No kidding. I was nearly pulling my hair out when I was trying to get things working under both X11 and DirectX, and had all sorts of messy implementation layers and whatnot, and the ugliness of it all still makes me physically cringe.
Then I tried SDL out, and I think the first words out of my mouth were "SOMEONE GOT IT RIGHT!" Had the whole layer ported to SDL in about 30-40 minutes and it worked like a charm. My only qualms now really only deal with poor file i/o (no directory support) and lack of decent WM functions.
Rereading that makes it sound like a religious experience, or a really horrible advertisement. May have been.;)
The main complaint I hear about a lack of a DirectX equivalent is that sound has quite some ways to go, and there are no rendering functions for SDL. Audio is looking more and more like OpenAL will be the way to go, and if I ever finish my current work I'll probably try to work on rectifying the renderlib. (Like I'll ever get around to that. Heh.)
I doubt Maelstrom was all that difficult. But porting any game really has more or less the same problems, and it also depends on how the game is written.
The main detail when porting any game is to make sure anything that is system specific; that is, input/output code, is heavily abstracted. If abstraction layers already exist, it is fairly easy to add in new code. If they don't, then it's still not all that difficult to split out the code and rewrite it.
Descent didn't have proper abstraction, mainly since the code was a mess. It is still not a terrible lot of work to go through abstraction, because most of it is just mad grepping and replacing.
Other problems include endianness (usually not hard to compensate for; just stuff some macros or defines to byteswap things on load), and word size. And let's not forget depending on large protocols, like D3D, that don't exist in other operating systems.
On the whole, though, no, it would not be more work to start over than it would have been to port. Writing a game is a LOT harder than rewriting graphics and interface code. I should know.
1024x768 at, say, 32bpp is 3.1MB. About 50MB per second if you get 16fps. This really doesn't sound like alot, until you consider that you're blitting to the buffer as well -and- you sit around waiting on the bus to 'flip' the buffer; and the bus is an awful lot slower than direct memory access.
You can get around this by using a hardware buffer and hardware surfaces, but you're stuck with using just images and usually color key that way; no primitives for the time being, and alpha blend isn't always supported in hardware.
As far as full screen page flipping goes, you need to use a hardware surface. You won't always get one; check the flags on the surface that is returned. May also need SDL_DOUBLEBUF, it's been awhile since I messed with that.
It's a buffering layer with access to acceleration when necessary. There are other libraries that assist it for the actual, well, game stuff.
SDL pretty much does all this:
Handles the video buffer, as well as GL contexts
Image blitting, with alpha (this does not include loading/saving)
Keyboard, mouse, and joystick input
A threaded audio buffer ('pull' model)
Limited CD access
Timers
File i/o handlers
Accelerates any of the above when applicable.
Probably a few I've forgotten.
This really isn't a game development library by itself: There are no image loaders, nor are there any image rotation/flip code, nor are there.. well, alot of things you'd need for a 2D game. There are other, supplemental libraries for this:
SDL_image - A wide assortment of image loaders. Nothing to save with, though.
SDL_mixer - Libmikmod, smpeg, ogg vorbis, and timidity. In other words, plays every sound file known to man, links into the audio buffer.
SDL_net - Portable networking library (haven't tested it myself)
There are also a few rendering and UI libraries in the works. There may even be a few finished, I'm really not sure. But, if you're going to use SDL for game development, don't expect it to do _everything._
But if you're developing one, it's probably better to get your hands dirty and learn how to do the rendering stuff yourself anyway. It's not really all that hard: I've got a bunch in mine. Digging out Abrash's book, which was recently posted here, should help with some of the other renderers (polygonal, bresenham, etc.) that are fairly interesting.
Nope, doesn't work that way. I've watched my share of internet communities collapse upon themselves, and usually it's either from the current userbase being too obstinate from their own views in the face of new folk (which turns it into a constant, neverending state of collapse where the old fogies are on a steady stream out as quickly as the new come in.. Which sounds good, but it's not: One long soap opera of headaches, which causes the new to generally not know what's going on and slowly stop trickling in as overall quality degrades), or a complete lack of any new blood. (The Internet tends to do a number on communities in 'net time. Go figure.)
Everything seems to be heading in the way of the former. Particularly after I sat down and looked in at the high ranked / 'cool' stuff: It all fit the stereotype, quality be damned. I think OOG down below summed everything up quite nicely about it.
Besides.. if your premise were true, it would _already_ be true as it isn't exactly small potatoes: There's already a fairly large userbase and people coming/going quite a lot. (Not to mention, it's not like slashdot's moderation has greatly improved things with the larger user base over time, now has it?)
Adding more editors does not fix things if they just stick to what they already perceive as good -- which is how more editors are added. You end up with a self-perpetuating cycle of fulfilling the status quo in order to change it, which means if you're not of it you won't get it, which doesn't change the status quo. Hmm, effective at updating, isn't it?
It's all a matter of perspective, of course: What is 'low quality'? What is 'high quality'? You'll never please everyone, and a system like E2s tries to reorganize itself to the people that use it. Unfortunately, it looks to me like it's a little too intolerant to change.
Oh well. I fully expect to be flamed to death over this one...
Yamauchi is, as usual, hostile towards the gaming industry. With good right to be! But he's missing what the actual problem is with the games themselves.
It's not the developers that are out there. You can have plenty of really highly talented developers and not a designer among 'em. Game designers are among the rarest breed in gaming anymore. If you don't believe me, take a look around: Lots of programmers, lots of good graphics, lots of good audio. Crappy games. (Judging from my poking around happypenguin, OSS suffers from it worse than the gaming industry, so don't give me any crap about how we'll all be saved by the GPL. Just 'cause you can code doesn't mean you can design.)
That isn't to say Nintendo's really good at it. They have alot of crap included with their quality games. The last few I seriously played were F-Zero and Super Metroid, which I actually still pull out once in awhile. Most of their new stuff has been, frankly, boring.
The thing is, everyone _is_ focused on graphics and atmosphere and this so-called 'immersiveness' which everyone hails. It's all a joke. None of it actually exists: The atmosphere gets you into it immediately, but it is the quality of the game that keeps you coming back. Half-Life is extremely overrated because of this, IMO.
That's not to say it can't be done well.. Alice took atmosphere to its logical extreme, much in the way R-Type took repetition to its own. Both were very good for what they did, even if the latter was a much better game (among the best IMNSHO!) overall. (And while I'm at it: Squaresoft's Xenogears took storyline in games to a whole new level.)
So what really is a fun game? It is a game where going through the motions, the controls, whatever about it can be considered fun in some way. But more than that: There has to be little limit on what can be done with it in the long run. (If you poke around Doom is still having time records being beaten, simply due to the sheer variable difficulty and variable goals that the player can impose upon himself) Giving incentive to doing that can also be helpful.. It extends replay value for a long time to come. (R-Type Delta had things you could unlock the more goals you accomplished.. some of the more obscure are nigh impossible)
So, the question is, what do you do about it? Educate them? It could work, but it has to be done well and professionally. A site dedicated to exploring it and doing it right (ala gamasutra, but without the tendency towards tech) could be greatly beneficial. I know I'd be willing to assist in that.
