The users of Moonlight 3D will decide the answer to that question.:-)
While it is noble to undertake writing a 3D suit, is it prudent to attempt to rewrite something that had already been written by 1999? To work on a project that is leagues behind the professional suits and that for all intents and purposes will most likely never be used in a professional setting?
Who's to say what will become of Moonlight 3d in the future? I'm sure people didn't think much would come of Linus' little side project either but look what happened.:-) I'm not saying this will happen for Moonlight, but anything is possible. Besides, choice is a good thing and to me the different focuses of Blender and Moonlight are signifigant enough to not pull out the "you're reinventing the wheel" card.
Blender is a scan line renderer w/a real time engine and animation capabilities w/an efficient but arcane UI.
Moonlight 3D is a ray tracer w/a nice interface and decent nurbs, curve functionality
Hopefully these two projects will be able to learn and feed off of one another's progress (esp since they're both GPL) and both projects will be better off in the end!
Moonlight 3D is a ray tracer and Blender is a scan line renderer. Blender will likely never have/be a raytracer natively (although export scripts to a few ray tracers exist). These are two *very* different approaches to rendering so by no means would I say that Blender and Moonlight are cut from the same cloth.
Best of luck to the Moonlight 3d team! Its a spiffy little app with a nice interface and plenty of potential!
Keep in mind that texture data isn't the only thing stored in GPU memory. 3D engines store all sorts of things (in signifigant amounts) other than texture data on GPU memory.
I think a better (even more powerful idea) would be to create servers/shards/realms with a MAXIMUM amount of hours played per account per week. This would be great for people like me who can only play so many hours a day -- basically you're keeping the power gamers out of one or two servers to allow casual players a chance.
If you go this route then you will create a caste system among players on that server of haves and have nots. The haves will be the XP chainers, macroers and exploiters who have all the good loot and uber skills. Then you'll have the casual gamers who's skills are subpar don't really have very much in the way of equipment. The *vast* majority of high level characters (esp in the beginning) on the server will have been macroed and no one will respect a high level character or equipment as they should. You'd be surprised what a macro can accomplish in four hours.
Why does the gaming company have to fix this 'problem' for you? Simply find friends online who play about the same number of hours and around the same times as you do. There are hundreds of thousands of people subscribed to MORGs. Surely you can find someone to pal around with?:-)
Second is cost. MS is making head way into this field, but not as rapidly as before. One thing with MS that adds cost to the bottom line is constant upgrade cycle. MS has responded to this. There will be no interim release of Windows XP in the next year or two. They're skipping the traditional "minor release" and going straight for the money shot in 2004/5. This will significantly improve their life cycle projections in the business world. Buying software for 4-5 years is much more attractive than 2-3 years.
While this may be true for for the low margin consumer market it really doesn't matter because Microsoft is making this money up by milking their corporate customers. Whether MS puts out any new software releases or not the new enterprise licensing agreements dictate that you send MS a check every couple of years or lose your preferential pricing agreements. MS now wants their big customers to rent their software instead of buying it.
MS basically has expanded to a point where it has very few avenues for new growth and need to squeeze their big money customers to keep their profits rising year after year. You can only do this for so long before you make your customers very upset (something MS already did last year w/ their licensing fiasco). Make no mistake about it, lots of MS customers are not happy at all with MS' and their new licensing tactics.
One striking example is that the GPLed games for Linux always tend to variations of Tetris, Boulder Dash, Missile Command, etc. You would expect the innovative games to be coming out for Linux: no pressure from marketing, free development tools, big community. But the games with spark, like The Sims and Grand Theft Auto 3 are coming from elsewhere.
There's a very easy explanation behind this. Coding is one of the smaller parts (although certainly non trivial) in the effort involved in producing a top notch game. Finding quality artists who grok Open Source and are willing to open their works using an Open Source license is very difficult. This makes creating games like GTA3 and the Sims problematic.
If you've ever gone in search of quality Open Source/Public Domain artwork/music you'll know what I'm talking about. The reason you see so many of these simple games produced by the open source community is that the coder is able to do the art themselves and therefore these are the games that get done.
I would like to note however that free (as in speech and beer) art is getting more common as Linux has matured into a viable gaming platform. At WorldForge we're amassing large collections of music, 3d meshes/textures, sprites and sound fx in our CVS repository to help fix this problem. All of the material in our media modules are either Public Domain or GPL/FDLed (some older stuff is OPL). There is already a great deal of material in our cvs media repositories but much is still left to do before we'll see a vibrant indie gaming scene as you described above.
The community now has (for the most part) all the source and tools that went into making Half-Life, the most successful game to come out of all of these codebases. Yet, to my knowledge, no project has arisen from the community to mold the next such game.
The real secret why there hasn't been an Open Source game as stunning as half life is one that all Open Source game developers know.
Artists that are willing to license their material under the GPL or a similar license are very rare.
Talented and experienced artists are difficult to find but doubly so for Open Source/Free Software projects. Artists have been conditioned to be paranoid about their work and aren't easily swayed over to the GPL as the benefit to themselves is not readily apparent (as very few people are currently sharing art with them). Also, factor in that the tools needed to created high quality 3D content often run into the thousands of $'s and you have another limiting force on the available pool of artists (this seems to be changing slowly). This is why there are amazing 3D engines like CrystalSpace and OGRE to drive content but you see comparatively few games built on them with production values as high as commercial game offerings.
I've been trying to bootstrap an effort by the WorldForge project to provide a GPLed/FDLed repository of art, music and sound effects. We have a very good start and some high quality media but more is needed if we're to have a thriving indie gaming scene any time soon.
Chances are that money was never in the door, and profits were inflated to trick the public into thinking things were okay. Granted this is fradulent and deceptive, but its probably not how you describe it: a case of a few people stealing to enrich themselves.
Yes, what these sleazy CFO execs have done and are doing is far worse than just skimming money for their own enrichment. They're erroding investor confidence in the stock market which is critical to the US (and hence) the world's general economic health. This isn't to say that the world revolves around the US but when any major country's economy tanks, today it has profound effects on the economies of other nations. This injures the common world market as well adding to general economic instability which has far more reaching effects than some greedy executive taking $4.6 billion out of the corp. till.
IIRC Lindows is supposed to work with AOL7. I don't think its officially blessed by AOL but a large piece of the scenario you describe is already a reality.
Re:Public Domain is too free for most creative wor
on
What Is Public Domain?
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· Score: 2
When I first started releasing my music, I wanted to make it free for people to listen to, copy and change. But I realised: what if the KKK made a propaganda video and wanted to use a song of mine in the soundtrack? If my work was PD, or even released under the EFF's Open Audio License [eff.org], they'd be able to.
To be honest with you I don't think these guys would care about your copyright. They would just use your song and wait for a law suit from you that would likely never come (lawyers aren't cheap).
