For those who have never worked with nurbs or even know what nurbs are, nurbs are an alternative approach to modeling, that instead of dealing with individual polygons, you work with curves that form surfaces, which at render-time are converted to polygons. Nurbs are mostly used for engineering applications, such as car designs, furniture, etc where precision is absolutely essential. However, nurbs are not without their own challenges, most notable that it is difficult to create models that are entirely closed; its a little difficult to explain. Basically, imagine modeling a vase with nurbs using nothing but curves... it gets difficult if you want to put a cap on that vase as you need to line up all the edges of the cap to the curvature of the top of the vase. While software packages such as Maya will automatically map the edges of the cap to the curvature of the vase opening, it takes a bit of work to perfect. This new approach to nurbs modeling is very impressive as it would allow artists to take the strongests aspects of nurbs and use them in a much more tactile manner such as modeling with clay in realtime using the gloves whilst a nurbs-based model is created within your 3D program. Essentially, you could cut out the modeler from about 80% of the modeling work, toss it to a normal clay-sculpting artist whom would create the clay model, which the real modeler would then touch up for further use. Good news for sculpting artists, bad news for modelers that can't sculpt.
I think the best way to enjoy Doom3 is not reading any of the reviews; after all, at this point you will either play it or you wont. Reading Gamespot's hype about it is pointless, as you only increase your expectations of a game, that lets face it, is not going to set new boundries of gameplay (though I will say nothing of its graphics). Id rather walk to the table with nothing but a couple screen shots in mind and enjoy it as it comes. Atleast then I can say I judged it on its own without (many) preconceptions.
The author's point is not that the games industry needs to eliminate crunchtime; crunchtime exists in almost any product-based situation, especially when it comes to computer products. Software development, games, and 3D animation are three that come to mind in that catagory and all of these require crunchtime when the deadline looms near. The issue here is mis-management from the start to finish, in which the project manager actually plans 12 hour shifts for everyone which naturally spills over sometimes to 14 - 16 hour shifts, that extra 2 - 4 hours going unpaid. We've all played video games and I think we can all tell when a video game was rushed to completion, Driv3r being a newer example; rushed games are obvious and the resulting morale drop from not only having busted your ass for the last 3 - 6 months on a game, only to be pressured by the publisher into a release date, then releasing an incomplete game which proceeds to bomb with reviewers as well as in sales. Whats the drive to really make an innovative game next time, knowing your publisher is going to knuckle you into the same situation again and again?
The big game publishers are reaching the point big music publishers reached about a decade or so back with music: their very presence hurts the overall industry due to their pump-em-out-n-release-an-expansion attitude, EA especially. Perhaps it is nearing a time where like-minded people need to stop buying games and their expansion packs from companies such as EA, Vivendi, etc. Now that it has become as popular as its music & movie siblings, we can expect more and more re-releases of games redone for new engines & systems, more (potentially crappy) sequels, and more branding (street fighter, resident evil, etc).
I recall a scene from total recall in which Arnold and his buddy are walking through an airport I think, and they come upon a real-time xray device that xrays people as they pass through this corridor to see what theyre carrying. This device the Israelis have developed sounds much similar in terms of its end-output & purpose; could this be used to speed up airport lines & ensure greater security. Since we've essentially handed off our privacy as soon as we enter an airport, I dont see how this would be any worst than what we already have.
Given that this configuration requires a Xeon based system w/ the dual PCI-E slots, this seems geared more towards the 3D development end of things, with Maya, Softimage and such. I've yet to meet a gamer-only with a Xeon rig, so this would seem to be a boon for the new Gelato systems, allowing for more GPU power. I just hope Nvidia doesn't end up emulating 3DFx's later moves in which it decides raw speed > innovation, as that is not really a winning strategy, especially these days where we're on the brink of a new age of gaming graphics using advanced shading techniques previously only seen in pre-rendered footage.
I am a proponent of anti-cheating measures & detection, however this seems like it could be bent to serve other purposes, such as attacking the creators of trainers for games. The difference between most of the cheating that goes on in CS and a trainer is that (usually) the trainer is used only for singleplayer, while cheats are used in multiplayer.
My question is, who draws the lines and where do they fall; is a trainer now considered cheating? I would argue quite heavily against someone who favored the illegality of trainers given that they are meant for a player to change a single-player experience more to their liking. Developers have mixed feelings about trainers, ranging from 'you can play the game how you like' to 'we made this game this way for a reason, by changing that, you wreck the entire game, we dont like that', both of which are understandable. Now, what stops a developer who is highly against trainers from hijacking such legalities to go after trainer developers & distributors. Are they drawing the line at multiplayer cheating only? Or are they going to go with the more artistic: non-permissible alteration of a game is not allowed since it ruins its original purpose of the game which the developer intended.
