I've strongly considered this myself, but it has one major drawback: For the most part, all of the realtime preview rendering I want will have the same renderer as the in-game renderer these days.
This means I'd have to port the renderer to Java, as opposed to just throwing the classes into the new program. The difference is fairly significant.
I'm thinking a workaround would be to create a 'preview app' which could accept certain parameters over a socket, and the java program would communicate with the C++ program to get the realtime rendering done that way.
Everyone talks about 3DFX and Nvidia from their vicarious marketing experience, which usually ends up being on the PC, because that's where people are using their systems. However, no one seems to realise that 3DFX supplied the graphics hardware for arcade machines as well. Does anyone know what is happening on that front?
3DFX had a bigger market than the PC.
As a side note, does anyone else think that Nvidia needs new spin doctors? What the hell is an 'N' Vidia, or a 'G' (e)force. It just sounds bad to me.
Furthermore, what happens when we run out of high-testosterone burning, exploding and speedy names for video cards?:)
Speaking of digging ditches, check out the shopping cart at PondSolutions.com These guys actually make you calculate your own tax and everything, for each item separately before you purchase!
I am of the understanding that Id Software won't let you use Radiant to create works for any engine, comerically, unless you have a license to do so. This is defined in the license agreement of the program, I also believe. (I'd check, but I don't have it installed)
Perhaps money should either be a reward for nothing, or for everything. Anything in the middle, and the decisions people make in their life will be guided by money. If, however, you create something artistically and no matter what the medium is you get paid, then money has not influenced your decision to create what it is you are going to create.
As someone who is very pressed for time and needs to stay focused, it would be good to throw away all the money making activities and work on the art that I would love to spend all my time on. This is not possible as it doesn't make me any money, currently.
John Carmack said, to paraphrase, the PC Gaming market is experimental. Patches for games are released, and bleeding edge features are attempted.
Think back to buggy console games. I can think of a few times over the period of my entire life that I have trashed a console game. One was Sonic The Hedgehog 2 on the Sega Genesis,where I walked into a wall, and the game froze. The other was Bigfoot on the Nintendo, where I didn't freeze the game,but I was able to win even though I had less money(score? can't remember) by pressing start on the final tally screen before the adding was done.
In both cases, and especially Bigfoot's, there would probably be an Internet patch.
Most likely, games will be designed for the PC still, and when all the bugs have been ironed out and the games prove to be good on the market, we'll be seeing Sony and Microsoft trying to bug these companies to port their games- Most likely Microsoft with their marketing strategy promoting that they have easy to port hardware.
Call me a conspiracy theorist, but I do believe that MS will end up making developers sign NDAs that stops them from talking about their porting experiences. I really do not think a moving target like DirectX will stay compatible with the PC stuff forever.
And I do not see something as low-level as the DirectX APIs making the entire system easy to program bug-free innovative games. Perhaps something like Nintendo did with the N64, where it SEEMS they gave a 3D engine to all the developers, and they worked with it.
Take a look at Mario 64 and then take a look at Mario Kart. Same engine, different controls. How's that for programming for a non-moving target? Try that, Microsoft.
It's long been the mindset of a lot of people that having a strong competitor in your marketspace creates higher quality products in order to compete. Not always so. Case in point: This article. Instead of creating higher quality products, Intel creates a shittier one.
How much do you want to bet that marketing (which should be latin for as much for as little as possible- but isn't) would opt to rush products out the door instead of getting some actual meat into what is being released?
The same would happen with Linux if it were doing as well commerically against Windows as AMD was against Microsoft. Microsoft would be releasing versions of their software earlier, and doing seemingly whatever it can to make money without higher quality products.
Open Source is a trademarked word, and there are a few people who stand behind the coined term in order to enhance their position is this meritocracy we have.
At what point is this assertion libelous? They didn't slander any human beings in particular, but people have associated themselves very closely with the "Open Source Movement". I'm fairly certain that Open Source is a registered trademark.
I'm no lawyer, but i would be interested to know when there is a case.
