Regular 3d uses approximations; 'if we have a spotlight here, and an item here, the shadow will look more or less like *this.*'
Raytracing actually 'traces' the 'rays' coming out of the light source, and bounces them off of things. So you get shadows on shadows, diffuse edges, all sorts of neat stuff. But, it's computationally very expensive, as you're tracing photons bouncing over all sorts of stuff, and the approximations are usually 'good enough' for games and what not.
In other news, the release date of Prey and Duke Nukem Forever have been pushed back, to allow the programmers time to incorporate support for this new technology into the engines.
Ah, but when you have one physical 'chip' that actually consists of four processor cores, you *can* do four simultanious tasks on one processor.
The advantage over good old fashioned SMP? Well, probably the interconnect is way faster, and if the cores all share some cache or something, sibling threads should see some benefit.
Exactly. The folks that he downloaded from, they're the ones doing the redistributing, and they're the ones breaking the law, would be the converse to this, I think.
I'll point out that, as a Soviet Chess champion during the cold war, he bloody well better be an expert of politics, and if he wasn't, he probably wouldn't be alive.
Your UNIX or UNIX-like OS most likely already has this amazing technology installed. The WORN drive is usually mounted as/dev/null; any of your standard file-manipulation tools should be able to move files to this time-saving device.
Shit, the thing I hated most about FFX is that you had to rotate your entire party, for one turn each, into each battle, to allow for XP parity.
Note to RPG developers: If you have more available chars than you have slots in your party, either assume that everybody's participating, and give the XP to everyone, or split the parties up and give them similar separate screen time. I seem to recall FFIX doing this, to some extent.
Better yet, allow the out-of-party members who are just kicking around to provide (appropriate) modifiers to the people in the party. Auron's not in the combat? Assume he's standing off to the side guarding. Yuna's not in battle? Assume she's off to one side, healing. Or something.
Well, first of all, who says it has to be lost? Give an option for the metadata to be transmitted separately, XML of course, cuz it's 2005, or tacked onto the end of the file, in some cases, ala id3 tags, or whatever.
Second, corp intranets, which is what this is primarily aimed at, probably aren't doing a whole lot of FTPing of internal documents.
Third, the existance of FTP and the like haven't stopped Apple's file system, or NTFS itself, from having things like resource streams.
I think it's good for all the same reasons that BeOS's metadata filesystem was good; the more metadata you can take out of the file format and put into the file descriptors, the better.
A, what? VoIP uses veddy veddy little bandwidth; it's quite doable over dialup, let alone broadband. The main concern is latency and jitter, not bandwidth.
A T1 should be able to support, well, at bare minimum, the 24 voice channels it really is. And VoIP takes less bandwidth than the 64 Kb/s those channels are using.
Now I'm not saying it sucks, but it's not a higher level of excellence. It's an older pc repackaged into a smaller box, with usb controllers, the first of which were halariously huge. Nothing higher level about it (for better or worse)
Why do people insist on comparing the Xbox to a PC? Compare it to it's market competitors; the GameCube and the PlayStation 2. Who the fuck CARES that it's a repacked PC? An average Xbox game still looks and sounds better than a top-flight PS2 or GC game, and that's the important part. Throwing in a hard drive, while it seems to us an obvious move, is a revolution in the console world. I still shudder at brand new, top-flight RPGs on the PS2 that have...save points.
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Yeah, that 'innocent until proven guilty' thing's a real bitch, ain't it?
Man, I'm glad I don't live in a country where you can't just throw unproven accusations around all willy-nilly.
Only in wartime.
'Twas a very simplified explanation; I'm sure there are technical details for both approaches I left out. Shadow maps, point sources, and so on.
Part of the problem is shuffling around the 50+ gigabyte scene files, the textures, and so on.
It's all about the light.
Regular 3d uses approximations; 'if we have a spotlight here, and an item here, the shadow will look more or less like *this.*'
Raytracing actually 'traces' the 'rays' coming out of the light source, and bounces them off of things. So you get shadows on shadows, diffuse edges, all sorts of neat stuff. But, it's computationally very expensive, as you're tracing photons bouncing over all sorts of stuff, and the approximations are usually 'good enough' for games and what not.