In short, is this the potential road to DRM-like measures in games, where your ownership is only partial and is dictated by the publisher as to what you can and cannot do to the game. I know my comments are somewhat off-topic and may seem a bit overly dramatic but this can easily lead in other directions, especially in the enterprising hands of companies such as EA whom are trying to further consolidate the market.
I recently switched to Firefox from MyIE for a couple reasons, mostly doing with spyware & its ability to exploit holes in IE. After installing some of the 'must have' extensions, such as Tab Browser Extensions and Linky, Firefox is easily configured to give me the same experience and better than MyIE, which imo is still a strong browser (even if it uses the IE engine). My main complaint is a simple one, and that is that there is no option nor extension that allows me to minimize Firefox to my system tray instead of closing it, when I hit the close window button on the browser. This allows Firefox to re-open a tad bit faster than if it wasnt running at all, and is nice to have quickly ready to go. Given the relative simplicity of this option, I think the Firefox team should seriously consider adding such a function, which I was hoping to see in this 0.9 release. Hopefully they will 'fix' this in the next release, but otherwise its a job well done all around.
PS. To those who would tell me to use a system addon such as AllToTray or PowerMenu, no thanks, but thats not quite the same as being able to click the close-window button and having it minimize to the tray. Close, but no cigar.
7th Guest was my first adventure game after Myst, and I loved it; between the music, the characters, and the atmosphere, I was entertained for hours and still look back with fondness upon those simpler days. I recently saw footage for The Collector, and while it did bring back some memories, I do not believe such a game can succeed anymore. The prime thing to consider is that these days, games as a whole can and are more complex so why should gamers be forced to play mostly mundane puzzles to progress a decent plot? There are different adventure-puzzle fans, some like them woven into the story, others like them part of the environment, and others still prefer the 7th Guest style of actual puzzles placed throughout the game.
These days, many years later, I personally lean towards the first two options, since these days it is technologically possible to weave puzzles into games & environments, where as 7th Guest smells slightly of playing puzzle games just to play puzzle games. We've all heard the mantra, 'Adventure games are dead' which I wont bother debating for or against since I think the statement is a bit overly dramatic, but games like 7th Guest lived for a reason, and they have died for a similar reason. Gamers no longer need games-within games to enjoy them, for the games themselves are plenty enough, so the successful adventure games have moved on with this for the most part.
I honestly hope that 7th Guest style games move on, and start with something new; I feel we need games that make the environment an intrical part to the story & gameplay, not abstract puzzles placed in locations, a tired concept. We need games in which the story is not merely a device to drive gameplay; we need games that the gameplay has many levels of depth, and offers freedom for different types of players; we do not need another adventure puzzle-game. Harsh and sad words, especially coming from a genuine fan of these games, but honestly spoken...
Its a well known fact that the feds watch txt msgs, as can be substanciated by the fact that people have been contacted by the authorities after sending msgs that looked suspicous, like secret messeges to start bombings and such. By using a cellphone, a communication device that broadcasts its information to a company that I have little/no control over, I assume I am being watched at any given moment, with both txt msging and the actual calls I make. If you believe that you have privacy while carrying around a device that easily allows someone to listen in on your convos and sends msgs in plain txt format, then you are rather naive.
Dude, wtf? I work in a similar environment only we do advertising work, so having music going on at any volume is not really possible when trying to work on a TV spot. Ironically enough however, my co-workers and I have amazingly gotten around this problem by investing in the technology thus referred to as headphones or the even more cutting edge, ear buds. Seriously, just go invest in a decent pair with a respectable cord-length and you can listen to your music at whatever volume you prefer, and no need to subject those around you to your music tastes, whatever they may be.
I find Philip K Dick has painted in many of his works a rather accurate portrayal of schizophrenia, especially since he suffers from a mild form of it. Though he is a science fiction writer, I doubt there is anyone who cannot connect in some form to his often startlingly accurate portrayals of our modern, commercialized times and the stresses it puts upon the everyday man.
I think its pretty safe to say windows is not losing much ground, especially when related to an isolated incident where someone encountered a majority of Apple systems. I could use similar logic when walking into my schools labs, but the hypothesis falls apart when I goto studios running primarily Windows, or large businesses. The editor's comment is pretty much pure conjecture, even if there has been a minor budging towards OSX.
Honestly, I haven't thought at all about whether Ep3 is gonna be good or bad. I had expectations for Ep1 and was dissappointed. I had no expectations for Ep2 and was mildly entertained (much more so than Ep1), so I'm going to approach Ep3 the same way; I think a lot of people here might help their enjoyment of the movie by not thinking about this film and just waiting to see it when it comes out. Hype of any type ruins just about anything.