Mr. Torvalds coordinates Linux in a somewhat detached manner.
He concerns himself only with intricate, technical details of Linux,
and won't take a stand on such issues as what sort of user
interface the software should have.
That is one reason there are now two rival Linux interfaces. Mr.
Torvalds also has no support staff; in fact, he doesn't even have
a secretary.
Mr. Torvalds defended his habits. He said, for example, that not
selecting an "official" Linux user interface allows the best one to
emerge through competition.
I don't think I've seen someone throw Linuses secretary preferences in the middle of a Gnome/KDE
discussion before.
Re:That wasn't the carmack we know..
on
New Doom Details
·
· Score: 3
Hmm, i well remember the whole discussion about virtual machines, code security, mods running on different platforms without recompilation,
etc... what happened to that? apart from it: can you imagine ID coding something in c++ ? I've yet to see something even vaguely OO from
carmack.
I'm actually surprised that this hadn't happened sooner. When you look at the massive potential for spaghetti code in the Quake engine, the man has to be commended for being on top of the entire engine for all this time. When id originally chose ANSI C for Quake, they said they did so for "speed and portability."
Anyway, with the size of today's engines, you could see how this could make sense. Also, take note of how Carmack said they have 'a good sound programmer', and 'a good AI programmer.' Sounds OO like to me.
Do you remember the leaked audio-interview from pre-q3 days? Carmack basically said, that single-player games suck from a
money/replayability point of view. He even said that he wouldn't start a sp-game nowadays, because of the ever growing development time.
(and could only be done right with a _massive_ devteam)
All I can think about here is that Carmack is going to take two years to code this new engine from scratch, which means that even if the dev tools aren't interactive for six months, there's a lot of time to create a new game with.
- The game and editor/tools are now combined. You'll be able to simply type doom.exe -editor for example (Or maybe even an in-game toggle)
Alright. This is wierd. However, it's a natural progression. If we have ingame editing, most likely we won't be using BSP trees anymore, or perhaps we will turn culling off when we walk around. I think such a thing could be handled as a mod in the game. It just makes more sense than some win32 app that has completely different requirements than the game itself.
I'm a geek. I sysadmin a network, and rare is the day that goes by that I don't write some code. Other people have made profit off my code, and so have I. My code is running in production situations, and a lot of it gets used 20,000 times a day.
And yet, I don't see the point of a sysadmin appreciation day. There is nothing unsung about being a geek, anymore. Ever since Open Source became a coined trademark, geeks have been the trendy thing to be. Ever see any of those banner ads on slashdot? They are marketing to an image that I accredit ESR for hyping. Certainly, geeks were around before that image, and they will be around after everyone gets as tired as I am with it.
But sysadmins are NOT unsung. Anyone willing to disclose the amount of money they make as a sysadmin?
We can be more than what "our" culture defines us to be.
I agree with what you said. However, I'm a long-time FPS player, and I've put in more hours in Doom than any other game in existence, and I have to say I disagree with cheating being boring. Cheating doesn't always give an absolute guarantee of winning. Sometimes, it just gives a player an unfair advantage.
Such is the case of the Doom cheat that was put in by Id Software. Any version of Doom before the final release 1.9 had a cheat in it that allowed you to see where your opponent was on the map. If you hit TAB and held down the left ALT key and typed 'IDDTIDDTIDDT', you would have this advantage. I know of a local hardcore player who used it quite often, and he ended up SLAUGHTERING everyone who wasn't really quick at finding a weapon after they respawned. However, they still had a chance, and in many cases, he was outgunned.
PS. I seem to remember the changelog that ID released with 1.9 saying something along the lines of "miscellaneous soundcard fixes"... it was never publically admitted that there was a multiplayer cheat in the game all along.:) I'd actually like to know why this cheat was in a commercial game... heh.
This design shows a very direct bias to Direct3D over OpenGL. Direct3D allows you to copy your textures to the video card, and remove them from system memory. However, OpenGL is not the same. You must keep a copy in system memory.