Open source purists might argue that people should be allowed to use free work for good and for evil, and that may be alright when your work is an app that converts mp3s to oggs
Or cryptography programs that was/is used by unsavory people such as Al Qaeda. You don't blame the ppl who wrote PGP or SSH for any of the bad stuff ppl do with their software do you? I can't see anyone with an fair amount of sense blaming you for some group using your public domain song.
but with music it's not that simple.
You're trying to draw a distinction where I believe none exist. Your music to this group would be just another tool to further their own ends the same as a word processor spitting out KKK flyers.
More importantly, my reputation would be shot to hell, because it would be an easy matter for people to assume that I worked alongside the KKK for this project.
See above comment about PGP and SSH...
Another issue I have is that if I put my songs into the public domain, and Sting, for instance, hears them and likes them (work with me here, it *could* happen), there's nothing to stop him from rerecording them as his own work. Then when I play my own song later on down the road, people would say "Hey, that's a Sting song!"
No, but he would credit you in his liner notes. That would be a proud badge to wear indeed. Sting should get credit for a quality performance of your song as you would get credit for writing it.
Not only that, but Sting would be free to copyright them, so I would have to get his permission before releasing an album of my own songs!
As other people have pointed out you are mistaken on this point. You would not have to get Sting's permission to use any song in the public domain. Now you couldn't include his performance of your song on one of your CDs but you're more than free to record and distribute your own versions of the song.
Before you dismiss submitting works into the public domain keep in mind that today what we consider to be the greatest works of art were mainly created in a world w/o any notion of copyrights. Artists _very_ liberally borrowed and improved on one another's pieces until pieces of art were finally honed into masterpieces. Today's copyright law chains art and inhibits artists from building on each other's works as they have done in the past. No one's art is so perfect that it cannot be improved upon by another artist. As artists IMO we should be far more open to collaboration. As an artist to believe that your original is the best or most true interpretation is arrogant and shows our over inflated sense of self worth. We really need to get over ourselves and realize that today's copyright laws are mainly tools for the mega media corporations to protect their own interests.
No, you won't. You'll build your own Iron Curtain around the USA, and hide from the evil terrorists outside. Look at yourselves now - your government has banned you from travelling to, or trading with Cuba. How can you say you're free?
Oooh please... Get off your high horse. Everyone has limits to their freedoms. Freedom without limits is anarchy and I hope you're not advocating that. Almost all countries use sanctions and travel restrictions as tools to influence other country's policies. Almost every country in the world has severe trade and travel restrictions with Iraq during the past 10 years so don't get all preachy about Cuba.
Your idiotic governments keep getting you tangled up in wars that you should stay out of. Oh, there isn't a war on just now? Let's start one! It's funny how all your wars seem to have something to do with wealthy, oil-producing countries.
Yeah!! There's so much oil in Afghanistan its not even funny! =P The Gulf War? That was the World vs. Iraq. Your rants while bringing up the popular subject of American bashing are short on facts and long on hollow rhetoric.
When your friends, family and your fellow countrymen are directly threatened by a foreign force, then putting your life at risk to protect them is a brave and noble thing that demands respect.
But when there's a conflict very far away, between people you don't know and of whom you know very little, and you risk your life because some politician has decided it is in the economic or political interests of the country, then you're a fool, and I'm afraid you'll get no respect from me.
I'm thankful most people don't think like you. With your way of thinking the country you presently live in, the USA would not exist (at least as we know it).
If France had followed your foreign policy advice they would not have come to the aid of the US during the revolutionary war and enabled us to defeat the British at Yorktown.
I won't even begin to list all of the countries (and more recent examples) which are now existing as free societies due to other country's military actions.
Exactly how far are you willing to carry your Puritanical software elitism? If you want to remain consistent you'd better stop using all GNU software from the Free Software Foundation since its based in Boston, MA USA. I wonder if you are you willing to go that far? If so then you won't be using any major Linux distribution. As others have pointed out its amusing that the distro you advocate (Mandrake) had its beginnings as a tweaked version of RH.
There are other forces at work in the American legislative branches other than those of Hollin's ilk like Rep. Boucher who champions the public domain and fair use rights. Please try to remember that (like all other news stories) the press is only giving you a distorted sensationalized view of events that are taking place in other countries.
Oh, you mean like Guides, Counselors, or Advisors? Are you willing to deal with the flack when one of them either makes a wrong decision, or turns rogue and starts abusing their powers?
No, I mean players just playing the game however they see fit. Just give the deputies the ability and open permission to kill folks poaching in the forest. There would be no duties, no schedules... Therefore they aren't a volunteer for the company. They're just playing the game like everyone else except the deputies have a few special abilities therefore the company wouldn't be liable for what a player does in game.
There's no such thing as a totally trustworthy player. All of the major online games have had to deal with people who had gotten fairly deep into their volunteer systems only to turn around and massively abuse the privelages and abilities given to them.
Of course not... Just like there's no such thing as a person who tells the truth 100% of the time. Players abuse other players all the time and the companies aren't liable for their behaivor. Again, people abusing their privledges will be handled in game. A trial by their peers and subsequent jail time for the offending character (perhaps a life sentence or even execution [implementing permadeath tends to make an impression but that's another debate]). Wow, players can choose to be wandering magistrates if they want? Now there's a switch... Don't like the magistrate's decisions? Get together a petition and run him out of office! This produces interactivity and player dynamics that makes the game more interesting! The only interacting players do now is arguing on who gets the next spawn. Blech!
Relying on them as your only method of keeping the game clean is folly
I haven't heard you say how its folly yet. I have a rich and long history of MUDs behind me that says it will work.
and worse, makes you liable for whatever they do.
Again, you're not liable for the player's actions bc they aren't your volunteers, they're just ppl playing a game. Players have been abusing other players ever since MMORPGs first went online. You can reduce it dramatically but it will never be stopped completely.
It's a much safer decision to put that power to function as a representative of the game world (and thus, the company behind it) in the hands of someone who is being paid and is legally responsible for their actions.
And therein is the problem with modern gaming companies! All the companies take the status quo and the middle road which is the safest. This is why we're stuck playing the same game in every single MMORPG produced by large studios.
Kill stuff and level... Wait for spawn... Kill stuff and level... That's all the current crop of games provides. Oh, joy how creative...
You're advocating the status quo which is *clearly* broken. Players are *really* unhappy now with their gaming experience bc of virtually non existent support when they look for redress to some wrong. The reason for this is that the game companies can't hire enough service reps to police even a small fraction of the player base and enforce rules. Enlist your players to help in this policing and you have a whole new ball game.
Today's MMORPG devs have it all wrong...
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The Future of MMORPGs
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Most developers agreed that in small communities you can rely on the user base to police itself. But large-scale games with tens of thousands of users logged in at any given time can't be counted on to effectively self-manage. Conclusion? Control the environment. Just as Disneyland keeps its attractions clean and ejects any troublemakers from the park.