Not really by my count. Look at your current highend Macs, the G5's; these systems do not come with serious 3D cards, they come with mid-end gamer cards. Let me ask you, how are you supposed to do serious 3D animation work on a Radeon 9800 Pro? Have you ever tried? It isn't very productive.
If Mac is serious about the 3D market, (and it honestly hasn't demonstrated it is, atleast for professional level work), they will start offering highend cards to their customers, cards such as the Nvidia Quadro FX 1100. Until it offers such cards, they are merely talking out their ass about 3D and Macs.
" There's really not too many other things they can do to develop the product left... it's a matter of sales more than development."
You've obvously haven't worked with Maya too much as thats a rather ridiculous statement given the following:
1. Maya cannot export or import animations in any really useful way. I myself have programmed as a result, my own importers and exporters for the program.
2. Maya's ability to import skin weighting is more or less broken.
3. MEL, maya's built-in scripting language doesn't support multi-dimensional arrays (it does, but theyre weak), and has only a couple data functions for arrays and strings.
4. Certain rendering functions such as 3D blur are buggy.
5. Polygon modelling tools only recently gained the ability to split parallel polygons, still needs a couple more functions.
6. MEL UI scripting powerful, but would be nice if we could use XML as well.
I could go on, and this is ONLY what I know, this hasnt even touched on any particle or dynamics issues, which have their own complexities. Don't get me wrong, I love Maya and enjoy working in it, but would not for a second say "Alias should stop developing Maya". No, the moment Alias even insinuated they were going to mostly stop development on Maya, you'd see many animators switch to Softimage or other 3D packages. And also, Maya enjoys a larger install-base amongst individual animators than does Softimage, so they don't need marketing that bad, especially marketing at the sacrifice of development.
Iomega's Jaz cartridges were undependable, so why the hell would you dump 35GB on its older brother? Can't count the number of times a student brought in a Jaz disk and it was busted in some manner...
I really don't understand why people are unimpressed with the dancing robots. Even if theyre programmed to do the dance routine, its still damn impressive. I'm not sure how familiar people are with bipedal movement, but its not as simple as you think; it takes a fairly complex series of motions to keep you balanced as you move, especially when walking or running. One thing you'll notice with the robots is that that balance every motion: this is not an easy feat, especially with the relative smoothness with which they are moving around. So once more, getting robots to do robotic things is easy (robotic arm that welds stuff), where as getting a robot to mimic life (bipedal walking around) and people is most definitely difficult, forget whatever you've seen in Hollywood.
One thing I've noticed about Apple is that once you've gotten one of their computers, they don't want it back. Take for example my one friend who bought a G4 Cube a couple days after they were released. Now, we all know the issues that these systems had, but obviously my friend wasn't going to be aware of them with the system being a matter of days old. So he went and (imho, foolishly), spent about $3500 on a new Apple G4 Cube. He recieved it and started having the normal problems; randomly resetting/shutting down as well as instability. This was caused by the neato heat-sensor power button where you don't need to actually touch it, but merely pass your finger in front of it. Cool idea but a flaw execution. So he naturally called apple and after spending about 6 hours on the phone with them, they finally agree to let him ship the machine in. Move forward several weeks, he gets a refurb (they adamately refused to give him a new system), and it too has the same problems. Long story short, he eventually sold it on E-bay for $2,400 after 2 refurbs and gained a finely-tuned loathing for apple and all its products from this consumer experience.
Maybe apple has gotten better? Not really. My boss and I were at an Apple Store buying 2 new dual cpu G5 systems for Maya, to both act as render stations and actual workstations. We get back to the office with said computers, unpack, etc, and the first one is running fine. The other however, just refused to stay up; we'd start the OSX updater, and it would reboot not too long after. Anything really we did, it would reboot or freeze eventually. Given that the system was 100% new, we didn't have time to fix a new computer tha we just paid $3,000 for. So we repacked it and brought it down to the Apple Store, and after arguing for quite a while that it was not indeed the software (the system wouldn't stay up long enough to have anything installed), and after blocking their polite attempts to say it was our fault, and an hour later, we had a new system that worked just fine when we plugged it in.
So in summary, I'll say that Apple systems generally work great and usually do not have these types of issues, but if something does happen, Apple will probably be the last to really care. You can see these attitudes reflected in the problems the iBook and iPod has had regarding their hardware. I rather doubt the US applecare people will be any better, but it might be worth a shot.