And now I'm getting incoherent, which means I really should get some more caffeine into my diet.
Anyway, Tran aka Thomas Pytel's been kind of staying away from the public eye as code goes. I suppose the slow death of the demo scene got to him... Heh. Last thing I managed to dig up was that he did art for a 1998 game that looks an awful lot like souped up Z66: (Still need to try it myself) Axia
Finding any more information is pretty difficult. Web searches tend to come up with bajillions of links to their pmode/w dos extender, along with "We use this!" from other demo groups or whatnot. Most likely thing was him listed as a runner in the cherry festival in '98. (Number 669, of course. I think that's just coincidence and probably isn't him.)
As far as the rest of Renaissance goes CC Catch is the only other one I managed to dig up something on. (Some of his old mods can be found on Mod Archive. One even has his email address in the comments!) There's been a track of his called 'Ephemeral Wanderer'(I think?) that's been floating around.
Here's a man who spent ten years of his life standing up for what he believed to be a genuine problem, didn't sell out, and managed to get the momentum rolling for the world to solve this problem. And the media turns on him because this worked too well.
And what do I hear on slashdot? "It was a hoax." "We would have been better off saving months of productivity by not fixing it." "This was a scam that ruined the market." "Nothing was publicized as wrong in less technically inclined areas(according to standard American ignorance of other countries) so therefore it was all a big con." And so on.
Hasn't anyone learned yet that gaming magazines have sucked for the past six years? Computer Gaming World was nice before Ziff-Davis bought it up, then down the hole it went!
This list has some good choices and many bad. Influential is a hard word to pin down: I'd like to believe it means a game that spawned many of the cliches for a genre or outright made one themselves.
Going down the list... Wing Commander still has its claws on space sims now: Whilst the storyline has slowly been removed over time, the gameplay style has been the same. This isn't technically a good thing, as any game after WC1 lost strategy and basically got to 'Get the lead indicator in your reticle and shoot.' At least games like Terminus went past that.
Ultima 3 I can't disagree with, although I think U4 was better about it. Can't disagree with Alone.
Ultima Online? It was the first 'massive multiplayer' game simply because it had the funding and marketing for it. Otherwise it's essentially a big MUD, and a poorly designed one at that. (That Evercrack is another poorly designed one is of no surprise, so I guess you could say the influence is there.) I cannot disagree too much, but this is another influence I wish we'd get away from.
Tomb Raider? Yay. It's third person. It's 3d. It had mass market appeal for no apparent reason whatsoever besides topheaviness. It must be influential. Cultural, indeed. Even they state that it had been done before on consoles, they were just the first for the pc.
Falcon I can't comment on. SimCity is unarguable in its influence, although clones are far and wide, despite its influence towards today's realtime 'strategy' games. (I don't know why that wasn't mentioned there... It's there if you look.)
HALF-LIFE?!?!?? Uck. Half-Life was Quake with a litshoad of scripting and movie sequences. I guess all I can say about it is that it was one of the first to bring things to mass market appeal; most of what had happened there had been done before and done better under less popular games.
Can't disagree with Civ.
Diablo? There have been virtually no spinoffs of Diablo, it hasn't influenced any of the RPGs out there now, and it was a cheap ripoff of nethack (Blizzard admits this) in the first place. This doesn't deserve a spot.
Dune 2. Yup, and RTSes haven't changed all that much since. KQ4? I thought Lucasart's were better and more influential towards adventure games on the whole, but oh well. Myst is a big'un, but there haven't been many offshoots so much as staking out a genre for itself.
Doom. Can't argue there; Doom is the one that brought actual levels of 3d (well, 2.5d if you ask me) to games. It was a real eye opener, and all id games following it were the same, only lamer.
Quake brought multiplayer and scriptability to a new level, as well as the console. You can see every one of these in every FPS since.
And that's that. It's kind of sad how few genres there really are these days when you look at it. Not many have really been brought to view; I can think of a few games that deserved spots that are still around today. Oh well.. Flame away on my opinions.;)
Oh, the days of type-in games.. I had an Atari 800 (upgraded to a 130xe when the thing imploded on itself) and I had all sorts of cool magazines (which I stupidly gave to someone who I never saw again in my lifetime) for it. Compute!, Antic, etc. Ahh, the memories..
I gotta admit, though, the Atari 800 emulator I had to dig up worked surprisingly well. Even the old antic music program worked great. (Some of you may remember Shock the Monkey being played on four channel square wave synth. I made an mp3 of it!) What's really sad is I actually remembered a great deal of atari basic and the various memory locations to peek/poke at. =)
Oh, you mean the so-called 'communities' that Katz's standard pseudo-intellectual ramble was about? Yup, that's a pretty accurate description. Business is trying to turn the Internet into one big shopping mall. Look over there! A plastic fern! They invade EVEN HERE! *sob*
Aaaanyway, communities are a long way from dead on the internet. But they will stagnate and pretty much degrade to reaction ("Hi!" "How are you?" "Fine, you?" "Fine! What's new?" "Nothing. You?" "Same!" {end of conversation}) without anything to _do_. Many communities that exist only for communication or whatever quite literally die out after awhile. Many that originally _did_ do things but fell into idle and decadence did the same. I've seen it happen on a number of occasions.
The so-called 'community' that many internet businesses build try and keep things as impersonal as possible. Sometimes they build into something more, usually they don't. Sometimes they build into personal things, then go right through the other side with nothing more to talk about and fall apart. (See above) At least IRC channels induce some level of personality into the people there; It's not just casual folk, there's a sort of hierarchy of people in each and every channel.
This is why things like muds/moos/m*'s and everquest and things like that will probably make the best communities. People are there to _do_ something, and that's what binds them together. There could be many differing views, but they all share that in common. So there is some homogeneousness in it.. Whoopee, that's to be expected on the Internet. Things are chopped apart by lines of interest, not geographical reasons. This is neither good nor bad, though, as it means there is less incentive to try or visit something new or go to a new community.
Anyway, enough of the ramble.
And it's not the first Katz article in awhile. Oct 1st, twice(!) on Sep 28th, Sep 26th, and Sep 21st are the most recent. I find it amusing how he's very, very close to some level of truth in each, but so far away at the same time. This article included. I wouldn't hold much in his words.
But it's not just the US patent system, it's the concept of code itself. The legal system hasn't seen anything like it before, but it's trying to slam it into the current system, since they don't really understand it.. For example:
Code is text. Therefore, copyrightable.
Code is an engineering practice. Therefore, patentable.
Code can be kept under wraps. Therefore, trade secret laws apply.
Unfortunately, for each one of the available IP methods currently in use, the ones they were actually originally meant to _apply_ to have balances. Plain, public English text is not an engineering practice (even if it describes one). Machines can be patented, but they aren't copyrightable nor under trade secret. And recipes or methods of production can be trade secret, which is another way of saying 'in-house machines to build the product.' But since when are trade secrets put right smack into public products, just hidden within them? Since software.