Trying to police and control your player base is a waste of time. 100,000 motivated subscribers will always find ways to circumvent arbitrary barriers and rules that game developers put in their way. Implementing these barriers steals valuable developer time and resources not only to implement these barriers but to also patch and maintain the barriers against their cunning player base. If you would instead give the player base and incentive to do the policing for you they'll do a far better job than a flotilla of developers could. I'll give you an example...
"In the land of Yore there lies a forest where the king's finest stag's graze. These stags are known throughout the world for their tasty meat and great horns both of which are highly sought after abroad (and are Yore's top exports). Now only the king and his servant's are allowed to kill stags in the forest as the stag population is cautiously controlled so as not to thin the heard too much. Commoners (controlled by player's) have been killing the stags illegally and ruining the game's economy. Do you...
A) Make the forest and no kill zone and technically implement this solution? Or
B) Deputize trustworthy members of the player base and pass laws against venison trading (punishable with prison terms for the character etc) by anyone except the king's men?
With A) your players will most likely figure out some clever way to either lure the stags out of the forest and kill them or figure out a hack which would allow them to kill stags in the forest. You'll end up spending all of your time fixing exploits that your players find and devs spend less and less time making the game more enjoyable and more time 'fixing' their game.
With B) you get an armed guard for the stags which never sleeps nor rests. Oh, and by the way you just made your game a lot more fun and interesting! Your player's are chasing dirty rotten thieves all over the forest and countryside to make them pay for trying to ruin their beloved land!
Some of you are probably wondering what stops a grief player from simply creating another account and griefing again? Simple, limit the number of player accounts a person can have per per credit card. In this way you limit grief players in the amount of trouble they can cause (although a little trouble can be fun and interesting). IMO it shouldn't be about trying to control user's and their experience. It should be about developer's injecting the right amount of reality into the game (where there are consequences for your actions) w/o removing the fun from the game. Game developer's: please allow players to police their own with the occasional encouragement and incentive from you to do so. The current model of "control the user's experience" is clearly broken and something needs to be done to fix it. MORGs are very costly to develop and company's don't like taking chances on unproven theories such as mine. I would very much like to see an atmosphere of experimentation and risk taking expand into the world of graphical MORGs much as was/is seen in the MUD community. This is one reason why I'm working with WorldForge. I would dearly love to promote an indie gaming scene where innovative games are created and interesting concepts tried. To take players where commercial game developers dare not tread.
The chairman of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Intellectual Property Howard Coble (R-North Carolina) opposes the bill and won't bring it up therefore the bill is DOA.
You can get more info over at Wired. That little Disney shill Hollins can try and repay his evil mouse ear masters but it won't avail him...
Ton Roosendaal has said in the past that NaN woul do that very thing should NaN ever go out of business. I'm hoping that they'll remember their promise if and when the time comes for NaN to close it's doors forever.
I support Blizzard and their attempt to protect their property, income sources, etc. What reason do they have to play nice and let bnetd do whatever they want? They certainly lose ad revenue if they do that, and they -potentially- lose more sales due to piracy.
As someone stated eariler... Piracy is not a technological problem, its a social one. Every counter measure you put in a pirate's way is going to get circumvented. Its that simple. You aren't addressing the root problem by making it more difficult to pirate a game (and therefore making life harder for your paying customers).
If I had a product and was reliant upon providing a means for people to meet up for games, and used that as a revenue source, to feed my programmers and staff, and some joe schmoe comes along with a service that bypasses all that, and makes it easier for pirates to hop on, I'd be mighty pissed, and rightly so.
Yes, and if you put out a buggy, laggy and easily exploitable, peer to peer (p2p what were they thinking?!) method to play games should you be surprised if someone gets sick of it and publishes their own improved version of your service? Some fans created a service that obviously a _lot_ of players wanted but Blizzard never provided. Blizzard's copy protection is not implementable by anyone but Blizzard. Blizzard could have been creative and provided some means where CD Keys could be authenticated on BDnet servers but instead they chose to sue. So now you're blaming the fans because they went out and did what Blizzard wasn't willing or unable to? That's almost laughable. Nice, one Blizzard... I won't be buying any more of your software.
So once MS catches up in the stability dept (all the while, doing the whiz-bang stuff people want), how will Linux be marketed? This isn't a troll, a serious question - in my own opinion it will boil down to price, as linux will likely have no technical advantages by mid-2003.
The most persuasive arguments I've found in convincing co.'s over to Linux aren't technical at all. Most of the business people (and home users for that matter) only understand the technical merits of Linux very superficially (and sometimes not at all) so therefore technical arguments aren't that effective.
There more effective arguments to be made however:
1) No vendor lock in with Linux. Linux systems are transparent and interoperable this cannot be said for MS. Once you start down the road with MS you're joined at the hip with them and they rarely play nicely with other systems or allow you to migrate easily. MS is infamous for their closed formats and lack of interoperability with other systems.
2) Companies want to upgrade on their own schedule not on MS'. MS' new licensing scheme forces users to upgrade every couple of years if they want to keep their good rates. I remember reading somewhere that the corp. OS/Office App refresh average is about every 3-4 years.
3) Price. Linux is free Windows is not. There are retraining issues of course but this is mitigated IMO by not ever having to pay for MS licenses ever again.
4) Security. Microsoft simply refuses to tighten security on major apps such as Outlook and its office suite. From the outside looking in it looks like MS prefers usability [out of the box] at almost any cost to security. Heck, Exchange doesn't even come with a virus scanner. This is inexplicable when you look at how wide open Outlook is out of the box. Its almost criminally negligent IMHO IANAL blah blah blah...
5) 300lbs gorilla syndrome. MS has over the years justly or unjustly developed the reputation for being a bully who likes to throw their weight around. Microsoft has done plenty to piss off their customers (esp. their very large customers) as of late. Witness XP and how much Ms managed to piss off some of their largest customers (as well as privacy advocates). The *very* small amount of time they gave corp.'s to evaluate XP, plan for a rollout and purchase the thing was crazy. Note the timing of *when* Microsoft told corps that they had to purchase XP to get a decent rate... After budgets for that year had been approved. Add to that fact they initially gave corps only about six months to make a decision! Sure MS extended this deadline but only after their customers went ballistic and they burned many bridges. If you're MS and you're telling Megacorp Inc that you need to shovel out another XYZ million dollars that weren't budgeted for this year... Well, you've just managed to royally piss of one large client. I'm not even going in to all the privacy issues that have people all stirred up. So to sum up MS has pissed off a lot of their cash cows... This is not a good thing my friends.
This isn't a troll, a serious question - in my own opinion it will boil down to price, as Linux will likely have no technical advantages by mid-2003.
You're assuming a few things which we will have to watch and see what happens.