Re:Jump The Shark: Chronicling The Moments When TV
on
Retro Vision
·
· Score: 5, Informative
For those who don't know, 'Jumping the Shark' is a reference to an episode in 'Happy Days' in which at the end of the show, the fonze is shown trying to water-ski a jump over a pool of sharks, in order to get more people to watch the following weeks episode which will show if he makes it. A reference to a show 'jumping the shark' means that whatever made that show unique and watchable is gone/going and thus the show must resort to gimmicks to keep it interesting.
You're definitely right, half the time something like this comes out, its because someone had something small that had major potential to become big, and it was just a matter of showing people. This is why as an artist, you should be sure to publically display your work, and not just keep it for private viewing for you, family, and friends (or whatever). Remember, even though you might not think it, someone else might be interested, and in some cases, interested enough to fund further research/production/ideas.
I really think due to UT 2003's relative lack of innovation, and overally not being that great of a game, that Epic (or whoever the publisher is), should give people who bought UT 2003 a rebate on UT 2004. Now, I never went out and bought UT 2003 since I figured it was nothing new, except an updated engine. This was pretty much the case, since really, UT 2003 is a demo for the Unreal Engine. Epic's 'real' game was Unreal II, which even though I wasnt too big a fan of, was atleast better than UT 2003, if only because the weapons were better. I give Epic a lot of credit for the work they've done on UT 2004, but by the same token these features either should have been in UT 2003 (given the lack of anything really new besides a new engine) or people who bought the $40 engine demo that was UT 2003 should get a rebate.
One thing I've noticed is that even though we now have the ability to reproduce a cinematic level of sound in games, voice acting in games is often weak. Its rather irritating to see your well modeled & textured character, with cool battle sounds and whatnot all of a sudden start talking with a tinny voice that makes me picture some guy standing in a studio with headphones on, reading lines from a script.
A couple recent examples would be Praetorians (their psuedo 'Roman' accents were debatable), X2 - The Threat which the voices themselves were ok but had horrible voice acting, and lastly, Ill include Freedom Fighters since though it has no voice acting, its sound work was frankly pathetic, and arcadishly crappy vs a game like say Battlefield 1942.
By making voice acting a last priority, game developers are almost intentionally lowering the quality of their end product to an almost amature level when it comes to sound; how much more embarrassing is it to show a game off to a friend and maybe a graphic screw up or two happens, versus really shitty voice acting coming in and all of a sudden, you cant take the game seriously at all.
For completeness, Ill name a couple games that obviously put a lot of time into their voice work: Sacrifice, Jagged Alliance 2, Splinter Cell (for the most part), and Freespace II. Each of these games, listening to the voice acting immerses you in the environment, unlike games where the voice acting reminds you that you are indeed playing a game, a not-so-well produced one at that. I'll admit that horrible voice acting is not the end of the world for a game, but it sure makes a worlds difference on how you feel while you're playing; I like my illusions to be as complete as possible, and bad voice acting puts a cramp in that illusion.
While I agree that this may be a tad over the top, and will serve as ammunition by family-groups and so on, we should stop for one moment and consider intellectually how retarded this actually is: We are actually more concerned with the player taking behavior modifying (and potentially addicting) substances than with a major part of the game's premesis, which is for the player to kill or harm other humans in the game. Somehow killing people isnt as bad as taking drugs...
In my apt building (I live in NYC), the elevators are about 60 years old, and theres 3 of them. Each has their own 'personality', such as the left one which when opening makes a loud metal-on-metal screetch/bang, or the center elevator which ALWAYS gets off 1 floor below the one you hit and then thinks it has hit your floor so moves onto whatever anyone else has pressed. The right one is usually 'normal' except when it fails; id say on average each car fails 2 - 3 times a year. So yes, I hit the button a couple times, since these old-doddering elevators need to be reminded quite often of where you want them to take you.
On a seperate note, I've never seen anyone hit the traffic buttons, and the walk-signs are merely a formality; its not like people actually pay attention to them when walking across the street. Most NYC'ers use the following logic for crossing the street: Is there a car coming? If so, can I cross without getting hit? If its ok, walk.
Technology itself does not cause the stress, unless you are talking about specifics, such as "I've been working on this 3D character for the last 8 hours, and no matter what I do, his arm keeps flipping, @#$()#)($*!..." Thats stressful, but thats due to the task, not the technology.
However, I do not like cellphones because I think being too easily accessible is stressful. There is something very satisfying about leaving my apartment and being by myself for a while, without worrying about answering a phone and talking to people I may or may not want to talk to. If I want to talk to my friends or whatnot, I wait till I get home, or if I really need to take out a phone card and call from a public phone. I do not own a cellphone (never have), and I do not miss it (though there are always those moments where it would have been useful). I do not look forward to being forced to get one for work...