The legal system's never seen anything like code or software before, and they're trying to 'fix it.' For better or for worse.
I feel inevitably someone's going to state 'Enough!' and get rid of all the silly IP problems right now, but it's going to be a trek consisting mostly of being lugged through the mud.
Getting politically active is about the best thing to do. Those who ignore politics or don't want to deal with them usually end up getting steamrolled by them, even on small scales. The common "Writing your representative" myth is almost entirely bogus, though, regardless of what people say. You need a lot of money or a _lot_ of social pull for that unless you have an actually respectable politician, which is an oxymoron. And I don't think anyone in the entire tech community could pull the latter. Everyone's too individual.
And, I'm too tired right now to be coherent. I'll be quiet now.
Wow... Just, wow. This is, like, the coolest thing ever made by humans. Like, ever. I'm speechless.
So when do the mass produced models come out? Although a better solution would probably be to shove an emulator on a gameboy advance or something, THAT'S NOT THE POINT!!!(*#@$(^
I think you missed the point of what he stated completely and entirely. He's not talking about being forcefed by predefined playlists or whatnot. This is not an advertising related thing he's talking about.
What he stated was that there should be more definable (less broad, more ways of mixing various ones) genres with subtags and what not, and a large database of them online. Then, as the amount of music climbs skyhigh from heavy usage on Napster and proceeds to fork itself into the database, it gets to the point where you can go to the database, state "I'd like to see stuff that's kind of very similar to this music" and it can cut it up across genre and msicellaneous information lines, which gives you.. More music by more bands you haven't heard of that are in a similar style! Imagine that.
IMO this could be a major improvement over Napster, who's main purpose right now is finding mp3s of bands you know. Browsing other people's repositories can sometimes help to learn about more bands, but isn't as effective as it could be. (Although searching for 'remix' is amusing for hours on end.)
Anything to increase the diversity of music is a good thing, and that is what he wants. It won't remove anything as it is, it's a secondary layer atop it that nets like styles together, mixable by however you choose.
First off, I think it fits. It's interesting, it's quality animation, and Cowboy Bebop is one of the neatest series to come out in quite some time.
Anime is neat, but in moderation and dependant on what it is. I feel that 99.9% of all anime is just utter crap. Especially the stuff that ends up on standard basic cable or the networks: Only Gundam Wing has been worth watching. (But what a ride that was! Episode 15 onwards was more than worth the time..) Encore's Action channel runs some, but Battle Angel was too rushed/badly done, and I didn't like Macross. Watch Patlabor if it's on; damn cool. Cinemax also runs *cringe* hentai anime on weekend nights. WHY, I don't know. It's utter garbage and trash.
I still want to smack Taco for making a big fuss about the utter garbage that is new DBZ, though.
And before anyone comments on it, Anime has a reputation for being childish, or pr0n/tentacle related. This is because this is what becomes popular, or what came first to the US, because it was thought to be popular. This is generally not really reflective of the stuff as a whole. But it partially depends on what you watch as well. I know people that like sugary garbage like "Oh My Goddess!" *shudder*
For good series, track down the Rurouni Kenshin OAV(Not the series!), Lain, Bebop, etc. I didn't like Evangelion.(the otaku can harass me now.)
Moving on... Slashdot is _not_ turning into a generic news site, never has, and as far as I can tell never will. (Unless those YRO freaks have their way, but that's another rant.) It's news-for-nerds and at the same time it's cool-stuff-that-interests-Taco. To think otherwise is to hold slashdot on this pillar of news objectivity that it doesn't fit.
Y'see, if you filter out the garbage that neither Taco nor Hemos posts, you get something that resembles... Yes, that's right, old slashdot! The 'decline' is overrated. Most of the existent decline appears in the posts, the trolls, the lusers and the morons, who sees the site as something that doesn't fit them. Nice and open minded, isn't it?
Anyway.. Lots of stuff fits on slashdot, whether people think so or not, mainly because you _can't pin people down to a certain subset_. Slashdot is a one stop shop for your stuff needs, and it cannot fill everyone's specific subset: Anime has a bad reputation. Vocal minorities love those to complain about and rant about, in my experience online.
To put it bluntly, I have seen 'This doesn't fit here!' or 'This shouldn't be here!' when there are a lot of interested people: Since the dawn of slashdot. Even after it switched from Chips and Dips it had a few within the first month.
Now that I have gone absolutely nowhere with this ramble, I'll stop here.;)
(Little proof that I've been around so long, tho; I would have a lower, Four-digit account ID, but for some reason it was nuked. Oh well.)
You do realize that, by stating and doing this, you are no better than those you accuse? Plus you deliberately shred the already decimated signal:noise ratio to oblivion because of it.
Trolls have been running so amazingly rampant on slashdot for the sake of annoying the 'karma whores' or whatever, but guess what really happens: It pisses off those who read and crank up their thresholds further (thus giving some ego gratification to them, if they exist), and the ones that don't see ten gajillion useless posts. Since I stubbornly refuse to bring my threshold up beyond zero, there's only one other option: Don't read the damn comments.
That's right, this set of trolls and their 'war on slashdot' has had no point except disrupting the people that exist on here.
Now, to continue, I honestly don't agree with where or what slashdot is right now, so don't blame me for that. Half the articles are worthless but the other half are interesting enough to keep me coming back. (I find the game design articles in particular fascinating, as well as things like this article.)
Did I mention that I had one of the first hundred hits on slashdot and was viewing back when it was *gasp* Chips and Bits? You know, back when it was a more closely knit community for the first year or two? When the trolls were actually fun to read and not mindless idiotic crapspewers? Before everyone and their mother came in and tore the joint up?
Now excuse me, I have better things to do than read a bunch of snotnosed maroons and children that feel that running around tearing the joint up for the sake of the problems that exist will cause anything but grief for anyone else. I don't care what moderators do to this post, offtopic though it may be, it had to be said. End rant.
The site mentioned in the article that clearly states 'Nintendo' only actually has Super Famicom/SNES information, and that seems quite outdated as it is. If you're looking for actual original NES information, nesdev.parodius.com is far more useful.
The only things I _couldn't_ find throughout it all were entirely accurate cpu timings of the thing. I've been trying to get something remotely close to accurate, and just haven't been able to dig anything up. (240 lines, 3 for reset despite having vblank bit(NOT interrupt) go off, and then 19 of vblank. The opcode timings are textbook, and I'm running on 113 cycles/line... I get the feeling that there's something special about the opcode timings for the bloody thing, though. Something isn't adding up right here.)
Does anyone know where to find any such information? I have had no end of dead ends in the process.
Well, I came here REAL late.
on
Essential Anime
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· Score: 1
So I won't really give long recommendations, but if you want them, see: Rurouni Kenshin. Slayers. Lain. Bastard!!(I don't think I saw anyone mention this. It rules.) Ghost in the Shell. Etc.
