I'm no expert on game engines, but comparing the current top of the line commercial engine to a previous gen engine, isn't really fair.
Compare Sauerbraten (a 2004 gamecube-era engine) to the modified goldsrc in CS:CZ/Unreal engine2/idtech4 and while it might not be as good, it surely does compete!
The ps3 is the only console to not be cracked yet (AFAIK). Piracy is rampant on the wii/DS/psp the only thing prevents piracy on the xbox360 is that you can't do online gaming but the same is true of most pc games. The only reason ps1 was so popular was because everybody had theirs chipped.
cube2 shows that on the technical level opensource can compete. Nethack shows that on the complex non-linear story level opensouce can compete
You don't have the kind of incentives to create a focused, quality project because you're not paying them to stay in line (people will just toddle off to play with your code--which is by no means a bad thing, but it kind of makes it hard to make a kickass game when everybody's off dicking around with their own thing).
The same could be said about linux. In addition closed source gaming is pretty complicated, so its safe to say that it's not as simple open source not being able to produce quality games. There are many problems but simply being open source isn't one, a free highly customizable engine would surely be a great base for many indie developers to work from.
For example, if indie developers interested in a genre worked together to produce a cutting edge engine, they would all gain and be able to spend more time on producing whatever differentiates their game from the crowd. The advantage of this over just buying the latest engine from ID/vavle/unreal is that if the engine gains significant use then it also improves faster and.'. gets used more. The advantage of this over a consortium of indie developers producing a closed engine, is free compatibility with obscure platforms (andriod -> wii) There are ofc disadvantage (its counter intuitive to help the competition, you have to give up on drm, it requires a significant investment to get the current OSS engines up to commercial standards)
Thats not an issue yet, atm you have QL = windows only (500k players) AL = linux only (a few players) Even when both spread to multiplatform QL is going to get the majority of players, and AL will be an interesting project but between hosting costs and lack of a recognized name will never be able to split the community
Do you really need access to all your spells all the time?
Perhaps with microphones for communication and a good design an MMO doesn't need more than 10 buttons, I've just been playing an fps and that alone used 12 keys regularly without spells or any of that jaz. MMOs arn't my thing but given that there are much fewer console MMOs, id guess that most MMOs don't work well with just 10 buttons (12 button controller -left/right click). OFC there may be many other reasons tbh i don't know.
You'll have to define "few" because modern consoles have a lot of buttons
Few is 10 (although i was originally posting in reply to somebody talking about the wiimote that has just 6), the main problem with RTS isn't just the lack of keys (you could work around that limitation by offering just a few options at a time). The lack of a mouse must be (and the 1 time i tried playing an RTS on a console defiantly was) a major limitation, pointing/scrolling around the map were simply not as easy, dragging to select a squad would be impossible, the lack of modifier keys (shift/ctrl) would also be a bigger problem than just lacking buttons. Sure you can play RTS on a console but im pretty sure for most RTSs aren't as good, star-craft especially!
Microsoft is an anomaly in the market.
Actually that was just a joke given Microsoft have continued their habit of making shoddy products that die quite often.
It's more like every 5 to 6 years for most console gamers
My old desktop is 5/6 years old cost me 400GBP to build (including snafus) and at can play any game you throw at it (albeit at low spec for newer ones), however if i spent nearly as much as a console gamer on it, then it'd be due for an upgrade, $400 you can buy a good gfxcard+processor+mobo as most of the other crap (sound+case+psu+memory) is transferable.
Our PC here is no match for the PS3 as a gaming device (nvidia 7150m), just like our previous PC (Intel 852/855 GME)
I doubt you spent nearly as much on your PC though,the PS3 is quite exceptional on numbers but fails, from what I've read/heard when gaming its only marginally better than an xbox360, which isn't better than the $400 core I listed above. On hardware costs alone consoles lose out, then you add in the increased cost of games and consoles simply cant compete!