Considering Quake 3 currently can use up to 32 megs in your video card, that doesn't leave much room for much else.
There's a bit of a political issue. I'm only interested in supporting games that run under Linux with my hard earned dollar. This way, I can play Linux games in the future. This is common sense and logical in theory, but in reality, it takes some actual willpower.
I will warez and borrow Windows-only games, and purchase them when they become available under Linux.
I have two ideas, but no the time to implement them, for a while yet.
First, we need an impulsive way for artists to contribute graphics to a project. To say artists won't release their work for free is folly; I've been following a number of Quake texture sites around, looking for stuff that could be used in the version of my game that is cost-free and comes with the level editor.
I propose that something like CVS for artists is created. This would have a very simple web interface (because we want a large audience), and it would have the ability to let artists upload images. These images would go into a queue which would be checked by people in the project, and would either be put into the rejected folder (with a reason attached, hopefully), or accepted into the game project.
This would be useful to track ownership of art back to the person. Perhaps in a larger system, something like the slashdot system could be implemented.
My second innovation is game-evolution. It would be possible to have a client/server type system for an RPG where the storyline unfolds based on data sent from the server, whether it be in-game scripting or dialog. This dialog would be rewritten from time to time by the programmers, and the storyline would change- perhaps on player's input, or be added to. People would use the open source client to connect to this server, which could charge on a per-service basis.
I don't like the idea of converting something that works fine into something client/server so you can charge for it on a per-use basis, but it does deem interesting to me to have value added options.
This would rock on the PC, where our bus speeds are slowly reaching 133mhz. If you could send the data compressed across the bus, that is.
Avoiding the low PC bus speeds are what 3D cards do best. You only upload the textures, and then you just send the vertices of the polygons across every time. Hell, some newer cards are even doing the calculations on some of the vertices once they've made the jump across the bus.
This also holds true for DVD decoders.
I wonder how viable hardware decompression is? Would it be a catch all solution for (low end) replacements for all these avert-the-PC-bus hardware cards? Admittedly, I'm not in touch with any relevant benchmarks to this sort of stuff these days.
Slashdot uses a particularly hard version of banner ads to stop with junkbuster (internet.junkbuster.com) because they are coming from images.slashdot.org just like the icons.
If you want to get rid of them, add this to your sblock.ini:
images.slashdot.org ~images.slashdot.org/topics
The '~' negates whatever proceeds it. In this case, you are allowed to view images.slashdot.org/topics.
Alright, I like the free distribution of music. I use it for good and responsibly, and I am disgusted with the mentality that we have to live life by the lowest common denominator: People who pirate music that they would have otherwise bought. In society, this happens in a lot of circumstances. We need traffic lights because we would all demand the right of way. We have to wait in line to buy food because we can't trust anyone to throw the correct amount of money into a basket. This is the motherfucking Internet, and there is an ever expanding amount of people who find their way to download mp3s. If we lived our life by the lowest common denominator, we'd be living a lot lower than we would in our society, as our homeland cultures don't define the status quo here. Having said all that shit, I feel I must point out an interesting way to damage people who pirate mp3s, though I hope it doesn't happen. If people recorded mp3s at 5% of what it would take for the audio to get clipped (max volume), people who play the music would turn up their speakers to listen to the mp3. With the song being 85% done, crank up the volume in your mp3 to 100%. This will blow people's eardrums, headphones and speakers up and out. Of course, this would only exist in an arms race situation, because software would start checking for big jumps in volume, and warn users after they've downloaded the file. Come to think of it, do mp3s have a footer in the file spec? It would be pretty good to be able to tell if a file is chopped off. It seems Napster is falling victim to mp3s devolving to the point where they're uselessly short with the ends cut off, as the downloads get cut short. Bottom line is, mp3s shouldn't play properly, or you should be able to check for the existence of a footer to tell if your mp3 is cut off.
Slashdot Mirror
I've strongly considered this myself, but it has one major drawback: For the most part, all of the realtime preview rendering I want will have the same renderer as the in-game renderer these days.