Now, why did I post? If you like anime, odds are pretty good you'll get a kick out of some fanfiction. The best I have seen that has a lot of varied content is ImproFanfic, or round-robin style fiction. It is NOT like tradition round robins; for the most part, the quality level is high (especially on the newer ones. Older ones like Magical Girl Hunters don't have that.)
On a more serious note, I would have to say Pascal(now called Delphi). If for no other reason than that I was programming in it when I was six. It's a very verbose language, which is good for beginners, and most of Borland's documentation is quite good and actually useful. At least, it was for me when I had TP5.
The best way is still to read already written examples (preferably small ones) and to let them decipher each part, to see how and why it works. Pascal's verbosity makes this easy.
I found these guys a few months ago... Was starting to wonder when slashdot would pick up on them.;) Really great stuff.
It's become something of an obsession of mine to track down orchestrated game music.. What oft scares me is how _good_ it usually is. I can seriously recommend a few CDs... Final Fantasy Pray is an excellent collection of somber vocal tracks from the older games(and is simply among the best I have ever heard.. Anybody know of other songs in this cd's style?), Actraiser Symphonic Suite for good ol' SNES symphonic, to the more recent Celtic-styled Xenogears - Creid. There are very few you can go wrong with.
Soundtrack Central has all you'd ever need to know on any of this, too. An archive of albums and reviews. Although it doesn't seem to be up right now. =P
From Nobuo's old tunes throughout the first three NES FF games, to Megaman 3's catchy tunes, and even Ninja Gaiden 1/2's niftiness, the original versions are impressive. I have been... rather unimpressed with the Linux based NES emulators, all being slow pieces of crap that don't do proper timing nor UI, so it's really not that enjoyable to hear/play on Linux.;)
Anyway, it's six am, I'm incoherent from lack of sleep. I'll stop babbling.
All the controversy surrounding MP3s seems to be about piracy, when cd sales are on the rise and still going. There is no doubt that mp3s can be used for downloading entire cds and records illegitimately, but it seems to me that it is, somewhat akin to libraries and books, fostering a new generation of educated cd buyers, ones that will try _more_ music out and get hooked _before_ buying, rather than hearing the top 40 on the radio or whatever and only buying those. I have seen this in a great number of people, the only ones that do not buy the cds appear to be the ones too poor to do so anyway. What is your opinion of this?
Actually, that's probably what I'd do if I had the time to spare from everything else I'm involved in.;P GNOME's html widget looks mildly interesting to me, despite that it's in C instead of C++. (But anything you can do in the latter, youc an do in the former, it's all about the length of time it takes to write vs difficulty) It's just that it's hideously immature. Amaya might be worth looking at if I ever knock a few things off of my mile long dance card.
Maybe I'm just picky, but there doesn't seem to be any middle ground with them. It either can't render worth squat or it can and has so many features it runs terrible and eats too much ram. I'd be happy with something that renders fast and dynamically and _correctly_. I don't care about the frills (well, besides Japanese support..)
On a side note, I just grabbing M13's binary in the offchance it got any better.. I think I can safely say not, even after turning off the debugging options. My P200 could barely handle it when it came to scrolling and the options UI was absolutely abysmal. (Font window took 20 seconds[!] to come up.) Netscape 4.08, which I'm using now, is light years faster and less memory intensive.. sheesh. Moz also rendered a few pages I pointed it at improperly. I'm not impressed for two years of work. I remember the original slashdot article which spawned the mozilla source release.. how nice it should have been. oh well.
*sigh* I'll stop babbling. I shouldn't rant when I'm barely awake and have a thunderous headache.;) Mmm, flu.
Hmm.. Netscape 4.08 here has grown 8MB of memory usage since I started writing this. Ah, quality coding. There's a bug in this somewhere with 'find in page' that will eat up 64MB of ram. One of these days I'd like to know WHY.
Just how hard can it be to design a fast, lightweight browser that renders properly?
I'm a wee bit frustrated at all these browsers taking either the high road (Every feature under the sun) or the low road (Everything that doesn't take some effort to handle.), but never the middle.
I tried mozilla. I kept trying it in the hopes it might actually be useful, but it only got worse with time. (Stability first, people, because if you ignore that even the speed wears down, as it did.)
If I weren't busy on.. oh.. three projects at once I could see working on a browser. Hell, I've already figured out how to do the damnedable thing. (If I seem a little arrogant here, it's more out of annoyance than anything else.)
Heck, I'm bored, let's see if I can drop it off the top of my mind.. Layers would be the hardest part.
First off, there's the parsing. In C++, I'd do this by breaking up each individual tag into it's own object, with 'text' as the one, stable object data and the object itself containing any other information. From this point out all handling of layout becomes a simple chore.
Size manipulation on the fly would require one function with not only params for size, but one that chooses whether or not to 'guess' the size if it doesn't have it yet. If it gets the actual size down the road (From a separate networking thread), it can go punt everything at it and below until nothing requires special width rerendering, at which point the render window would just 'push' that section down if it has already been rendered.
Of course, the real trouble with that is font handling as you have to make sure it keeps to a specified width, but just cache the width of each letter.
This pretty much solves any problems. Any things that would actually change the width of the cell or whatever owning it would fall back up the object tree until we hit the frame.
This also makes cleaning up VERY simple and very clean (Just delete the root object, it'll delete everything under it which will.. and so forth.). Telling anything in specific to update will cause a reparsing of that section.
Now comes the other details: css (Cache the identifications and stuff and then promptly go whack the proper items with 'this size forced'), javascript/java (Ugh, not my department, and I don't like them anyway), networking/protocol (I don't see what's so difficult aobut this..), and options.
Now despite the rant, I really don't have time to devote to something like this, but I just look at the designs of web browsers that either don't render or do render with ten tons of feature bloat and it aggravates me.
However, if I'm wrong on any of this, feel free to give me a Boot to the Head[tm].
I seem to remember a Comcast ad from awhile back that stated that it was *perfectly legal and okay with them* to tape stuff off of PPV. They made that crystal clear.
I don't know if they've changed their policy since, however.
Am I the only one that is actually in favor of this, expect than that they did it quietly?
I managed to get my hands on a cable modem from @Home in late '97, when they were first starting to roll out. The bandwidth was significantly faster at first(near-consistant 200KB/sec), but wound down over time. I did a little bit of poking around and managed to find more than a few ftp servers running on the same network as me; heck, I found other systems doing the same to me.
The bandwidth cap was inevitable, there was simply too much outbound usage from the various warez kiddies and mp3 hogs. I'd probably be doing the same thing in their shoes. How else would you get rid of this usage?
For those whining about not being able to run servers any more; It's not like you can't anymore, 16KB is ample for most things, you just can't go and run 16-player Quake servers anymore. Too bad.;)
Anyway... I do far more downloading than I do uploading, so this is really only an issue for me when the upload speed cap caps my download speed, and I seriously don't see that happening anytime soon, unless I somehow get another 600KB/sec kernel download.