Slashdot Mirror
For those who have never worked with nurbs or even know what nurbs are, nurbs are an alternative approach to modeling, that instead of dealing with individual polygons, you work with curves that form surfaces, which at render-time are converted to polygons. Nurbs are mostly used for engineering applications, such as car designs, furniture, etc where precision is absolutely essential. However, nurbs are not without their own challenges, most notable that it is difficult to create models that are entirely closed; its a little difficult to explain. Basically, imagine modeling a vase with nurbs using nothing but curves... it gets difficult if you want to put a cap on that vase as you need to line up all the edges of the cap to the curvature of the top of the vase. While software packages such as Maya will automatically map the edges of the cap to the curvature of the vase opening, it takes a bit of work to perfect. This new approach to nurbs modeling is very impressive as it would allow artists to take the strongests aspects of nurbs and use them in a much more tactile manner such as modeling with clay in realtime using the gloves whilst a nurbs-based model is created within your 3D program. Essentially, you could cut out the modeler from about 80% of the modeling work, toss it to a normal clay-sculpting artist whom would create the clay model, which the real modeler would then touch up for further use. Good news for sculpting artists, bad news for modelers that can't sculpt.
I think the best way to enjoy Doom3 is not reading any of the reviews; after all, at this point you will either play it or you wont. Reading Gamespot's hype about it is pointless, as you only increase your expectations of a game, that lets face it, is not going to set new boundries of gameplay (though I will say nothing of its graphics). Id rather walk to the table with nothing but a couple screen shots in mind and enjoy it as it comes. Atleast then I can say I judged it on its own without (many) preconceptions.
The author's point is not that the games industry needs to eliminate crunchtime; crunchtime exists in almost any product-based situation, especially when it comes to computer products. Software development, games, and 3D animation are three that come to mind in that catagory and all of these require crunchtime when the deadline looms near. The issue here is mis-management from the start to finish, in which the project manager actually plans 12 hour shifts for everyone which naturally spills over sometimes to 14 - 16 hour shifts, that extra 2 - 4 hours going unpaid. We've all played video games and I think we can all tell when a video game was rushed to completion, Driv3r being a newer example; rushed games are obvious and the resulting morale drop from not only having busted your ass for the last 3 - 6 months on a game, only to be pressured by the publisher into a release date, then releasing an incomplete game which proceeds to bomb with reviewers as well as in sales. Whats the drive to really make an innovative game next time, knowing your publisher is going to knuckle you into the same situation again and again?
The big game publishers are reaching the point big music publishers reached about a decade or so back with music: their very presence hurts the overall industry due to their pump-em-out-n-release-an-expansion attitude, EA especially. Perhaps it is nearing a time where like-minded people need to stop buying games and their expansion packs from companies such as EA, Vivendi, etc. Now that it has become as popular as its music & movie siblings, we can expect more and more re-releases of games redone for new engines & systems, more (potentially crappy) sequels, and more branding (street fighter, resident evil, etc).
I recall a scene from total recall in which Arnold and his buddy are walking through an airport I think, and they come upon a real-time xray device that xrays people as they pass through this corridor to see what theyre carrying. This device the Israelis have developed sounds much similar in terms of its end-output & purpose; could this be used to speed up airport lines & ensure greater security. Since we've essentially handed off our privacy as soon as we enter an airport, I dont see how this would be any worst than what we already have.
Given that this configuration requires a Xeon based system w/ the dual PCI-E slots, this seems geared more towards the 3D development end of things, with Maya, Softimage and such. I've yet to meet a gamer-only with a Xeon rig, so this would seem to be a boon for the new Gelato systems, allowing for more GPU power. I just hope Nvidia doesn't end up emulating 3DFx's later moves in which it decides raw speed > innovation, as that is not really a winning strategy, especially these days where we're on the brink of a new age of gaming graphics using advanced shading techniques previously only seen in pre-rendered footage.
I am a proponent of anti-cheating measures & detection, however this seems like it could be bent to serve other purposes, such as attacking the creators of trainers for games. The difference between most of the cheating that goes on in CS and a trainer is that (usually) the trainer is used only for singleplayer, while cheats are used in multiplayer.
My question is, who draws the lines and where do they fall; is a trainer now considered cheating? I would argue quite heavily against someone who favored the illegality of trainers given that they are meant for a player to change a single-player experience more to their liking. Developers have mixed feelings about trainers, ranging from 'you can play the game how you like' to 'we made this game this way for a reason, by changing that, you wreck the entire game, we dont like that', both of which are understandable. Now, what stops a developer who is highly against trainers from hijacking such legalities to go after trainer developers & distributors. Are they drawing the line at multiplayer cheating only? Or are they going to go with the more artistic: non-permissible alteration of a game is not allowed since it ruins its original purpose of the game which the developer intended.