Only Microsoft charges for multiplayer. PS2/PS3 owners have free multiplayer, except for MMORPG's of course.
Perhaps most of my multiplayer rants were aimed at the 360 (which seams to be the console with the biggest multiplayer market ironically),
Are you sure the consoles don't have such things? Because they do, at least for some games.
My brother doesn't have a ps3 so perhaps its online gaming is all fine and dandy but the xbox360's and wii's suck. I'm yet to come across a game that can boast the kind of server communities even your smallest mods have on the PC, even Day of Defeat that seams to be in its death throws, gives a better game than halo3 matchmaking does!
For example, if I wanted to batch scale some images from the digital camera it would probably be easier (and perhaps faster) to do so using ImageMagick under Linux on the PS3 than trying to do it in Windows Vista.
Dear god why would you ever try such a thing in windows is beyond me!
As a sibling pointed out "your post is one big compromise on gaming quality", the PC is the best platform for many genres, sure you can fit all you bindings into 10 keys but why bother as it will often ruin the game (e.g BF2 on the consoles is a poor imitation of the pc version). Pc gaming is also cheaper (I have spent less on my entire gamin
Any advantage the mouse/keyboard combo gave the PC (which was substantial) is shrinking; it nearly went away with the wiimote
WTF are you on? the wiimote sucks for anything other than sports/minigames, MMORPG - forget having a complex worlds with different spells at your fingertips with just a few buttons RTS - seriously no chance of playing anything but a simplified RTS with just a few buttons FPS - you need an aimable area much bigger than that of a tv screen shooters - timecrises/zombie flick/etc well these kind of work, but you never actually point to shoot, you move the crosshair about (but fundamentaly these DO work on the wii)
The other advantages of PC games are ofc: easy mods:- counter-strike, day of defeat, gary's mod better graphics - The id5tech engine will have to trade off fps for graphics quality on rage, on pc you get to set this yourself because high-end pcs can already better bang for buck for hardware - Ok some specs are better on game systems when they are first released, but given that pcs can be upgraded and generally come with more than 512MB ram, if you spend $400 upgrading you system every 3/4 years (probably more often if you bought an xbox) you system would be far more powerful than any current gen system. Free(ish) multiplayer gaming for most genres. Better communities / multiplayer architecture for most genres - having dedicated servers, forums and admins, produces a much better gaming experience than xbox/wii/ps3-live ever can
All consoles really have is: noob friendly (is that really a plus) local multiplayer
Remember this is some poor guy's life we are talking about here, so look it up in an actual book, not on something like Wikipedia. I really don't think asking them to open an actual book is too much to ask, do you?
But studies have shown that on non-disputed articles (you know the ones with tones of warning as the top), Wikipedia is more reliable than any other encyclopedia, so if its some poor guy's life you owe it to them to use Wikipedia (and check citations) over the alternatives. As its been shown that expert witnesses can't always be trusted (e.g cot death incident), it's up to the defense to find flaws in the prosecutions expert witnesses anyway be them errors caused by bias/Wikipedia/encyclopedia Britannica/the user manual for photoshop/etc
Facts don't make an expert, If the court wanted facts they could look them up in a book (or wikipedia). I'm doing a degree in chemistry and despite what some of my tutors think being able to recall the specific heat capacity of n2o is fairly useless, however being able to interpret the data to give you useful information is what experts do!
It's much harder for an atheist to blow himself up, killing innocent civilians and himself forever, than a theist!.'. the only sane course of action is to kill anybody that believes in an afterlives, just to be on the safe side.
nope it merely takes a raw data-dump of a pen-drive and converts tables in that data dump to inode addresses according to an algorithm of its choosing, in no way does it deal with any of your so called "filesystems"!
yes, very few programs use msjava.v2 (wouldn't want to infrindge any tradmarks by calling it mono), in fact very few distros ship with java and thats patent safe!