A) MS doesn't shoot themselves in the foot again like they did with XP. XP was a real PR disaster on a lot of fronts. They can't afford another debacle like XP. It cost them a number of very large customers (or so I hear in my circle of friends that work at other large co.'s)
B) Will MS be able to keep pace with OS development and usability enhancements? Esp. on the rapidly evolving Linux desktop. Linux seems to be progressing at a much faster rate ATM.to be progressing at a much faster rate ATM.
But in this day where software is such big money, education costs are spiralling, funding is staying constant or dropping, it makes sense to the managers of these institutions to get back something from industry by patenting and licensing technologies they develop.
The big problem is that when you charge industry for something that cost is simply filtered down to the consumer. So basically every tax payer. paying twice for the same innovation. Once through the funding universities with our tax dollars and yet again through goods we consume from companies that pay to license these technologies. Universities taking my tax dollars to conduct research which turns right around and forces me to pay some company even more money angers me greatly. I thought that universtities are for the open exchange of ideas and the education of students. Boy was I ever naive. >=P Perhaps its time to rethink our whole university system? Our higher education system is *really* screwed up! In lots of large public universities there are literally hundreds of students in ONE class which the professor doesn't even teach. Getting a teaching award at many state universities is often the kiss of death (I've heard this from several professors). Our universities should exist primarily to *teach* not be an extension the R&D dept for companies. This isn't how things should work people.
Another/.er said:
"KDE can do without coding primadonnas".
Sorry, I think I disagree.
Primadonnas are a pain in the ass, ok.
They are not only a pain in the ass but if you've been in open projects for any amount of time you know that they're huge time wasters as well. They're contributions are mitigated by the fact that they're such high maintenance and they eat up other ppl's valuable time.
In the famous Lee Iacocca autobiographic book, he tells about having colleagues who complained about hardtimes with other people. He used to say, jokingly I guess, "Too bad, this company doesn't hire monkeys, or gorillas or tigers, we just got people!"
And that's it, to put it simply.
That quote you're using... It was Iocacca arguing why prima donnas aren't tolerated. He also goes on to say that if the prima dona is sufficiently talented he might be tolerated for a time but eventually their inability to get along with people will do them in. I don't understand your use of the quote as it just undermines your position.
But KDE _is_ about people, too. Don't throw away competent people. Instead, put some buffer around their idiosyncrasies.
Heck, keep them in an asylum if you need, but don't disregard their work. We lost too many geniuses because they were gay, and now we regret it.
Ummm... Being gay and being a prima donna are two very different things. Its a fatally flawed analogy.
So, get two people, the primadonna and someone who can interface him/her to the world.
You mean get them a babysitter? Good luck finding one willing to babysit egos during their free time. =)
That said it appears that Mosfet is playing nicely with everyone in the sandbox now. =)
Some things I forgot to mention in my previous post...
full use of Gforce special effects on the GUI is how you can help the interface.
The gaming industry has proven just the opposite of this. The more glitzy and pretty games have become there is an inverse reaction in how original, bug free and innovative the games are. If programmers are busy adding in motion blur, morphing to their UI they are going to spend less time coming up with useful new features, stamping out bugs etc. IMO it would not make GUIs better but worse. Granted more pretty to look at... but less useful.
Theres no excuse why we shouldnt take advantage of graphics cards that can render millions of polygons per second and do all of these effects i mentioned with ease.
Here is where you are really confusing me if you're really just talking about animating sprites in the UI. 3D hardware acceleration rendering a polygon (a triangle really) is soley based on 3D acceleration. If you have a sprite rendering (from 3DS etc) of a polygon you will not take advantage of *any* 3D hardware acceleration. With that in mind why would you even mention how many polys a card can render? Its meaningless in that sense.
And when you have 1-2-3-4ghz CPUs and 512-1gig of ram it makes absolutely no sense why you should be worrying about your resources.
Programmers don't need any more excuse than they have now to be lazy and focus on eye candy over useability...:-)
I never said 3d. Just because you use polygons does not mean its 3d.
If you say 'polygon' to a graphics guys his mind is going to be thinking '3D'. Esp in the context of "XYZ card can render XYZ polygons per second." Renderings of 3D objects would be a more apt description IMO.
Polygons can be used on 3d GUIs to add special effects like sparkles and morphing.
To use true particle effects you're going to need a 3D API like OpenGL or D3D etc which takes advantage of only 3D hardware accel in the case of particle effects.
SVG Icons, SVG widgets, 60fps animation on widgets and icons, genie effect,motion blur, alpha channeling,morphing animation windows widgets and menus, full use of Gforce special effects on the GUI is how you can help the interface. Theres no excuse why we shouldnt take advantage of graphics cards that can render millions of polygons per second and do all of these effects i mentioned with ease.
You're confusing two very different issues. 3d and 2d acceleration are two *very* different and seperate things! Just because a card can render 2mil polys/sec doesn't mean that your 2d performance is improving dramatically. Add to the fact that most business machines (esp for large Co.'s) aren't equipped with even reasonably powerful 3d hardware and your target audience just got a lot smaller. Unless you can find a team to write your whole UI in OpenGL you won't be seeing a 3d desktop as you describe any time soon. Besides, we haven't even been able to perfect a 2d UI and you want to open a whole new can of worms? Yikes!:-) That said I seem to remember someone working on a 3d desktop environment but can't rememeber the name of the project ATM.
I tried out blender a couple years ago, when I was seriously shopping for a 3d package.
Why would you comment on something that you tried 2 years ago? Just think about how much progress [fill in the blank with your fav 3d app] and think how much its changed in those two years. Esp a relatively new product which Blender certainly was 2 years ago.
It's interface is a real nightmare, even for a 3d app, and that says something.
I wouldn't say its a nightmare but it is very different from any app you've ever used. Hence why you should buy the manual for $40. Once you learn the the UI blender becomes like an extension of yourself and you can do things much more quickly than you can in other packages. Esp if you're doing basic mesh editing and scene setups.
Further more, the rendering engine (at the time mind you) was primitive.
I think you'll be pleasently surprised by the progress made by Blender's scan line renderer. It's very accurate and has the fastest renders I've ever seen.
I will admit it had alot of features that you only find in the higher end 3d packages, but overall, the learning curve is pretty steep.
You will spend far more time trying to figure out what you just did, what happened to your view, and how to get it back, then you will modelling.
The only way to figure out how to use it to cough up $199 for the manual (cannot find anything on the site right now).
I don't ever remember the manual costing anything close to that! Maybe you're thinking about the C-Key they had a while ago which would unlock certain features that were considered leading edge for Blender at the time? You've been able to get the Blender Manual for $40 for quite some time. Its worth every penny.
I admit it's been a couple of years since I checked it out, my info may be outdated, but in the end, I settled for Cinema 4D [cinema4d.com].
If you took a look at what Blender has become I think you'd be pleasently surprised.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Do we really need another 3D suit?