In other news, the release date of Prey and Duke Nukem Forever have been pushed back, to allow the programmers time to incorporate support for this new technology into the engines.
The Sega Saturn had two CPUs. The PS2 has multiple vector units that need to be dealt with, as I recall, in a multi-threaded fashion.
Ah, but when you have one physical 'chip' that actually consists of four processor cores, you *can* do four simultanious tasks on one processor.
The advantage over good old fashioned SMP? Well, probably the interconnect is way faster, and if the cores all share some cache or something, sibling threads should see some benefit.
Will there be an option to change the soundtrack to 'cheezy jazz with lots of keyboards?'
To be fair, exactly how many stances and moves can you usefully use with blades in a fixed position on the back of your hand?
Exactly. The folks that he downloaded from, they're the ones doing the redistributing, and they're the ones breaking the law, would be the converse to this, I think.
I'll point out that, as a Soviet Chess champion during the cold war, he bloody well better be an expert of politics, and if he wasn't, he probably wouldn't be alive.
Is Judaism the state-sponsered faith of Israel, or is Israel tha faith-sponsered state of Judaism?
Note that the Hauppauge PVR-150 is coming out at the end of the month, which appears to be nothing but a reengineered PVR-250.
The xbox has two other advantages; hard drive, and unified memory.
This means that textures can be stored on the HD, read into main memory, and there's no additional 'copy to the video RAM step.'
This is leaps/bounds over, say, the PS2, which wants you to be streaming textures, constantly, off of the DVD drive.
Your UNIX or UNIX-like OS most likely already has this amazing technology installed. The WORN drive is usually mounted as /dev/null; any of your standard file-manipulation tools should be able to move files to this time-saving device.
Probably the same amount that needed to be rewritten for Fat32, then for NTFS.
Shit, the thing I hated most about FFX is that you had to rotate your entire party, for one turn each, into each battle, to allow for XP parity.
Note to RPG developers: If you have more available chars than you have slots in your party, either assume that everybody's participating, and give the XP to everyone, or split the parties up and give them similar separate screen time. I seem to recall FFIX doing this, to some extent.
Better yet, allow the out-of-party members who are just kicking around to provide (appropriate) modifiers to the people in the party. Auron's not in the combat? Assume he's standing off to the side guarding. Yuna's not in battle? Assume she's off to one side, healing. Or something.
Well, first of all, who says it has to be lost? Give an option for the metadata to be transmitted separately, XML of course, cuz it's 2005, or tacked onto the end of the file, in some cases, ala id3 tags, or whatever.
Second, corp intranets, which is what this is primarily aimed at, probably aren't doing a whole lot of FTPing of internal documents.
Third, the existance of FTP and the like haven't stopped Apple's file system, or NTFS itself, from having things like resource streams.
I think it's good for all the same reasons that BeOS's metadata filesystem was good; the more metadata you can take out of the file format and put into the file descriptors, the better.
'Fishing' has been a fraud/con related term for a very long time now.
Well, if you're looking to 'copy' a file, there's not a whole lot of things you can name the command that are still going to make sense.
A, what? VoIP uses veddy veddy little bandwidth; it's quite doable over dialup, let alone broadband. The main concern is latency and jitter, not bandwidth.
A T1 should be able to support, well, at bare minimum, the 24 voice channels it really is. And VoIP takes less bandwidth than the 64 Kb/s those channels are using.
I'll admit I've not seen RE4. You'll probably admit you've never seen Ninja Gaiden, any of the DOA games, off the top of my head.
Why do people insist on comparing the Xbox to a PC? Compare it to it's market competitors; the GameCube and the PlayStation 2. Who the fuck CARES that it's a repacked PC? An average Xbox game still looks and sounds better than a top-flight PS2 or GC game, and that's the important part. Throwing in a hard drive, while it seems to us an obvious move, is a revolution in the console world. I still shudder at brand new, top-flight RPGs on the PS2 that have...save points.