Incidentally, the more I hear of things like this, the better I can understand why so many Europeans think it's absurd that the USA has software patents at all.
Seriously i hope distros ship dumbed down "us versions" of packages to avoid stupid software patents, because i sure as hell don't give a flying fuck about infringing this patent in the UK. Once it's clear that software patents are hurting US companies, it wont take long for SIGs in congress to sort the problem out, and given the current economic climate bullying the EU to be as retarded as the US (in this respect, we sure as hell already are in other areas) isn't an option.
so its really good news, and more good news (unless you wanted to use the original good news to wank more) as better screening can help increase the pregnancy rate from IVF without filling people up and risking multiple births.
They pack plenty of eggs in there and still only get 30%-40%(if you trust numbers from US clinics selling IVF) and of those
In 2008, an analysis of the data of the National Birth Defects Study in the US found that certain birth defects were significantly more common in infants conceived with IVF, notably septal heart defects, cleft lip with or without cleft palate, esophageal atresia, and anorectal atresia; the mechanism of causality is unclear.
time for a back of the napkin calculation to not-really-but-sort-of prove my point: 10%*7(couldn't find a number for how many they fill you up with, so i made one up)*50%(other factors and multiple pregnancies counting as one) ~=30-40%
Isn't allowing guests this much access to the graphics card a terrible idea! Given that even the limited, well implemented, xbox360 hypervisor still let exploits slip through, implementing this must mitigates the security benefits of the VM. I'm under the impression that you used to needed elevated privileges on unix system to prevent potential exploits by executing code on the graphics card and modifying memory DMA and all that, over time it seems the potential for these exploits has got worse; graphics cards are pretty powerful and complex, graphics drivers are often buggy (and i assume porly vented for vulnerabilities), laptops are widespread and use the same memory as the OS, yet the protection has been dropped in favor of ease of use.
And if the above comments that they are using wine to get directx->opengl conversion, compatibility can't be better than wine anyway so it's unlikely that people will take a performance hit for compatibility that can't be much better.
disclaimer: I no next to nothing about graphics / virtual machines and not that much about security either tbh, so you are welcome to correct me...
I know one extreme christian that doesn't believe; in quantum mechanics, the big bang theory, evolution, etc, oddly i knew him because he was in all the top science/maths sets at highschool
Drink lots of coffee - working that shift will turn you into a zombie. Coffee (and tobacco, not recommended) keep you alert, give you something to look forward to, and supress the appetite so you...
Why not drop a pill in the morning i hear its great for appetite too!
I do vouch for night jogs i don't even try and keep fit, but night jogs are pretty cool/peaceful if you live somewhere you can do them i definitely would recommended it (or for the lazier among us, long walks are also good 1-2hrs of wandering around a city is only fun at night)
You don't miss it until you've used it, when i was on (ms) windows i didn't really use windows at all they took too much space for boarders and most used so much space for menubars/toolbars that everything had to be run maximised, now between my moded firefox/kde i regularly have 3 or even 4 windows in use at once.
Description: diff and patch utilities which work with Debian packages
debdelta is a program suite designed to compute changes between
Debian packages. These changes (debdeltas) are similar to the output of the
"diff" program in that they may be used to store and transmit only the
changes between Debian packages.
.
This suite contains 'debdelta-upgrade', that downloads debdeltas and use them
to create all Debian packages needed for an 'apt-get upgrade'.
It may be used in a Debian/unstable host (to speed up download of new
packages), or in a Debian/stable host (for security updates).
The thing is that what delta updates save in bandwidth they save in complexity and cpu power, apt-torrent is similar and hasn't really taken off. Even on fedora I got the impression that people weren't amazingly keen on using it.
Slashdot Mirror
pardon?
I'm no expert on game engines, but comparing the current top of the line commercial engine to a previous gen engine, isn't really fair.
Compare Sauerbraten (a 2004 gamecube-era engine) to the modified goldsrc in CS:CZ/Unreal engine2/idtech4 and while it might not be as good, it surely does compete!