Slashdot Mirror
No kidding. I was nearly pulling my hair out when I was trying to get things working under both X11 and DirectX, and had all sorts of messy implementation layers and whatnot, and the ugliness of it all still makes me physically cringe.
Then I tried SDL out, and I think the first words out of my mouth were "SOMEONE GOT IT RIGHT!" Had the whole layer ported to SDL in about 30-40 minutes and it worked like a charm. My only qualms now really only deal with poor file i/o (no directory support) and lack of decent WM functions.
Rereading that makes it sound like a religious experience, or a really horrible advertisement. May have been. ;)
The main complaint I hear about a lack of a DirectX equivalent is that sound has quite some ways to go, and there are no rendering functions for SDL. Audio is looking more and more like OpenAL will be the way to go, and if I ever finish my current work I'll probably try to work on rectifying the renderlib. (Like I'll ever get around to that. Heh.)
I doubt Maelstrom was all that difficult. But porting any game really has more or less the same problems, and it also depends on how the game is written.
The main detail when porting any game is to make sure anything that is system specific; that is, input/output code, is heavily abstracted. If abstraction layers already exist, it is fairly easy to add in new code. If they don't, then it's still not all that difficult to split out the code and rewrite it.
Descent didn't have proper abstraction, mainly since the code was a mess. It is still not a terrible lot of work to go through abstraction, because most of it is just mad grepping and replacing.
Other problems include endianness (usually not hard to compensate for; just stuff some macros or defines to byteswap things on load), and word size. And let's not forget depending on large protocols, like D3D, that don't exist in other operating systems.
On the whole, though, no, it would not be more work to start over than it would have been to port. Writing a game is a LOT harder than rewriting graphics and interface code. I should know.
- aoiushi, #sdl
That's mostly hardware.
1024x768 at, say, 32bpp is 3.1MB. About 50MB per second if you get 16fps. This really doesn't sound like alot, until you consider that you're blitting to the buffer as well -and- you sit around waiting on the bus to 'flip' the buffer; and the bus is an awful lot slower than direct memory access.
You can get around this by using a hardware buffer and hardware surfaces, but you're stuck with using just images and usually color key that way; no primitives for the time being, and alpha blend isn't always supported in hardware.
As far as full screen page flipping goes, you need to use a hardware surface. You won't always get one; check the flags on the surface that is returned. May also need SDL_DOUBLEBUF, it's been awhile since I messed with that.
- aoiushi, #sdl
It's a buffering layer with access to acceleration when necessary. There are other libraries that assist it for the actual, well, game stuff.
SDL pretty much does all this:
This really isn't a game development library by itself: There are no image loaders, nor are there any image rotation/flip code, nor are there.. well, alot of things you'd need for a 2D game. There are other, supplemental libraries for this:
There are also a few rendering and UI libraries in the works. There may even be a few finished, I'm really not sure. But, if you're going to use SDL for game development, don't expect it to do _everything._
But if you're developing one, it's probably better to get your hands dirty and learn how to do the rendering stuff yourself anyway. It's not really all that hard: I've got a bunch in mine. Digging out Abrash's book, which was recently posted here, should help with some of the other renderers (polygonal, bresenham, etc.) that are fairly interesting.
Nope, doesn't work that way. I've watched my share of internet communities collapse upon themselves, and usually it's either from the current userbase being too obstinate from their own views in the face of new folk (which turns it into a constant, neverending state of collapse where the old fogies are on a steady stream out as quickly as the new come in.. Which sounds good, but it's not: One long soap opera of headaches, which causes the new to generally not know what's going on and slowly stop trickling in as overall quality degrades), or a complete lack of any new blood. (The Internet tends to do a number on communities in 'net time. Go figure.)
Everything seems to be heading in the way of the former. Particularly after I sat down and looked in at the high ranked / 'cool' stuff: It all fit the stereotype, quality be damned. I think OOG down below summed everything up quite nicely about it.
Besides .. if your premise were true, it would _already_ be true as it isn't exactly small potatoes: There's already a fairly large userbase and people coming/going quite a lot. (Not to mention, it's not like slashdot's moderation has greatly improved things with the larger user base over time, now has it?)
Adding more editors does not fix things if they just stick to what they already perceive as good -- which is how more editors are added. You end up with a self-perpetuating cycle of fulfilling the status quo in order to change it, which means if you're not of it you won't get it, which doesn't change the status quo. Hmm, effective at updating, isn't it?
It's all a matter of perspective, of course: What is 'low quality'? What is 'high quality'? You'll never please everyone, and a system like E2s tries to reorganize itself to the people that use it. Unfortunately, it looks to me like it's a little too intolerant to change.
Oh well. I fully expect to be flamed to death over this one...
Yamauchi is, as usual, hostile towards the gaming industry. With good right to be! But he's missing what the actual problem is with the games themselves.
It's not the developers that are out there. You can have plenty of really highly talented developers and not a designer among 'em. Game designers are among the rarest breed in gaming anymore. If you don't believe me, take a look around: Lots of programmers, lots of good graphics, lots of good audio. Crappy games. (Judging from my poking around happypenguin, OSS suffers from it worse than the gaming industry, so don't give me any crap about how we'll all be saved by the GPL. Just 'cause you can code doesn't mean you can design.)
That isn't to say Nintendo's really good at it. They have alot of crap included with their quality games. The last few I seriously played were F-Zero and Super Metroid, which I actually still pull out once in awhile. Most of their new stuff has been, frankly, boring.
The thing is, everyone _is_ focused on graphics and atmosphere and this so-called 'immersiveness' which everyone hails. It's all a joke. None of it actually exists: The atmosphere gets you into it immediately, but it is the quality of the game that keeps you coming back. Half-Life is extremely overrated because of this, IMO.
That's not to say it can't be done well.. Alice took atmosphere to its logical extreme, much in the way R-Type took repetition to its own. Both were very good for what they did, even if the latter was a much better game (among the best IMNSHO!) overall. (And while I'm at it: Squaresoft's Xenogears took storyline in games to a whole new level.)
So what really is a fun game? It is a game where going through the motions, the controls, whatever about it can be considered fun in some way. But more than that: There has to be little limit on what can be done with it in the long run. (If you poke around Doom is still having time records being beaten, simply due to the sheer variable difficulty and variable goals that the player can impose upon himself) Giving incentive to doing that can also be helpful .. It extends replay value for a long time to come. (R-Type Delta had things you could unlock the more goals you accomplished.. some of the more obscure are nigh impossible)
So, the question is, what do you do about it? Educate them? It could work, but it has to be done well and professionally. A site dedicated to exploring it and doing it right (ala gamasutra, but without the tendency towards tech) could be greatly beneficial. I know I'd be willing to assist in that.
And now I'm getting incoherent, which means I really should get some more caffeine into my diet.
He's still around a bit. I make it a habit of looking up old Renaissance folkses from time to time since I'm writing a Z66 clone that'll probably never get finished.