In short, is this the potential road to DRM-like measures in games, where your ownership is only partial and is dictated by the publisher as to what you can and cannot do to the game. I know my comments are somewhat off-topic and may seem a bit overly dramatic but this can easily lead in other directions, especially in the enterprising hands of companies such as EA whom are trying to further consolidate the market.
I recently switched to Firefox from MyIE for a couple reasons, mostly doing with spyware & its ability to exploit holes in IE. After installing some of the 'must have' extensions, such as Tab Browser Extensions and Linky, Firefox is easily configured to give me the same experience and better than MyIE, which imo is still a strong browser (even if it uses the IE engine). My main complaint is a simple one, and that is that there is no option nor extension that allows me to minimize Firefox to my system tray instead of closing it, when I hit the close window button on the browser. This allows Firefox to re-open a tad bit faster than if it wasnt running at all, and is nice to have quickly ready to go. Given the relative simplicity of this option, I think the Firefox team should seriously consider adding such a function, which I was hoping to see in this 0.9 release. Hopefully they will 'fix' this in the next release, but otherwise its a job well done all around.
PS. To those who would tell me to use a system addon such as AllToTray or PowerMenu, no thanks, but thats not quite the same as being able to click the close-window button and having it minimize to the tray. Close, but no cigar.
7th Guest was my first adventure game after Myst, and I loved it; between the music, the characters, and the atmosphere, I was entertained for hours and still look back with fondness upon those simpler days. I recently saw footage for The Collector, and while it did bring back some memories, I do not believe such a game can succeed anymore. The prime thing to consider is that these days, games as a whole can and are more complex so why should gamers be forced to play mostly mundane puzzles to progress a decent plot? There are different adventure-puzzle fans, some like them woven into the story, others like them part of the environment, and others still prefer the 7th Guest style of actual puzzles placed throughout the game.
These days, many years later, I personally lean towards the first two options, since these days it is technologically possible to weave puzzles into games & environments, where as 7th Guest smells slightly of playing puzzle games just to play puzzle games. We've all heard the mantra, 'Adventure games are dead' which I wont bother debating for or against since I think the statement is a bit overly dramatic, but games like 7th Guest lived for a reason, and they have died for a similar reason. Gamers no longer need games-within games to enjoy them, for the games themselves are plenty enough, so the successful adventure games have moved on with this for the most part.
I honestly hope that 7th Guest style games move on, and start with something new; I feel we need games that make the environment an intrical part to the story & gameplay, not abstract puzzles placed in locations, a tired concept. We need games in which the story is not merely a device to drive gameplay; we need games that the gameplay has many levels of depth, and offers freedom for different types of players; we do not need another adventure puzzle-game. Harsh and sad words, especially coming from a genuine fan of these games, but honestly spoken...
Its a well known fact that the feds watch txt msgs, as can be substanciated by the fact that people have been contacted by the authorities after sending msgs that looked suspicous, like secret messeges to start bombings and such. By using a cellphone, a communication device that broadcasts its information to a company that I have little/no control over, I assume I am being watched at any given moment, with both txt msging and the actual calls I make. If you believe that you have privacy while carrying around a device that easily allows someone to listen in on your convos and sends msgs in plain txt format, then you are rather naive.
Dude, wtf? I work in a similar environment only we do advertising work, so having music going on at any volume is not really possible when trying to work on a TV spot. Ironically enough however, my co-workers and I have amazingly gotten around this problem by investing in the technology thus referred to as headphones or the even more cutting edge, ear buds. Seriously, just go invest in a decent pair with a respectable cord-length and you can listen to your music at whatever volume you prefer, and no need to subject those around you to your music tastes, whatever they may be.
I find Philip K Dick has painted in many of his works a rather accurate portrayal of schizophrenia, especially since he suffers from a mild form of it. Though he is a science fiction writer, I doubt there is anyone who cannot connect in some form to his often startlingly accurate portrayals of our modern, commercialized times and the stresses it puts upon the everyday man.
I think its pretty safe to say windows is not losing much ground, especially when related to an isolated incident where someone encountered a majority of Apple systems. I could use similar logic when walking into my schools labs, but the hypothesis falls apart when I goto studios running primarily Windows, or large businesses. The editor's comment is pretty much pure conjecture, even if there has been a minor budging towards OSX.