:-)
:-) I'm not saying this will happen for Moonlight, but anything is possible. Besides, choice is a good thing and to me the different focuses of Blender and Moonlight are signifigant enough to not pull out the "you're reinventing the wheel" card.
The users of Moonlight 3D will decide the answer to that question.
While it is noble to undertake writing a 3D suit, is it prudent to attempt to rewrite something that had already been written by 1999? To work on a project that is leagues behind the professional suits and that for all intents and purposes will most likely never be used in a professional setting?
Who's to say what will become of Moonlight 3d in the future? I'm sure people didn't think much would come of Linus' little side project either but look what happened.
Blender is a scan line renderer w/a real time engine and animation capabilities w/an efficient but arcane UI.
Moonlight 3D is a ray tracer w/a nice interface and decent nurbs, curve functionality
Hopefully these two projects will be able to learn and feed off of one another's progress (esp since they're both GPL) and both projects will be better off in the end!
Moonlight 3D is a ray tracer and Blender is a scan line renderer. Blender will likely never have/be a raytracer natively (although export scripts to a few ray tracers exist). These are two *very* different approaches to rendering so by no means would I say that Blender and Moonlight are cut from the same cloth.
Best of luck to the Moonlight 3d team! Its a spiffy little app with a nice interface and plenty of potential!
Keep in mind that texture data isn't the only thing stored in GPU memory. 3D engines store all sorts of things (in signifigant amounts) other than texture data on GPU memory.
I think a better (even more powerful idea) would be to create servers/shards/realms with a MAXIMUM amount of hours played per account per week. This would be great for people like me who can only play so many hours a day -- basically you're keeping the power gamers out of one or two servers to allow casual players a chance.
:-)
If you go this route then you will create a caste system among players on that server of haves and have nots. The haves will be the XP chainers, macroers and exploiters who have all the good loot and uber skills. Then you'll have the casual gamers who's skills are subpar don't really have very much in the way of equipment. The *vast* majority of high level characters (esp in the beginning) on the server will have been macroed and no one will respect a high level character or equipment as they should. You'd be surprised what a macro can accomplish in four hours.
Why does the gaming company have to fix this 'problem' for you? Simply find friends online who play about the same number of hours and around the same times as you do. There are hundreds of thousands of people subscribed to MORGs. Surely you can find someone to pal around with?
Second is cost. MS is making head way into this field, but not as rapidly as before. One thing with MS that adds cost to the bottom line is constant upgrade cycle. MS has responded to this. There will be no interim release of Windows XP in the next year or two. They're skipping the traditional "minor release" and going straight for the money shot in 2004/5. This will significantly improve their life cycle projections in the business world. Buying software for 4-5 years is much more attractive than 2-3 years.
While this may be true for for the low margin consumer market it really doesn't matter because Microsoft is making this money up by milking their corporate customers. Whether MS puts out any new software releases or not the new enterprise licensing agreements dictate that you send MS a check every couple of years or lose your preferential pricing agreements. MS now wants their big customers to rent their software instead of buying it.
MS basically has expanded to a point where it has very few avenues for new growth and need to squeeze their big money customers to keep their profits rising year after year. You can only do this for so long before you make your customers very upset (something MS already did last year w/ their licensing fiasco). Make no mistake about it, lots of MS customers are not happy at all with MS' and their new licensing tactics.
One striking example is that the GPLed games for Linux always tend to variations of Tetris, Boulder Dash, Missile Command, etc. You would expect the innovative games to be coming out for Linux: no pressure from marketing, free development tools, big community. But the games with spark, like The Sims and Grand Theft Auto 3 are coming from elsewhere.
There's a very easy explanation behind this. Coding is one of the smaller parts (although certainly non trivial) in the effort involved in producing a top notch game. Finding quality artists who grok Open Source and are willing to open their works using an Open Source license is very difficult. This makes creating games like GTA3 and the Sims problematic.
If you've ever gone in search of quality Open Source/Public Domain artwork/music you'll know what I'm talking about. The reason you see so many of these simple games produced by the open source community is that the coder is able to do the art themselves and therefore these are the games that get done.
I would like to note however that free (as in speech and beer) art is getting more common as Linux has matured into a viable gaming platform. At WorldForge we're amassing large collections of music, 3d meshes/textures, sprites and sound fx in our CVS repository to help fix this problem. All of the material in our media modules are either Public Domain or GPL/FDLed (some older stuff is OPL). There is already a great deal of material in our cvs media repositories but much is still left to do before we'll see a vibrant indie gaming scene as you described above.
-Jason
The community now has (for the most part) all the source and tools that went into making Half-Life, the most successful game to come out of all of these codebases. Yet, to my knowledge, no project has arisen from the community to mold the next such game.
The real secret why there hasn't been an Open Source game as stunning as half life is one that all Open Source game developers know.
Artists that are willing to license their material under the GPL or a similar license are very rare.
Talented and experienced artists are difficult to find but doubly so for Open Source/Free Software projects. Artists have been conditioned to be paranoid about their work and aren't easily swayed over to the GPL as the benefit to themselves is not readily apparent (as very few people are currently sharing art with them). Also, factor in that the tools needed to created high quality 3D content often run into the thousands of $'s and you have another limiting force on the available pool of artists (this seems to be changing slowly). This is why there are amazing 3D engines like CrystalSpace and OGRE to drive content but you see comparatively few games built on them with production values as high as commercial game offerings.
I've been trying to bootstrap an effort by the WorldForge project to provide a GPLed/FDLed repository of art, music and sound effects. We have a very good start and some high quality media but more is needed if we're to have a thriving indie gaming scene any time soon.
Chances are that money was never in the door, and profits were inflated to trick the public into thinking things were okay. Granted this is fradulent and deceptive, but its probably not how you describe it: a case of a few people stealing to enrich themselves.
Yes, what these sleazy CFO execs have done and are doing is far worse than just skimming money for their own enrichment. They're erroding investor confidence in the stock market which is critical to the US (and hence) the world's general economic health. This isn't to say that the world revolves around the US but when any major country's economy tanks, today it has profound effects on the economies of other nations. This injures the common world market as well adding to general economic instability which has far more reaching effects than some greedy executive taking $4.6 billion out of the corp. till.
IIRC Lindows is supposed to work with AOL7. I don't think its officially blessed by AOL but a large piece of the scenario you describe is already a reality.
When I first started releasing my music, I wanted to make it free for people to listen to, copy and change. But I realised: what if the KKK made a propaganda video and wanted to use a song of mine in the soundtrack? If my work was PD, or even released under the EFF's Open Audio License [eff.org], they'd be able to.
To be honest with you I don't think these guys would care about your copyright. They would just use your song and wait for a law suit from you that would likely never come (lawyers aren't cheap).