Anyway, Tran aka Thomas Pytel's been kind of staying away from the public eye as code goes. I suppose the slow death of the demo scene got to him... Heh. Last thing I managed to dig up was that he did art for a 1998 game that looks an awful lot like souped up Z66: (Still need to try it myself) Axia
Finding any more information is pretty difficult. Web searches tend to come up with bajillions of links to their pmode/w dos extender, along with "We use this!" from other demo groups or whatnot. Most likely thing was him listed as a runner in the cherry festival in '98. (Number 669, of course. I think that's just coincidence and probably isn't him.)
As far as the rest of Renaissance goes CC Catch is the only other one I managed to dig up something on. (Some of his old mods can be found on Mod Archive. One even has his email address in the comments!) There's been a track of his called 'Ephemeral Wanderer'(I think?) that's been floating around.
Here's a man who spent ten years of his life standing up for what he believed to be a genuine problem, didn't sell out, and managed to get the momentum rolling for the world to solve this problem. And the media turns on him because this worked too well.
And what do I hear on slashdot? "It was a hoax." "We would have been better off saving months of productivity by not fixing it." "This was a scam that ruined the market." "Nothing was publicized as wrong in less technically inclined areas(according to standard American ignorance of other countries) so therefore it was all a big con." And so on.
What a truly sad, depressing world we live in.
Hasn't anyone learned yet that gaming magazines have sucked for the past six years? Computer Gaming World was nice before Ziff-Davis bought it up, then down the hole it went!
This list has some good choices and many bad. Influential is a hard word to pin down: I'd like to believe it means a game that spawned many of the cliches for a genre or outright made one themselves.
Going down the list... Wing Commander still has its claws on space sims now: Whilst the storyline has slowly been removed over time, the gameplay style has been the same. This isn't technically a good thing, as any game after WC1 lost strategy and basically got to 'Get the lead indicator in your reticle and shoot.' At least games like Terminus went past that.
Ultima 3 I can't disagree with, although I think U4 was better about it. Can't disagree with Alone.
Ultima Online? It was the first 'massive multiplayer' game simply because it had the funding and marketing for it. Otherwise it's essentially a big MUD, and a poorly designed one at that. (That Evercrack is another poorly designed one is of no surprise, so I guess you could say the influence is there.) I cannot disagree too much, but this is another influence I wish we'd get away from.
Tomb Raider? Yay. It's third person. It's 3d. It had mass market appeal for no apparent reason whatsoever besides topheaviness. It must be influential. Cultural, indeed. Even they state that it had been done before on consoles, they were just the first for the pc.
Falcon I can't comment on. SimCity is unarguable in its influence, although clones are far and wide, despite its influence towards today's realtime 'strategy' games. (I don't know why that wasn't mentioned there... It's there if you look.)
HALF-LIFE?!?!?? Uck. Half-Life was Quake with a litshoad of scripting and movie sequences. I guess all I can say about it is that it was one of the first to bring things to mass market appeal; most of what had happened there had been done before and done better under less popular games.
Can't disagree with Civ.
Diablo? There have been virtually no spinoffs of Diablo, it hasn't influenced any of the RPGs out there now, and it was a cheap ripoff of nethack (Blizzard admits this) in the first place. This doesn't deserve a spot.
Dune 2. Yup, and RTSes haven't changed all that much since. KQ4? I thought Lucasart's were better and more influential towards adventure games on the whole, but oh well. Myst is a big'un, but there haven't been many offshoots so much as staking out a genre for itself.
Doom. Can't argue there; Doom is the one that brought actual levels of 3d (well, 2.5d if you ask me) to games. It was a real eye opener, and all id games following it were the same, only lamer.
Quake brought multiplayer and scriptability to a new level, as well as the console. You can see every one of these in every FPS since.
And that's that. It's kind of sad how few genres there really are these days when you look at it. Not many have really been brought to view; I can think of a few games that deserved spots that are still around today. Oh well.. Flame away on my opinions. ;)
Oh, the days of type-in games.. I had an Atari 800 (upgraded to a 130xe when the thing imploded on itself) and I had all sorts of cool magazines (which I stupidly gave to someone who I never saw again in my lifetime) for it. Compute!, Antic, etc. Ahh, the memories..
So, a few weeks ago I was on a nostalgia kick. Apparently, every single Antic magazine is now available on the internet, including all the software, which made me dance a jig for a few days. It's a real blast to the past.
I gotta admit, though, the Atari 800 emulator I had to dig up worked surprisingly well. Even the old antic music program worked great. (Some of you may remember Shock the Monkey being played on four channel square wave synth. I made an mp3 of it!) What's really sad is I actually remembered a great deal of atari basic and the various memory locations to peek/poke at. =)
Oh, you mean the so-called 'communities' that Katz's standard pseudo-intellectual ramble was about? Yup, that's a pretty accurate description. Business is trying to turn the Internet into one big shopping mall. Look over there! A plastic fern! They invade EVEN HERE! *sob*
Aaaanyway, communities are a long way from dead on the internet. But they will stagnate and pretty much degrade to reaction ("Hi!" "How are you?" "Fine, you?" "Fine! What's new?" "Nothing. You?" "Same!" {end of conversation}) without anything to _do_. Many communities that exist only for communication or whatever quite literally die out after awhile. Many that originally _did_ do things but fell into idle and decadence did the same. I've seen it happen on a number of occasions.
The so-called 'community' that many internet businesses build try and keep things as impersonal as possible. Sometimes they build into something more, usually they don't. Sometimes they build into personal things, then go right through the other side with nothing more to talk about and fall apart. (See above) At least IRC channels induce some level of personality into the people there; It's not just casual folk, there's a sort of hierarchy of people in each and every channel.
This is why things like muds/moos/m*'s and everquest and things like that will probably make the best communities. People are there to _do_ something, and that's what binds them together. There could be many differing views, but they all share that in common. So there is some homogeneousness in it.. Whoopee, that's to be expected on the Internet. Things are chopped apart by lines of interest, not geographical reasons. This is neither good nor bad, though, as it means there is less incentive to try or visit something new or go to a new community.
Anyway, enough of the ramble.
And it's not the first Katz article in awhile. Oct 1st, twice(!) on Sep 28th, Sep 26th, and Sep 21st are the most recent. I find it amusing how he's very, very close to some level of truth in each, but so far away at the same time. This article included. I wouldn't hold much in his words.
But it's not just the US patent system, it's the concept of code itself. The legal system hasn't seen anything like it before, but it's trying to slam it into the current system, since they don't really understand it.. For example:
Unfortunately, for each one of the available IP methods currently in use, the ones they were actually originally meant to _apply_ to have balances. Plain, public English text is not an engineering practice (even if it describes one). Machines can be patented, but they aren't copyrightable nor under trade secret. And recipes or methods of production can be trade secret, which is another way of saying 'in-house machines to build the product.' But since when are trade secrets put right smack into public products, just hidden within them? Since software.
The legal system's never seen anything like code or software before, and they're trying to 'fix it.' For better or for worse.