The ps3 is the only console to not be cracked yet (AFAIK). Piracy is rampant on the wii/DS/psp the only thing prevents piracy on the xbox360 is that you can't do online gaming but the same is true of most pc games. The only reason ps1 was so popular was because everybody had theirs chipped.
cube2 shows that on the technical level opensource can compete.
Nethack shows that on the complex non-linear story level opensouce can compete
You don't have the kind of incentives to create a focused, quality project because you're not paying them to stay in line (people will just toddle off to play with your code--which is by no means a bad thing, but it kind of makes it hard to make a kickass game when everybody's off dicking around with their own thing).
The same could be said about linux. In addition closed source gaming is pretty complicated, so its safe to say that it's not as simple open source not being able to produce quality games. There are many problems but simply being open source isn't one, a free highly customizable engine would surely be a great base for many indie developers to work from.
For example, if indie developers interested in a genre worked together to produce a cutting edge engine, they would all gain and be able to spend more time on producing whatever differentiates their game from the crowd. .'. gets used more.
The advantage of this over just buying the latest engine from ID/vavle/unreal is that if the engine gains significant use then it also improves faster and
The advantage of this over a consortium of indie developers producing a closed engine, is free compatibility with obscure platforms (andriod -> wii)
There are ofc disadvantage (its counter intuitive to help the competition, you have to give up on drm, it requires a significant investment to get the current OSS engines up to commercial standards)
Thats not an issue yet, atm you have
QL = windows only (500k players)
AL = linux only (a few players)
Even when both spread to multiplatform QL is going to get the majority of players, and AL will be an interesting project but between hosting costs and lack of a recognized name will never be able to split the community
Do you really need access to all your spells all the time?
Perhaps with microphones for communication and a good design an MMO doesn't need more than 10 buttons, I've just been playing an fps and that alone used 12 keys regularly without spells or any of that jaz. MMOs arn't my thing but given that there are much fewer console MMOs, id guess that most MMOs don't work well with just 10 buttons (12 button controller -left/right click). OFC there may be many other reasons tbh i don't know.
You'll have to define "few" because modern consoles have a lot of buttons
Few is 10 (although i was originally posting in reply to somebody talking about the wiimote that has just 6), the main problem with RTS isn't just the lack of keys (you could work around that limitation by offering just a few options at a time). The lack of a mouse must be (and the 1 time i tried playing an RTS on a console defiantly was) a major limitation, pointing/scrolling around the map were simply not as easy, dragging to select a squad would be impossible, the lack of modifier keys (shift/ctrl) would also be a bigger problem than just lacking buttons. Sure you can play RTS on a console but im pretty sure for most RTSs aren't as good, star-craft especially!
Microsoft is an anomaly in the market.
Actually that was just a joke given Microsoft have continued their habit of making shoddy products that die quite often.
It's more like every 5 to 6 years for most console gamers
My old desktop is 5/6 years old cost me 400GBP to build (including snafus) and at can play any game you throw at it (albeit at low spec for newer ones), however if i spent nearly as much as a console gamer on it, then it'd be due for an upgrade, $400 you can buy a good gfxcard+processor+mobo as most of the other crap (sound+case+psu+memory) is transferable.
Our PC here is no match for the PS3 as a gaming device (nvidia 7150m), just like our previous PC (Intel 852/855 GME)
I doubt you spent nearly as much on your PC though,the PS3 is quite exceptional on numbers but fails, from what I've read/heard when gaming its only marginally better than an xbox360, which isn't better than the $400 core I listed above. On hardware costs alone consoles lose out, then you add in the increased cost of games and consoles simply cant compete!
Only Microsoft charges for multiplayer. PS2/PS3 owners have free multiplayer, except for MMORPG's of course.
Perhaps most of my multiplayer rants were aimed at the 360 (which seams to be the console with the biggest multiplayer market ironically),
Are you sure the consoles don't have such things? Because they do, at least for some games.