Open source purists might argue that people should be allowed to use free work for good and for evil, and that may be alright when your work is an app that converts mp3s to oggs
Or cryptography programs that was/is used by unsavory people such as Al Qaeda. You don't blame the ppl who wrote PGP or SSH for any of the bad stuff ppl do with their software do you? I can't see anyone with an fair amount of sense blaming you for some group using your public domain song.
but with music it's not that simple.
You're trying to draw a distinction where I believe none exist. Your music to this group would be just another tool to further their own ends the same as a word processor spitting out KKK flyers.
More importantly, my reputation would be shot to hell, because it would be an easy matter for people to assume that I worked alongside the KKK for this project.
See above comment about PGP and SSH...
Another issue I have is that if I put my songs into the public domain, and Sting, for instance, hears them and likes them (work with me here, it *could* happen), there's nothing to stop him from rerecording them as his own work. Then when I play my own song later on down the road, people would say "Hey, that's a Sting song!"
No, but he would credit you in his liner notes. That would be a proud badge to wear indeed. Sting should get credit for a quality performance of your song as you would get credit for writing it.
Not only that, but Sting would be free to copyright them, so I would have to get his permission before releasing an album of my own songs!
As other people have pointed out you are mistaken on this point. You would not have to get Sting's permission to use any song in the public domain. Now you couldn't include his performance of your song on one of your CDs but you're more than free to record and distribute your own versions of the song.
Before you dismiss submitting works into the public domain keep in mind that today what we consider to be the greatest works of art were mainly created in a world w/o any notion of copyrights. Artists _very_ liberally borrowed and improved on one another's pieces until pieces of art were finally honed into masterpieces. Today's copyright law chains art and inhibits artists from building on each other's works as they have done in the past. No one's art is so perfect that it cannot be improved upon by another artist. As artists IMO we should be far more open to collaboration. As an artist to believe that your original is the best or most true interpretation is arrogant and shows our over inflated sense of self worth. We really need to get over ourselves and realize that today's copyright laws are mainly tools for the mega media corporations to protect their own interests.
No, you won't. You'll build your own Iron Curtain around the USA, and hide from the evil terrorists outside. Look at yourselves now - your government has banned you from travelling to, or trading with Cuba. How can you say you're free?
Oooh please... Get off your high horse. Everyone has limits to their freedoms. Freedom without limits is anarchy and I hope you're not advocating that. Almost all countries use sanctions and travel restrictions as tools to influence other country's policies. Almost every country in the world has severe trade and travel restrictions with Iraq during the past 10 years so don't get all preachy about Cuba.
Your idiotic governments keep getting you tangled up in wars that you should stay out of. Oh, there isn't a war on just now? Let's start one! It's funny how all your wars seem to have something to do with wealthy, oil-producing countries.
Yeah!! There's so much oil in Afghanistan its not even funny! =P The Gulf War? That was the World vs. Iraq. Your rants while bringing up the popular subject of American bashing are short on facts and long on hollow rhetoric.
When your friends, family and your fellow countrymen are directly threatened by a foreign force, then putting your life at risk to protect them is a brave and noble thing that demands respect.
But when there's a conflict very far away, between people you don't know and of whom you know very little, and you risk your life because some politician has decided it is in the economic or political interests of the country, then you're a fool, and I'm afraid you'll get no respect from me.
I'm thankful most people don't think like you. With your way of thinking the country you presently live in, the USA would not exist (at least as we know it).
If France had followed your foreign policy advice they would not have come to the aid of the US during the revolutionary war and enabled us to defeat the British at Yorktown.
I won't even begin to list all of the countries (and more recent examples) which are now existing as free societies due to other country's military actions.
Exactly how far are you willing to carry your Puritanical software elitism? If you want to remain consistent you'd better stop using all GNU software from the Free Software Foundation since its based in Boston, MA USA. I wonder if you are you willing to go that far? If so then you won't be using any major Linux distribution. As others have pointed out its amusing that the distro you advocate (Mandrake) had its beginnings as a tweaked version of RH.
There are other forces at work in the American legislative branches other than those of Hollin's ilk like Rep. Boucher who champions the public domain and fair use rights. Please try to remember that (like all other news stories) the press is only giving you a distorted sensationalized view of events that are taking place in other countries.
"Mountain Dew-based Google views Teoma as "an interesting approach"
Instead of...
"Mountain View-based Google views Teoma as "an interesting approach"
Oh, you mean like Guides, Counselors, or Advisors? Are you willing to deal with the flack when one of them either makes a wrong decision, or turns rogue and starts abusing their powers?
No, I mean players just playing the game however they see fit. Just give the deputies the ability and open permission to kill folks poaching in the forest. There would be no duties, no schedules... Therefore they aren't a volunteer for the company. They're just playing the game like everyone else except the deputies have a few special abilities therefore the company wouldn't be liable for what a player does in game.
There's no such thing as a totally trustworthy player. All of the major online games have had to deal with people who had gotten fairly deep into their volunteer systems only to turn around and massively abuse the privelages and abilities given to them.
Of course not... Just like there's no such thing as a person who tells the truth 100% of the time. Players abuse other players all the time and the companies aren't liable for their behaivor. Again, people abusing their privledges will be handled in game. A trial by their peers and subsequent jail time for the offending character (perhaps a life sentence or even execution [implementing permadeath tends to make an impression but that's another debate]). Wow, players can choose to be wandering magistrates if they want? Now there's a switch... Don't like the magistrate's decisions? Get together a petition and run him out of office! This produces interactivity and player dynamics that makes the game more interesting! The only interacting players do now is arguing on who gets the next spawn. Blech!
Relying on them as your only method of keeping the game clean is folly
I haven't heard you say how its folly yet. I have a rich and long history of MUDs behind me that says it will work.
and worse, makes you liable for whatever they do.
Again, you're not liable for the player's actions bc they aren't your volunteers, they're just ppl playing a game. Players have been abusing other players ever since MMORPGs first went online. You can reduce it dramatically but it will never be stopped completely.
It's a much safer decision to put that power to function as a representative of the game world (and thus, the company behind it) in the hands of someone who is being paid and is legally responsible for their actions.
And therein is the problem with modern gaming companies! All the companies take the status quo and the middle road which is the safest. This is why we're stuck playing the same game in every single MMORPG produced by large studios.
Kill stuff and level... Wait for spawn... Kill stuff and level... That's all the current crop of games provides. Oh, joy how creative...
You're advocating the status quo which is *clearly* broken. Players are *really* unhappy now with their gaming experience bc of virtually non existent support when they look for redress to some wrong. The reason for this is that the game companies can't hire enough service reps to police even a small fraction of the player base and enforce rules. Enlist your players to help in this policing and you have a whole new ball game.
Most developers agreed that in small communities you can rely on the user base to police itself. But large-scale games with tens of thousands of users logged in at any given time can't be counted on to effectively self-manage. Conclusion? Control the environment. Just as Disneyland keeps its attractions clean and ejects any troublemakers from the park.