Honestly, I haven't thought at all about whether Ep3 is gonna be good or bad. I had expectations for Ep1 and was dissappointed. I had no expectations for Ep2 and was mildly entertained (much more so than Ep1), so I'm going to approach Ep3 the same way; I think a lot of people here might help their enjoyment of the movie by not thinking about this film and just waiting to see it when it comes out. Hype of any type ruins just about anything.
Not really by my count. Look at your current highend Macs, the G5's; these systems do not come with serious 3D cards, they come with mid-end gamer cards. Let me ask you, how are you supposed to do serious 3D animation work on a Radeon 9800 Pro? Have you ever tried? It isn't very productive.
If Mac is serious about the 3D market, (and it honestly hasn't demonstrated it is, atleast for professional level work), they will start offering highend cards to their customers, cards such as the Nvidia Quadro FX 1100. Until it offers such cards, they are merely talking out their ass about 3D and Macs.
" There's really not too many other things they can do to develop the product left... it's a matter of sales more than development."
You've obvously haven't worked with Maya too much as thats a rather ridiculous statement given the following:
1. Maya cannot export or import animations in any really useful way. I myself have programmed as a result, my own importers and exporters for the program.
2. Maya's ability to import skin weighting is more or less broken.
3. MEL, maya's built-in scripting language doesn't support multi-dimensional arrays (it does, but theyre weak), and has only a couple data functions for arrays and strings.
4. Certain rendering functions such as 3D blur are buggy.
5. Polygon modelling tools only recently gained the ability to split parallel polygons, still needs a couple more functions.
6. MEL UI scripting powerful, but would be nice if we could use XML as well.
I could go on, and this is ONLY what I know, this hasnt even touched on any particle or dynamics issues, which have their own complexities. Don't get me wrong, I love Maya and enjoy working in it, but would not for a second say "Alias should stop developing Maya". No, the moment Alias even insinuated they were going to mostly stop development on Maya, you'd see many animators switch to Softimage or other 3D packages. And also, Maya enjoys a larger install-base amongst individual animators than does Softimage, so they don't need marketing that bad, especially marketing at the sacrifice of development.
Iomega's Jaz cartridges were undependable, so why the hell would you dump 35GB on its older brother? Can't count the number of times a student brought in a Jaz disk and it was busted in some manner...
I really don't understand why people are unimpressed with the dancing robots. Even if theyre programmed to do the dance routine, its still damn impressive. I'm not sure how familiar people are with bipedal movement, but its not as simple as you think; it takes a fairly complex series of motions to keep you balanced as you move, especially when walking or running. One thing you'll notice with the robots is that that balance every motion: this is not an easy feat, especially with the relative smoothness with which they are moving around. So once more, getting robots to do robotic things is easy (robotic arm that welds stuff), where as getting a robot to mimic life (bipedal walking around) and people is most definitely difficult, forget whatever you've seen in Hollywood.
One thing I've noticed about Apple is that once you've gotten one of their computers, they don't want it back. Take for example my one friend who bought a G4 Cube a couple days after they were released. Now, we all know the issues that these systems had, but obviously my friend wasn't going to be aware of them with the system being a matter of days old. So he went and (imho, foolishly), spent about $3500 on a new Apple G4 Cube. He recieved it and started having the normal problems; randomly resetting/shutting down as well as instability. This was caused by the neato heat-sensor power button where you don't need to actually touch it, but merely pass your finger in front of it. Cool idea but a flaw execution. So he naturally called apple and after spending about 6 hours on the phone with them, they finally agree to let him ship the machine in. Move forward several weeks, he gets a refurb (they adamately refused to give him a new system), and it too has the same problems. Long story short, he eventually sold it on E-bay for $2,400 after 2 refurbs and gained a finely-tuned loathing for apple and all its products from this consumer experience.
Maybe apple has gotten better? Not really. My boss and I were at an Apple Store buying 2 new dual cpu G5 systems for Maya, to both act as render stations and actual workstations. We get back to the office with said computers, unpack, etc, and the first one is running fine. The other however, just refused to stay up; we'd start the OSX updater, and it would reboot not too long after. Anything really we did, it would reboot or freeze eventually. Given that the system was 100% new, we didn't have time to fix a new computer tha we just paid $3,000 for. So we repacked it and brought it down to the Apple Store, and after arguing for quite a while that it was not indeed the software (the system wouldn't stay up long enough to have anything installed), and after blocking their polite attempts to say it was our fault, and an hour later, we had a new system that worked just fine when we plugged it in.
So in summary, I'll say that Apple systems generally work great and usually do not have these types of issues, but if something does happen, Apple will probably be the last to really care. You can see these attitudes reflected in the problems the iBook and iPod has had regarding their hardware. I rather doubt the US applecare people will be any better, but it might be worth a shot.