My brother doesn't have a ps3 so perhaps its online gaming is all fine and dandy but the xbox360's and wii's suck. I'm yet to come across a game that can boast the kind of server communities even your smallest mods have on the PC, even Day of Defeat that seams to be in its death throws, gives a better game than halo3 matchmaking does!
For example, if I wanted to batch scale some images from the digital camera it would probably be easier (and perhaps faster) to do so using ImageMagick under Linux on the PS3 than trying to do it in Windows Vista.
Dear god why would you ever try such a thing in windows is beyond me!
As a sibling pointed out "your post is one big compromise on gaming quality", the PC is the best platform for many genres, sure you can fit all you bindings into 10 keys but why bother as it will often ruin the game (e.g BF2 on the consoles is a poor imitation of the pc version). Pc gaming is also cheaper (I have spent less on my entire gamin
They've already made it clear that when the time is right they will GPL idtech5 (the rage engine, though ofc they never release the gamedata)
Any advantage the mouse/keyboard combo gave the PC (which was substantial) is shrinking; it nearly went away with the wiimote
WTF are you on? the wiimote sucks for anything other than sports/minigames,
MMORPG - forget having a complex worlds with different spells at your fingertips with just a few buttons
RTS - seriously no chance of playing anything but a simplified RTS with just a few buttons
FPS - you need an aimable area much bigger than that of a tv screen
shooters - timecrises/zombie flick/etc well these kind of work, but you never actually point to shoot, you move the crosshair about (but fundamentaly these DO work on the wii)
The other advantages of PC games are ofc: :- counter-strike, day of defeat, gary's mod
easy mods
better graphics - The id5tech engine will have to trade off fps for graphics quality on rage, on pc you get to set this yourself because high-end pcs can already
better bang for buck for hardware - Ok some specs are better on game systems when they are first released, but given that pcs can be upgraded and generally come with more than 512MB ram, if you spend $400 upgrading you system every 3/4 years (probably more often if you bought an xbox) you system would be far more powerful than any current gen system.
Free(ish) multiplayer gaming for most genres.
Better communities / multiplayer architecture for most genres - having dedicated servers, forums and admins, produces a much better gaming experience than xbox/wii/ps3-live ever can
All consoles really have is:
noob friendly (is that really a plus)
local multiplayer
unless of course obscure topics are not considered notable!
Remember this is some poor guy's life we are talking about here, so look it up in an actual book, not on something like Wikipedia. I really don't think asking them to open an actual book is too much to ask, do you?
But studies have shown that on non-disputed articles (you know the ones with tones of warning as the top), Wikipedia is more reliable than any other encyclopedia, so if its some poor guy's life you owe it to them to use Wikipedia (and check citations) over the alternatives. As its been shown that expert witnesses can't always be trusted (e.g cot death incident), it's up to the defense to find flaws in the prosecutions expert witnesses anyway be them errors caused by bias/Wikipedia/encyclopedia Britannica/the user manual for photoshop/etc
Facts don't make an expert, If the court wanted facts they could look them up in a book (or wikipedia). I'm doing a degree in chemistry and despite what some of my tutors think being able to recall the specific heat capacity of n2o is fairly useless, however being able to interpret the data to give you useful information is what experts do!
It's much harder for an atheist to blow himself up, killing innocent civilians and himself forever, than a theist! .'. the only sane course of action is to kill anybody that believes in an afterlives, just to be on the safe side.
b) requires cheap, easy tests and a change in attitude towards stds.
nope it merely takes a raw data-dump of a pen-drive and converts tables in that data dump to inode addresses according to an algorithm of its choosing, in no way does it deal with any of your so called "filesystems"!
Can't one have a Linux distribution without mono?
yes, very few programs use msjava.v2 (wouldn't want to infrindge any tradmarks by calling it mono), in fact very few distros ship with java and thats patent safe!