Trying to police and control your player base is a waste of time. 100,000 motivated subscribers will always find ways to circumvent arbitrary barriers and rules that game developers put in their way. Implementing these barriers steals valuable developer time and resources not only to implement these barriers but to also patch and maintain the barriers against their cunning player base. If you would instead give the player base and incentive to do the policing for you they'll do a far better job than a flotilla of developers could. I'll give you an example...
"In the land of Yore there lies a forest where the king's finest stag's graze. These stags are known throughout the world for their tasty meat and great horns both of which are highly sought after abroad (and are Yore's top exports). Now only the king and his servant's are allowed to kill stags in the forest as the stag population is cautiously controlled so as not to thin the heard too much. Commoners (controlled by player's) have been killing the stags illegally and ruining the game's economy. Do you...
A) Make the forest and no kill zone and technically implement this solution? Or
B) Deputize trustworthy members of the player base and pass laws against venison trading (punishable with prison terms for the character etc) by anyone except the king's men?
With A) your players will most likely figure out some clever way to either lure the stags out of the forest and kill them or figure out a hack which would allow them to kill stags in the forest. You'll end up spending all of your time fixing exploits that your players find and devs spend less and less time making the game more enjoyable and more time 'fixing' their game.
With B) you get an armed guard for the stags which never sleeps nor rests. Oh, and by the way you just made your game a lot more fun and interesting! Your player's are chasing dirty rotten thieves all over the forest and countryside to make them pay for trying to ruin their beloved land!
Some of you are probably wondering what stops a grief player from simply creating another account and griefing again? Simple, limit the number of player accounts a person can have per per credit card. In this way you limit grief players in the amount of trouble they can cause (although a little trouble can be fun and interesting). IMO it shouldn't be about trying to control user's and their experience. It should be about developer's injecting the right amount of reality into the game (where there are consequences for your actions) w/o removing the fun from the game. Game developer's: please allow players to police their own with the occasional encouragement and incentive from you to do so. The current model of "control the user's experience" is clearly broken and something needs to be done to fix it. MORGs are very costly to develop and company's don't like taking chances on unproven theories such as mine. I would very much like to see an atmosphere of experimentation and risk taking expand into the world of graphical MORGs much as was/is seen in the MUD community. This is one reason why I'm working with WorldForge. I would dearly love to promote an indie gaming scene where innovative games are created and interesting concepts tried. To take players where commercial game developers dare not tread.
The chairman of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Intellectual Property Howard Coble (R-North Carolina) opposes the bill and won't bring it up therefore the bill is DOA.
You can get more info over at Wired. That little Disney shill Hollins can try and repay his evil mouse ear masters but it won't avail him...
Please release the source under GPL
Ton Roosendaal has said in the past that NaN woul do that very thing should NaN ever go out of business. I'm hoping that they'll remember their promise if and when the time comes for NaN to close it's doors forever.
... One Sad Blender User
I support Blizzard and their attempt to protect their property, income sources, etc. What reason do they have to play nice and let bnetd do whatever they want? They certainly lose ad revenue if they do that, and they -potentially- lose more sales due to piracy.
As someone stated eariler... Piracy is not a technological problem, its a social one. Every counter measure you put in a pirate's way is going to get circumvented. Its that simple. You aren't addressing the root problem by making it more difficult to pirate a game (and therefore making life harder for your paying customers).
If I had a product and was reliant upon providing a means for people to meet up for games, and used that as a revenue source, to feed my programmers and staff, and some joe schmoe comes along with a service that bypasses all that, and makes it easier for pirates to hop on, I'd be mighty pissed, and rightly so.
Yes, and if you put out a buggy, laggy and easily exploitable, peer to peer (p2p what were they thinking?!) method to play games should you be surprised if someone gets sick of it and publishes their own improved version of your service? Some fans created a service that obviously a _lot_ of players wanted but Blizzard never provided. Blizzard's copy protection is not implementable by anyone but Blizzard. Blizzard could have been creative and provided some means where CD Keys could be authenticated on BDnet servers but instead they chose to sue. So now you're blaming the fans because they went out and did what Blizzard wasn't willing or unable to? That's almost laughable. Nice, one Blizzard... I won't be buying any more of your software.
So once MS catches up in the stability dept (all the while, doing the whiz-bang stuff people want), how will Linux be marketed? This isn't a troll, a serious question - in my own opinion it will boil down to price, as linux will likely have no technical advantages by mid-2003.
The most persuasive arguments I've found in convincing co.'s over to Linux aren't technical at all. Most of the business people (and home users for that matter) only understand the technical merits of Linux very superficially (and sometimes not at all) so therefore technical arguments aren't that effective.
There more effective arguments to be made however:
1) No vendor lock in with Linux. Linux systems are transparent and interoperable this cannot be said for MS. Once you start down the road with MS you're joined at the hip with them and they rarely play nicely with other systems or allow you to migrate easily. MS is infamous for their closed formats and lack of interoperability with other systems.
2) Companies want to upgrade on their own schedule not on MS'. MS' new licensing scheme forces users to upgrade every couple of years if they want to keep their good rates. I remember reading somewhere that the corp. OS/Office App refresh average is about every 3-4 years.
3) Price. Linux is free Windows is not. There are retraining issues of course but this is mitigated IMO by not ever having to pay for MS licenses ever again.
4) Security. Microsoft simply refuses to tighten security on major apps such as Outlook and its office suite. From the outside looking in it looks like MS prefers usability [out of the box] at almost any cost to security. Heck, Exchange doesn't even come with a virus scanner. This is inexplicable when you look at how wide open Outlook is out of the box. Its almost criminally negligent IMHO IANAL blah blah blah...
5) 300lbs gorilla syndrome. MS has over the years justly or unjustly developed the reputation for being a bully who likes to throw their weight around. Microsoft has done plenty to piss off their customers (esp. their very large customers) as of late. Witness XP and how much Ms managed to piss off some of their largest customers (as well as privacy advocates). The *very* small amount of time they gave corp.'s to evaluate XP, plan for a rollout and purchase the thing was crazy. Note the timing of *when* Microsoft told corps that they had to purchase XP to get a decent rate... After budgets for that year had been approved. Add to that fact they initially gave corps only about six months to make a decision! Sure MS extended this deadline but only after their customers went ballistic and they burned many bridges. If you're MS and you're telling Megacorp Inc that you need to shovel out another XYZ million dollars that weren't budgeted for this year... Well, you've just managed to royally piss of one large client. I'm not even going in to all the privacy issues that have people all stirred up. So to sum up MS has pissed off a lot of their cash cows... This is not a good thing my friends.
This isn't a troll, a serious question - in my own opinion it will boil down to price, as Linux will likely have no technical advantages by mid-2003.
You're assuming a few things which we will have to watch and see what happens.