I feel inevitably someone's going to state 'Enough!' and get rid of all the silly IP problems right now, but it's going to be a trek consisting mostly of being lugged through the mud.
Getting politically active is about the best thing to do. Those who ignore politics or don't want to deal with them usually end up getting steamrolled by them, even on small scales. The common "Writing your representative" myth is almost entirely bogus, though, regardless of what people say. You need a lot of money or a _lot_ of social pull for that unless you have an actually respectable politician, which is an oxymoron. And I don't think anyone in the entire tech community could pull the latter. Everyone's too individual.
And, I'm too tired right now to be coherent. I'll be quiet now.
Wow... Just, wow. This is, like, the coolest thing ever made by humans. Like, ever. I'm speechless.
So when do the mass produced models come out? Although a better solution would probably be to shove an emulator on a gameboy advance or something, THAT'S NOT THE POINT!!!(*#@$(^
I think you missed the point of what he stated completely and entirely. He's not talking about being forcefed by predefined playlists or whatnot. This is not an advertising related thing he's talking about.
What he stated was that there should be more definable (less broad, more ways of mixing various ones) genres with subtags and what not, and a large database of them online. Then, as the amount of music climbs skyhigh from heavy usage on Napster and proceeds to fork itself into the database, it gets to the point where you can go to the database, state "I'd like to see stuff that's kind of very similar to this music" and it can cut it up across genre and msicellaneous information lines, which gives you.. More music by more bands you haven't heard of that are in a similar style! Imagine that.
IMO this could be a major improvement over Napster, who's main purpose right now is finding mp3s of bands you know. Browsing other people's repositories can sometimes help to learn about more bands, but isn't as effective as it could be. (Although searching for 'remix' is amusing for hours on end.)
Anything to increase the diversity of music is a good thing, and that is what he wants. It won't remove anything as it is, it's a secondary layer atop it that nets like styles together, mixable by however you choose.
First off, I think it fits. It's interesting, it's quality animation, and Cowboy Bebop is one of the neatest series to come out in quite some time.
Anime is neat, but in moderation and dependant on what it is. I feel that 99.9% of all anime is just utter crap. Especially the stuff that ends up on standard basic cable or the networks: Only Gundam Wing has been worth watching. (But what a ride that was! Episode 15 onwards was more than worth the time..) Encore's Action channel runs some, but Battle Angel was too rushed/badly done, and I didn't like Macross. Watch Patlabor if it's on; damn cool. Cinemax also runs *cringe* hentai anime on weekend nights. WHY, I don't know. It's utter garbage and trash.
I still want to smack Taco for making a big fuss about the utter garbage that is new DBZ, though.
And before anyone comments on it, Anime has a reputation for being childish, or pr0n/tentacle related. This is because this is what becomes popular, or what came first to the US, because it was thought to be popular. This is generally not really reflective of the stuff as a whole. But it partially depends on what you watch as well. I know people that like sugary garbage like "Oh My Goddess!" *shudder*
For good series, track down the Rurouni Kenshin OAV(Not the series!), Lain, Bebop, etc. I didn't like Evangelion.(the otaku can harass me now.)
Moving on... Slashdot is _not_ turning into a generic news site, never has, and as far as I can tell never will. (Unless those YRO freaks have their way, but that's another rant.) It's news-for-nerds and at the same time it's cool-stuff-that-interests-Taco. To think otherwise is to hold slashdot on this pillar of news objectivity that it doesn't fit.
Y'see, if you filter out the garbage that neither Taco nor Hemos posts, you get something that resembles... Yes, that's right, old slashdot! The 'decline' is overrated. Most of the existent decline appears in the posts, the trolls, the lusers and the morons, who sees the site as something that doesn't fit them. Nice and open minded, isn't it?
Anyway.. Lots of stuff fits on slashdot, whether people think so or not, mainly because you _can't pin people down to a certain subset_. Slashdot is a one stop shop for your stuff needs, and it cannot fill everyone's specific subset: Anime has a bad reputation. Vocal minorities love those to complain about and rant about, in my experience online.
To put it bluntly, I have seen 'This doesn't fit here!' or 'This shouldn't be here!' when there are a lot of interested people: Since the dawn of slashdot. Even after it switched from Chips and Dips it had a few within the first month.
Now that I have gone absolutely nowhere with this ramble, I'll stop here. ;)
(Little proof that I've been around so long, tho; I would have a lower, Four-digit account ID, but for some reason it was nuked. Oh well.)
You do realize that, by stating and doing this, you are no better than those you accuse? Plus you deliberately shred the already decimated signal:noise ratio to oblivion because of it.
Trolls have been running so amazingly rampant on slashdot for the sake of annoying the 'karma whores' or whatever, but guess what really happens: It pisses off those who read and crank up their thresholds further (thus giving some ego gratification to them, if they exist), and the ones that don't see ten gajillion useless posts. Since I stubbornly refuse to bring my threshold up beyond zero, there's only one other option: Don't read the damn comments.
That's right, this set of trolls and their 'war on slashdot' has had no point except disrupting the people that exist on here.
Now, to continue, I honestly don't agree with where or what slashdot is right now, so don't blame me for that. Half the articles are worthless but the other half are interesting enough to keep me coming back. (I find the game design articles in particular fascinating, as well as things like this article.)
Did I mention that I had one of the first hundred hits on slashdot and was viewing back when it was *gasp* Chips and Bits? You know, back when it was a more closely knit community for the first year or two? When the trolls were actually fun to read and not mindless idiotic crapspewers? Before everyone and their mother came in and tore the joint up?
Now excuse me, I have better things to do than read a bunch of snotnosed maroons and children that feel that running around tearing the joint up for the sake of the problems that exist will cause anything but grief for anyone else. I don't care what moderators do to this post, offtopic though it may be, it had to be said. End rant.
The site mentioned in the article that clearly states 'Nintendo' only actually has Super Famicom/SNES information, and that seems quite outdated as it is. If you're looking for actual original NES information, nesdev.parodius.com is far more useful.
The only things I _couldn't_ find throughout it all were entirely accurate cpu timings of the thing. I've been trying to get something remotely close to accurate, and just haven't been able to dig anything up. (240 lines, 3 for reset despite having vblank bit(NOT interrupt) go off, and then 19 of vblank. The opcode timings are textbook, and I'm running on 113 cycles/line ... I get the feeling that there's something special about the opcode timings for the bloody thing, though. Something isn't adding up right here.)
Does anyone know where to find any such information? I have had no end of dead ends in the process.
So I won't really give long recommendations, but if you want them, see: Rurouni Kenshin. Slayers. Lain. Bastard!!(I don't think I saw anyone mention this. It rules.) Ghost in the Shell. Etc.
Now, why did I post? If you like anime, odds are pretty good you'll get a kick out of some fanfiction. The best I have seen that has a lot of varied content is ImproFanfic, or round-robin style fiction. It is NOT like tradition round robins; for the most part, the quality level is high (especially on the newer ones. Older ones like Magical Girl Hunters don't have that.)