This means I'd have to port the renderer to Java, as opposed to just throwing the classes into the new program. The difference is fairly significant.
I'm thinking a workaround would be to create a 'preview app' which could accept certain parameters over a socket, and the java program would communicate with the C++ program to get the realtime rendering done that way.
Everyone talks about 3DFX and Nvidia from their vicarious marketing experience, which usually ends up being on the PC, because that's where people are using their systems. However, no one seems to realise that 3DFX supplied the graphics hardware for arcade machines as well. Does anyone know what is happening on that front?
:)
3DFX had a bigger market than the PC.
As a side note, does anyone else think that Nvidia needs new spin doctors? What the hell is an 'N' Vidia, or a 'G' (e)force. It just sounds bad to me.
Furthermore, what happens when we run out of high-testosterone burning, exploding and speedy names for video cards?
You're far more likely to get someone to run and distribute the floppy disk version than you are to get someone to type in the code.
Considering your additude is condescending, you seem to think that I don't understand this.
In this case, why in the hell would I be pointing out the "2-bit amateur shopping cart" in the first place?
Blow.
Speaking of digging ditches, check out the shopping cart at PondSolutions.com These guys actually make you calculate your own tax and everything, for each item separately before you purchase!
I am of the understanding that Id Software won't let you use Radiant to create works for any engine, comerically, unless you have a license to do so. This is defined in the license agreement of the program, I also believe. (I'd check, but I don't have it installed)
Perhaps money should either be a reward for nothing, or for everything. Anything in the middle, and the decisions people make in their life will be guided by money. If, however, you create something artistically and no matter what the medium is you get paid, then money has not influenced your decision to create what it is you are going to create.
As someone who is very pressed for time and needs to stay focused, it would be good to throw away all the money making activities and work on the art that I would love to spend all my time on. This is not possible as it doesn't make me any money, currently.
John Carmack said, to paraphrase, the PC Gaming market is experimental. Patches for games are released, and bleeding edge features are attempted.
Think back to buggy console games. I can think of a few times over the period of my entire life that I have trashed a console game. One was Sonic The Hedgehog 2 on the Sega Genesis,where I walked into a wall, and the game froze. The other was Bigfoot on the Nintendo, where I didn't freeze the game,but I was able to win even though I had less money(score? can't remember) by pressing start on the final tally screen before the adding was done.
In both cases, and especially Bigfoot's, there would probably be an Internet patch.
Most likely, games will be designed for the PC still, and when all the bugs have been ironed out and the games prove to be good on the market, we'll be seeing Sony and Microsoft trying to bug these companies to port their games- Most likely Microsoft with their marketing strategy promoting that they have easy to port hardware.
Call me a conspiracy theorist, but I do believe that MS will end up making developers sign NDAs that stops them from talking about their porting experiences. I really do not think a moving target like DirectX will stay compatible with the PC stuff forever.
And I do not see something as low-level as the DirectX APIs making the entire system easy to program bug-free innovative games. Perhaps something like Nintendo did with the N64, where it SEEMS they gave a 3D engine to all the developers, and they worked with it.
Take a look at Mario 64 and then take a look at Mario Kart. Same engine, different controls. How's that for programming for a non-moving target? Try that, Microsoft.
It's long been the mindset of a lot of people that having a strong competitor in your marketspace creates higher quality products in order to compete. Not always so. Case in point: This article. Instead of creating higher quality products, Intel creates a shittier one.
How much do you want to bet that marketing (which should be latin for as much for as little as possible- but isn't) would opt to rush products out the door instead of getting some actual meat into what is being released?
The same would happen with Linux if it were doing as well commerically against Windows as AMD was against Microsoft. Microsoft would be releasing versions of their software earlier, and doing seemingly whatever it can to make money without higher quality products.
Open Source is a trademarked word, and there are a few people who stand behind the coined term in order to enhance their position is this meritocracy we have.