A) MS doesn't shoot themselves in the foot again like they did with XP. XP was a real PR disaster on a lot of fronts. They can't afford another debacle like XP. It cost them a number of very large customers (or so I hear in my circle of friends that work at other large co.'s)
B) Will MS be able to keep pace with OS development and usability enhancements? Esp. on the rapidly evolving Linux desktop. Linux seems to be progressing at a much faster rate ATM.to be progressing at a much faster rate ATM.
But in this day where software is such big money, education costs are spiralling, funding is staying constant or dropping, it makes sense to the managers of these institutions to get back something from industry by patenting and licensing technologies they develop.
The big problem is that when you charge industry for something that cost is simply filtered down to the consumer. So basically every tax payer. paying twice for the same innovation. Once through the funding universities with our tax dollars and yet again through goods we consume from companies that pay to license these technologies. Universities taking my tax dollars to conduct research which turns right around and forces me to pay some company even more money angers me greatly. I thought that universtities are for the open exchange of ideas and the education of students. Boy was I ever naive. >=P Perhaps its time to rethink our whole university system? Our higher education system is *really* screwed up! In lots of large public universities there are literally hundreds of students in ONE class which the professor doesn't even teach. Getting a teaching award at many state universities is often the kiss of death (I've heard this from several professors). Our universities should exist primarily to *teach* not be an extension the R&D dept for companies. This isn't how things should work people.
Another /.er said:
"KDE can do without coding primadonnas".
Sorry, I think I disagree.
Primadonnas are a pain in the ass, ok.
They are not only a pain in the ass but if you've been in open projects for any amount of time you know that they're huge time wasters as well. They're contributions are mitigated by the fact that they're such high maintenance and they eat up other ppl's valuable time.
In the famous Lee Iacocca autobiographic book, he tells about having colleagues who complained about hardtimes with other people. He used to say, jokingly I guess, "Too bad, this company doesn't hire monkeys, or gorillas or tigers, we just got people!"
And that's it, to put it simply.
That quote you're using... It was Iocacca arguing why prima donnas aren't tolerated. He also goes on to say that if the prima dona is sufficiently talented he might be tolerated for a time but eventually their inability to get along with people will do them in. I don't understand your use of the quote as it just undermines your position.
But KDE _is_ about people, too. Don't throw away competent people. Instead, put some buffer around their idiosyncrasies.
Heck, keep them in an asylum if you need, but don't disregard their work. We lost too many geniuses because they were gay, and now we regret it.
Ummm... Being gay and being a prima donna are two very different things. Its a fatally flawed analogy.
So, get two people, the primadonna and someone who can interface him/her to the world.
You mean get them a babysitter? Good luck finding one willing to babysit egos during their free time. =)
That said it appears that Mosfet is playing nicely with everyone in the sandbox now. =)
Some things I forgot to mention in my previous post...
:-)
full use of Gforce special effects on the GUI is how you can help the interface.
The gaming industry has proven just the opposite of this. The more glitzy and pretty games have become there is an inverse reaction in how original, bug free and innovative the games are. If programmers are busy adding in motion blur, morphing to their UI they are going to spend less time coming up with useful new features, stamping out bugs etc. IMO it would not make GUIs better but worse. Granted more pretty to look at... but less useful.
Theres no excuse why we shouldnt take advantage of graphics cards that can render millions of polygons per second and do all of these effects i mentioned with ease.
Here is where you are really confusing me if you're really just talking about animating sprites in the UI. 3D hardware acceleration rendering a polygon (a triangle really) is soley based on 3D acceleration. If you have a sprite rendering (from 3DS etc) of a polygon you will not take advantage of *any* 3D hardware acceleration. With that in mind why would you even mention how many polys a card can render? Its meaningless in that sense.
And when you have 1-2-3-4ghz CPUs and 512-1gig of ram it makes absolutely no sense why you should be worrying about your resources.
Programmers don't need any more excuse than they have now to be lazy and focus on eye candy over useability...
I never said 3d. Just because you use polygons does not mean its 3d.
If you say 'polygon' to a graphics guys his mind is going to be thinking '3D'. Esp in the context of "XYZ card can render XYZ polygons per second." Renderings of 3D objects would be a more apt description IMO.
Polygons can be used on 3d GUIs to add special effects like sparkles and morphing.
To use true particle effects you're going to need a 3D API like OpenGL or D3D etc which takes advantage of only 3D hardware accel in the case of particle effects.
SVG Icons, SVG widgets, 60fps animation on widgets and icons, genie effect,motion blur, alpha channeling,morphing animation windows widgets and menus, full use of Gforce special effects on the GUI is how you can help the interface. Theres no excuse why we shouldnt take advantage of graphics cards that can render millions of polygons per second and do all of these effects i mentioned with ease.
:-) That said I seem to remember someone working on a 3d desktop environment but can't rememeber the name of the project ATM.
You're confusing two very different issues. 3d and 2d acceleration are two *very* different and seperate things! Just because a card can render 2mil polys/sec doesn't mean that your 2d performance is improving dramatically. Add to the fact that most business machines (esp for large Co.'s) aren't equipped with even reasonably powerful 3d hardware and your target audience just got a lot smaller. Unless you can find a team to write your whole UI in OpenGL you won't be seeing a 3d desktop as you describe any time soon. Besides, we haven't even been able to perfect a 2d UI and you want to open a whole new can of worms? Yikes!
I tried out blender a couple years ago, when I was seriously shopping for a 3d package.
:-)
Why would you comment on something that you tried 2 years ago? Just think about how much progress [fill in the blank with your fav 3d app] and think how much its changed in those two years. Esp a relatively new product which Blender certainly was 2 years ago.
It's interface is a real nightmare, even for a 3d app, and that says something.
I wouldn't say its a nightmare but it is very different from any app you've ever used. Hence why you should buy the manual for $40. Once you learn the the UI blender becomes like an extension of yourself and you can do things much more quickly than you can in other packages. Esp if you're doing basic mesh editing and scene setups.
Further more, the rendering engine (at the time mind you) was primitive.
I think you'll be pleasently surprised by the progress made by Blender's scan line renderer. It's very accurate and has the fastest renders I've ever seen.
I will admit it had alot of features that you only find in the higher end 3d packages, but overall, the learning curve is pretty steep.
You will spend far more time trying to figure out what you just did, what happened to your view, and how to get it back, then you will modelling.
The only way to figure out how to use it to cough up $199 for the manual (cannot find anything on the site right now).
I don't ever remember the manual costing anything close to that! Maybe you're thinking about the C-Key they had a while ago which would unlock certain features that were considered leading edge for Blender at the time? You've been able to get the Blender Manual for $40 for quite some time. Its worth every penny.
I admit it's been a couple of years since I checked it out, my info may be outdated, but in the end, I settled for Cinema 4D [cinema4d.com].
If you took a look at what Blender has become I think you'd be pleasently surprised.