For those who don't know, 'Jumping the Shark' is a reference to an episode in 'Happy Days' in which at the end of the show, the fonze is shown trying to water-ski a jump over a pool of sharks, in order to get more people to watch the following weeks episode which will show if he makes it. A reference to a show 'jumping the shark' means that whatever made that show unique and watchable is gone/going and thus the show must resort to gimmicks to keep it interesting.
You're definitely right, half the time something like this comes out, its because someone had something small that had major potential to become big, and it was just a matter of showing people. This is why as an artist, you should be sure to publically display your work, and not just keep it for private viewing for you, family, and friends (or whatever). Remember, even though you might not think it, someone else might be interested, and in some cases, interested enough to fund further research/production/ideas.
I really think due to UT 2003's relative lack of innovation, and overally not being that great of a game, that Epic (or whoever the publisher is), should give people who bought UT 2003 a rebate on UT 2004. Now, I never went out and bought UT 2003 since I figured it was nothing new, except an updated engine. This was pretty much the case, since really, UT 2003 is a demo for the Unreal Engine. Epic's 'real' game was Unreal II, which even though I wasnt too big a fan of, was atleast better than UT 2003, if only because the weapons were better. I give Epic a lot of credit for the work they've done on UT 2004, but by the same token these features either should have been in UT 2003 (given the lack of anything really new besides a new engine) or people who bought the $40 engine demo that was UT 2003 should get a rebate.
One thing I've noticed is that even though we now have the ability to reproduce a cinematic level of sound in games, voice acting in games is often weak. Its rather irritating to see your well modeled & textured character, with cool battle sounds and whatnot all of a sudden start talking with a tinny voice that makes me picture some guy standing in a studio with headphones on, reading lines from a script.
A couple recent examples would be Praetorians (their psuedo 'Roman' accents were debatable), X2 - The Threat which the voices themselves were ok but had horrible voice acting, and lastly, Ill include Freedom Fighters since though it has no voice acting, its sound work was frankly pathetic, and arcadishly crappy vs a game like say Battlefield 1942.
By making voice acting a last priority, game developers are almost intentionally lowering the quality of their end product to an almost amature level when it comes to sound; how much more embarrassing is it to show a game off to a friend and maybe a graphic screw up or two happens, versus really shitty voice acting coming in and all of a sudden, you cant take the game seriously at all.
For completeness, Ill name a couple games that obviously put a lot of time into their voice work: Sacrifice, Jagged Alliance 2, Splinter Cell (for the most part), and Freespace II. Each of these games, listening to the voice acting immerses you in the environment, unlike games where the voice acting reminds you that you are indeed playing a game, a not-so-well produced one at that. I'll admit that horrible voice acting is not the end of the world for a game, but it sure makes a worlds difference on how you feel while you're playing; I like my illusions to be as complete as possible, and bad voice acting puts a cramp in that illusion.
While I agree that this may be a tad over the top, and will serve as ammunition by family-groups and so on, we should stop for one moment and consider intellectually how retarded this actually is: We are actually more concerned with the player taking behavior modifying (and potentially addicting) substances than with a major part of the game's premesis, which is for the player to kill or harm other humans in the game. Somehow killing people isnt as bad as taking drugs...
In my apt building (I live in NYC), the elevators are about 60 years old, and theres 3 of them. Each has their own 'personality', such as the left one which when opening makes a loud metal-on-metal screetch/bang, or the center elevator which ALWAYS gets off 1 floor below the one you hit and then thinks it has hit your floor so moves onto whatever anyone else has pressed. The right one is usually 'normal' except when it fails; id say on average each car fails 2 - 3 times a year. So yes, I hit the button a couple times, since these old-doddering elevators need to be reminded quite often of where you want them to take you.
On a seperate note, I've never seen anyone hit the traffic buttons, and the walk-signs are merely a formality; its not like people actually pay attention to them when walking across the street. Most NYC'ers use the following logic for crossing the street: Is there a car coming? If so, can I cross without getting hit? If its ok, walk.
Technology itself does not cause the stress, unless you are talking about specifics, such as "I've been working on this 3D character for the last 8 hours, and no matter what I do, his arm keeps flipping, @#$()#)($*!..." Thats stressful, but thats due to the task, not the technology.
However, I do not like cellphones because I think being too easily accessible is stressful. There is something very satisfying about leaving my apartment and being by myself for a while, without worrying about answering a phone and talking to people I may or may not want to talk to. If I want to talk to my friends or whatnot, I wait till I get home, or if I really need to take out a phone card and call from a public phone. I do not own a cellphone (never have), and I do not miss it (though there are always those moments where it would have been useful). I do not look forward to being forced to get one for work...