At what point is this assertion libelous? They didn't slander any human beings in particular, but people have associated themselves very closely with the "Open Source Movement". I'm fairly certain that Open Source is a registered trademark. I'm no lawyer, but i would be interested to know when there is a case.
Mr. Torvalds coordinates Linux in a somewhat detached manner. He concerns himself only with intricate, technical details of Linux, and won't take a stand on such issues as what sort of user interface the software should have.
That is one reason there are now two rival Linux interfaces. Mr. Torvalds also has no support staff; in fact, he doesn't even have a secretary.
Mr. Torvalds defended his habits. He said, for example, that not selecting an "official" Linux user interface allows the best one to emerge through competition.
I don't think I've seen someone throw Linuses secretary preferences in the middle of a Gnome/KDE discussion before.
I'm actually surprised that this hadn't happened sooner. When you look at the massive potential for spaghetti code in the Quake engine, the man has to be commended for being on top of the entire engine for all this time. When id originally chose ANSI C for Quake, they said they did so for "speed and portability." Anyway, with the size of today's engines, you could see how this could make sense. Also, take note of how Carmack said they have 'a good sound programmer', and 'a good AI programmer.' Sounds OO like to me.
All I can think about here is that Carmack is going to take two years to code this new engine from scratch, which means that even if the dev tools aren't interactive for six months, there's a lot of time to create a new game with.
Alright. This is wierd. However, it's a natural progression. If we have ingame editing, most likely we won't be using BSP trees anymore, or perhaps we will turn culling off when we walk around. I think such a thing could be handled as a mod in the game. It just makes more sense than some win32 app that has completely different requirements than the game itself.
Kind of like slashdot... when they post the same story twice with banner ads at the top... :)
Just kidding Taco, we love you!
I'm a geek. I sysadmin a network, and rare is the day that goes by that I don't write some code. Other people have made profit off my code, and so have I. My code is running in production situations, and a lot of it gets used 20,000 times a day.
And yet, I don't see the point of a sysadmin appreciation day. There is nothing unsung about being a geek, anymore. Ever since Open Source became a coined trademark, geeks have been the trendy thing to be. Ever see any of those banner ads on slashdot? They are marketing to an image that I accredit ESR for hyping. Certainly, geeks were around before that image, and they will be around after everyone gets as tired as I am with it.
But sysadmins are NOT unsung. Anyone willing to disclose the amount of money they make as a sysadmin?
We can be more than what "our" culture defines us to be.
I agree with what you said. However, I'm a long-time FPS player, and I've put in more hours in Doom than any other game in existence, and I have to say I disagree with cheating being boring. Cheating doesn't always give an absolute guarantee of winning. Sometimes, it just gives a player an unfair advantage.
:) I'd actually like to know why this cheat was in a commercial game... heh.
Such is the case of the Doom cheat that was put in by Id Software. Any version of Doom before the final release 1.9 had a cheat in it that allowed you to see where your opponent was on the map. If you hit TAB and held down the left ALT key and typed 'IDDTIDDTIDDT', you would have this advantage. I know of a local hardcore player who used it quite often, and he ended up SLAUGHTERING everyone who wasn't really quick at finding a weapon after they respawned. However, they still had a chance, and in many cases, he was outgunned.
PS. I seem to remember the changelog that ID released with 1.9 saying something along the lines of "miscellaneous soundcard fixes"... it was never publically admitted that there was a multiplayer cheat in the game all along.
I think they should call the new Perl version gperl2, just so they can follow suit with the confusing libc5->glibc2 shift.
This design shows a very direct bias to Direct3D over OpenGL. Direct3D allows you to copy your textures to the video card, and remove them from system memory. However, OpenGL is not the same. You must keep a copy in system memory.
Considering Quake 3 currently can use up to 32 megs in your video card, that doesn't leave much room for much else.
There's a bit of a political issue. I'm only interested in supporting games that run under Linux with my hard earned dollar. This way, I can play Linux games in the future. This is common sense and logical in theory, but in reality, it takes some actual willpower.