Alternatively, there's Twoflower's fics at Spoof Chase (Check MTCFF Beta.. hee hee) and his Slayers series.
For manga, there's ImproManga, although I'm not real fond of most of the stuff there.
ZZT!
On a more serious note, I would have to say Pascal(now called Delphi). If for no other reason than that I was programming in it when I was six. It's a very verbose language, which is good for beginners, and most of Borland's documentation is quite good and actually useful. At least, it was for me when I had TP5.
The best way is still to read already written examples (preferably small ones) and to let them decipher each part, to see how and why it works. Pascal's verbosity makes this easy.
I found these guys a few months ago... Was starting to wonder when slashdot would pick up on them. ;) Really great stuff.
It's become something of an obsession of mine to track down orchestrated game music.. What oft scares me is how _good_ it usually is. I can seriously recommend a few CDs... Final Fantasy Pray is an excellent collection of somber vocal tracks from the older games(and is simply among the best I have ever heard.. Anybody know of other songs in this cd's style?), Actraiser Symphonic Suite for good ol' SNES symphonic, to the more recent Celtic-styled Xenogears - Creid. There are very few you can go wrong with.
Soundtrack Central has all you'd ever need to know on any of this, too. An archive of albums and reviews. Although it doesn't seem to be up right now. =P
From Nobuo's old tunes throughout the first three NES FF games, to Megaman 3's catchy tunes, and even Ninja Gaiden 1/2's niftiness, the original versions are impressive. I have been ... rather unimpressed with the Linux based NES emulators, all being slow pieces of crap that don't do proper timing nor UI, so it's really not that enjoyable to hear/play on Linux. ;)
Anyway, it's six am, I'm incoherent from lack of sleep. I'll stop babbling.
All the controversy surrounding MP3s seems to be about piracy, when cd sales are on the rise and still going. There is no doubt that mp3s can be used for downloading entire cds and records illegitimately, but it seems to me that it is, somewhat akin to libraries and books, fostering a new generation of educated cd buyers, ones that will try _more_ music out and get hooked _before_ buying, rather than hearing the top 40 on the radio or whatever and only buying those. I have seen this in a great number of people, the only ones that do not buy the cds appear to be the ones too poor to do so anyway. What is your opinion of this?
Actually, that's probably what I'd do if I had the time to spare from everything else I'm involved in. ;P GNOME's html widget looks mildly interesting to me, despite that it's in C instead of C++. (But anything you can do in the latter, youc an do in the former, it's all about the length of time it takes to write vs difficulty) It's just that it's hideously immature. Amaya might be worth looking at if I ever knock a few things off of my mile long dance card.
Maybe I'm just picky, but there doesn't seem to be any middle ground with them. It either can't render worth squat or it can and has so many features it runs terrible and eats too much ram. I'd be happy with something that renders fast and dynamically and _correctly_. I don't care about the frills (well, besides Japanese support..)
On a side note, I just grabbing M13's binary in the offchance it got any better.. I think I can safely say not, even after turning off the debugging options. My P200 could barely handle it when it came to scrolling and the options UI was absolutely abysmal. (Font window took 20 seconds[!] to come up.) Netscape 4.08, which I'm using now, is light years faster and less memory intensive.. sheesh. Moz also rendered a few pages I pointed it at improperly. I'm not impressed for two years of work. I remember the original slashdot article which spawned the mozilla source release.. how nice it should have been. oh well.
*sigh* I'll stop babbling. I shouldn't rant when I'm barely awake and have a thunderous headache. ;) Mmm, flu.
Hmm.. Netscape 4.08 here has grown 8MB of memory usage since I started writing this. Ah, quality coding. There's a bug in this somewhere with 'find in page' that will eat up 64MB of ram. One of these days I'd like to know WHY.
Just how hard can it be to design a fast, lightweight browser that renders properly?
I'm a wee bit frustrated at all these browsers taking either the high road (Every feature under the sun) or the low road (Everything that doesn't take some effort to handle.), but never the middle.
I tried mozilla. I kept trying it in the hopes it might actually be useful, but it only got worse with time. (Stability first, people, because if you ignore that even the speed wears down, as it did.)
If I weren't busy on.. oh.. three projects at once I could see working on a browser. Hell, I've already figured out how to do the damnedable thing. (If I seem a little arrogant here, it's more out of annoyance than anything else.)
Heck, I'm bored, let's see if I can drop it off the top of my mind.. Layers would be the hardest part.
First off, there's the parsing. In C++, I'd do this by breaking up each individual tag into it's own object, with 'text' as the one, stable object data and the object itself containing any other information. From this point out all handling of layout becomes a simple chore.
Size manipulation on the fly would require one function with not only params for size, but one that chooses whether or not to 'guess' the size if it doesn't have it yet. If it gets the actual size down the road (From a separate networking thread), it can go punt everything at it and below until nothing requires special width rerendering, at which point the render window would just 'push' that section down if it has already been rendered.
Of course, the real trouble with that is font handling as you have to make sure it keeps to a specified width, but just cache the width of each letter.
This pretty much solves any problems. Any things that would actually change the width of the cell or whatever owning it would fall back up the object tree until we hit the frame.
This also makes cleaning up VERY simple and very clean (Just delete the root object, it'll delete everything under it which will.. and so forth.). Telling anything in specific to update will cause a reparsing of that section.
Now comes the other details: css (Cache the identifications and stuff and then promptly go whack the proper items with 'this size forced'), javascript/java (Ugh, not my department, and I don't like them anyway), networking/protocol (I don't see what's so difficult aobut this..), and options.
Now despite the rant, I really don't have time to devote to something like this, but I just look at the designs of web browsers that either don't render or do render with ten tons of feature bloat and it aggravates me.
However, if I'm wrong on any of this, feel free to give me a Boot to the Head[tm].
"Understanding is a three-edged sword."
I seem to remember a Comcast ad from awhile back that stated that it was *perfectly legal and okay with them* to tape stuff off of PPV. They made that crystal clear.
I don't know if they've changed their policy since, however.
Am I the only one that is actually in favor of this, expect than that they did it quietly?
;)
I managed to get my hands on a cable modem from @Home in late '97, when they were first starting to roll out. The bandwidth was significantly faster at first(near-consistant 200KB/sec), but wound down over time. I did a little bit of poking around and managed to find more than a few ftp servers running on the same network as me; heck, I found other systems doing the same to me.
The bandwidth cap was inevitable, there was simply too much outbound usage from the various warez kiddies and mp3 hogs. I'd probably be doing the same thing in their shoes. How else would you get rid of this usage?
For those whining about not being able to run servers any more; It's not like you can't anymore, 16KB is ample for most things, you just can't go and run 16-player Quake servers anymore. Too bad.
Anyway... I do far more downloading than I do uploading, so this is really only an issue for me when the upload speed cap caps my download speed, and I seriously don't see that happening anytime soon, unless I somehow get another 600KB/sec kernel download.
Oh well.