Incidentally, the more I hear of things like this, the better I can understand why so many Europeans think it's absurd that the USA has software patents at all.
Seriously i hope distros ship dumbed down "us versions" of packages to avoid stupid software patents, because i sure as hell don't give a flying fuck about infringing this patent in the UK. Once it's clear that software patents are hurting US companies, it wont take long for SIGs in congress to sort the problem out, and given the current economic climate bullying the EU to be as retarded as the US (in this respect, we sure as hell already are in other areas) isn't an option.
so its really good news, and more good news (unless you wanted to use the original good news to wank more) as better screening can help increase the pregnancy rate from IVF without filling people up and risking multiple births.
They pack plenty of eggs in there and still only get 30%-40%(if you trust numbers from US clinics selling IVF) and of those
In 2008, an analysis of the data of the National Birth Defects Study in the US found that certain birth defects were significantly more common in infants conceived with IVF, notably septal heart defects, cleft lip with or without cleft palate, esophageal atresia, and anorectal atresia; the mechanism of causality is unclear.
time for a back of the napkin calculation to not-really-but-sort-of prove my point:
10%*7(couldn't find a number for how many they fill you up with, so i made one up)*50%(other factors and multiple pregnancies counting as one) ~=30-40%
Isn't allowing guests this much access to the graphics card a terrible idea! Given that even the limited, well implemented, xbox360 hypervisor still let exploits slip through, implementing this must mitigates the security benefits of the VM. I'm under the impression that you used to needed elevated privileges on unix system to prevent potential exploits by executing code on the graphics card and modifying memory DMA and all that, over time it seems the potential for these exploits has got worse; graphics cards are pretty powerful and complex, graphics drivers are often buggy (and i assume porly vented for vulnerabilities), laptops are widespread and use the same memory as the OS, yet the protection has been dropped in favor of ease of use.
And if the above comments that they are using wine to get directx->opengl conversion, compatibility can't be better than wine anyway so it's unlikely that people will take a performance hit for compatibility that can't be much better.
disclaimer: I no next to nothing about graphics / virtual machines and not that much about security either tbh, so you are welcome to correct me...
sure, because nobody could edit wikipedia to cover for the fake moon landings!
I know one extreme christian that doesn't believe; in quantum mechanics, the big bang theory, evolution, etc, oddly i knew him because he was in all the top science/maths sets at highschool
How many such people actually exist?
Of course they don't exist, its something that Europeans (often posing as Americans) make up to make all Americans seam like idiots!
Drink lots of coffee - working that shift will turn you into a zombie. Coffee (and tobacco, not recommended) keep you alert, give you something to look forward to, and supress the appetite so you...
Why not drop a pill in the morning i hear its great for appetite too!
I do vouch for night jogs i don't even try and keep fit, but night jogs are pretty cool/peaceful if you live somewhere you can do them i definitely would recommended it (or for the lazier among us, long walks are also good 1-2hrs of wandering around a city is only fun at night)
You don't miss it until you've used it, when i was on (ms) windows i didn't really use windows at all they took too much space for boarders and most used so much space for menubars/toolbars that everything had to be run maximised, now between my moded firefox/kde i regularly have 3 or even 4 windows in use at once.
apt-cache show debdelta
Description: diff and patch utilities which work with Debian packages
debdelta is a program suite designed to compute changes between
Debian packages. These changes (debdeltas) are similar to the output of the
"diff" program in that they may be used to store and transmit only the
changes between Debian packages.
.
This suite contains 'debdelta-upgrade', that downloads debdeltas and use them
to create all Debian packages needed for an 'apt-get upgrade'.
It may be used in a Debian/unstable host (to speed up download of new
packages), or in a Debian/stable host (for security updates).
The thing is that what delta updates save in bandwidth they save in complexity and cpu power, apt-torrent is similar and hasn't really taken off. Even on fedora I got the impression that people weren't amazingly keen on using it.