I will warez and borrow Windows-only games, and purchase them when they become available under Linux.
It's a tossup for me: do I wait to see if the expoits continue in the sequel, or do I rush out and buy it so I can play before the cheats come out?
Oh what, Windows only, you say? Cough. I don't pay money to reboot.
I have two ideas, but no the time to implement them, for a while yet.
First, we need an impulsive way for artists to contribute graphics to a project. To say artists won't release their work for free is folly; I've been following a number of Quake texture sites around, looking for stuff that could be used in the version of my game that is cost-free and comes with the level editor.
I propose that something like CVS for artists is created. This would have a very simple web interface (because we want a large audience), and it would have the ability to let artists upload images. These images would go into a queue which would be checked by people in the project, and would either be put into the rejected folder (with a reason attached, hopefully), or accepted into the game project.
This would be useful to track ownership of art back to the person. Perhaps in a larger system, something like the slashdot system could be implemented.
My second innovation is game-evolution. It would be possible to have a client/server type system for an RPG where the storyline unfolds based on data sent from the server, whether it be in-game scripting or dialog. This dialog would be rewritten from time to time by the programmers, and the storyline would change- perhaps on player's input, or be added to. People would use the open source client to connect to this server, which could charge on a per-service basis.
I don't like the idea of converting something that works fine into something client/server so you can charge for it on a per-use basis, but it does deem interesting to me to have value added options.
Add the following two lines to your sblock.ini if you're a junkbuster user (internet.junkbuster.com):
images.slashdot.org
(at the bottom...)
~images.slashdot.org/topics
This would rock on the PC, where our bus speeds are slowly reaching 133mhz. If you could send the data compressed across the bus, that is.
Avoiding the low PC bus speeds are what 3D cards do best. You only upload the textures, and then you just send the vertices of the polygons across every time. Hell, some newer cards are even doing the calculations on some of the vertices once they've made the jump across the bus.
This also holds true for DVD decoders.
I wonder how viable hardware decompression is? Would it be a catch all solution for (low end) replacements for all these avert-the-PC-bus hardware cards? Admittedly, I'm not in touch with any relevant benchmarks to this sort of stuff these days.
Slashdot uses a particularly hard version of banner ads to stop with junkbuster (internet.junkbuster.com) because they are coming from images.slashdot.org just like the icons.
If you want to get rid of them, add this to your sblock.ini:
images.slashdot.org
~images.slashdot.org/topics
The '~' negates whatever proceeds it. In this case, you are allowed to view images.slashdot.org/topics.
Alright, I like the free distribution of music. I use it for good and responsibly, and I am disgusted with the mentality that we have to live life by the lowest common denominator: People who pirate music that they would have otherwise bought. In society, this happens in a lot of circumstances. We need traffic lights because we would all demand the right of way. We have to wait in line to buy food because we can't trust anyone to throw the correct amount of money into a basket. This is the motherfucking Internet, and there is an ever expanding amount of people who find their way to download mp3s. If we lived our life by the lowest common denominator, we'd be living a lot lower than we would in our society, as our homeland cultures don't define the status quo here. Having said all that shit, I feel I must point out an interesting way to damage people who pirate mp3s, though I hope it doesn't happen. If people recorded mp3s at 5% of what it would take for the audio to get clipped (max volume), people who play the music would turn up their speakers to listen to the mp3. With the song being 85% done, crank up the volume in your mp3 to 100%. This will blow people's eardrums, headphones and speakers up and out. Of course, this would only exist in an arms race situation, because software would start checking for big jumps in volume, and warn users after they've downloaded the file. Come to think of it, do mp3s have a footer in the file spec? It would be pretty good to be able to tell if a file is chopped off. It seems Napster is falling victim to mp3s devolving to the point where they're uselessly short with the ends cut off, as the downloads get cut short. Bottom line is, mp3s shouldn't play properly, or you should be able to check for the existence of a footer to tell if your mp3 is cut off.
Don't worry, we're going to see Halo renamed to Microsoft Gun.