The idea is to ditch that model of "write once then throw away" and replace it with "write a good engine and reuse it throughout all your projects". That's what the big game development companies are moving towards. The ones that can't do their own or can't license that of a third party will have to fall back to casual games that don't require much processing power.
This is irrelevant, game developers don't care about whether you can play old games on new hardware. That's not their business model. Again, I've already addressed this in another subthread. Go read it for more details.
As I said in another subthread, it doesn't matter if you have choice since there are only two manufacturers anyway (with Nvidia being better supported by games in general). Games usually can't even run on Intel GMA even on the lowest settings.
And if you need to replace your graphics card every two years to run new games, it's no different than buying a Sound Blaster 16 or whatever other fancy hardware a game at the time required.
Anyway, the point is that of course ray casting is better suited to that hardware, but a lot of raytracing applications, like in medical or semiconductor imaging, already benefit from GPUs greatly. And those things actually run in real (or interactive) time.
But a game written for OpenGL or Direct3D in 2001 still runs on modern hardware. A game written to write directly to 2001 hardware does not.
This is irrelevant, since the industry does not try to make money out of old games. What they want is to make money at launch, then milk the cash cow for some time with a couple of people working on DLCs, then move on.
Also notice how your old Playstation games don't work without a Playstation (short of using an emulator). This is not a serious issue. Games are not meant to yield profits for life, so if they're limited to the lifetime of the platform it's fine.
Writing directly to hardware without a standardised API is retarded and pretty much guarantees that in ten years time the software won't work or performance will be lousy if it does.
What matters is that the game is groundbreaking and people want to buy it when it goes out.
Back when the Cell was released, it was a very powerful (it still is, but to a lesser extent). Game developers could have used it instead of the graphics card to do very innovative things (and Sony actually supported this idea). They didn't, even though it was available in many homes. Game developers just can't handle doing serious R&D in graphics. They need hardware manufacturers or middleware people to do it for them. I know for a fact there are only a couple of Cell experts in the whole of Ubisoft.
It wasn't a commented directed at Id in particular, but at the game developer industry in general.
We'd be back to the bad old days when you actually had to check the system requirements for your sound card and video card manufacturer.
Don't you have to do this anyway? It's true consoles have stopped PC games from requiring new hardware, but a few years ago, you needed to replace your graphics card every other year to play new games.
You still run into the same problems regardless of whether you're using a vector processor with no branch-prediction and no cache, to if you're using a bunch of in-order cores with cache coherency, or full-blown out-of-order cores with cache coherency. You end up pulling in a combinatorial explosion (ie. exponential number) of cache lines or memory accesses per recursive ray tied to the complexity of your scene.
GPUs have no cache. (Fermi has one, but it doesn't really work, so we might as well not count it)
Intellisense is by far the best C++ dev environment.
I guess it's a matter of taste. I find that Visual Studio is very unintuitive and impractical for the way I code in C++.
In that category, I've had better experience with Eclipse.
If Chrome can produce a better environment AND be the first to support all C++11 features, I'll be happy to watch MS slide into history. Until then, I expect MS programmer base to grow.
With some work, you can probably use any compiler you want, since it directly executes machine code (albeit in a custom executable format, and I couldn't find information about the ABI). The reference compiler is GCC.
I write software tools for high-performance computing that work on a variety of hardware, including all variations of x86, POWER, PowerPC and Cell, ARM, GPUs, multi-core, clusters... and other more confidential architectures (many-core, VLIW, FPGA, ASICs...) Supporting a lot of different hardware is not an insurmountable problem if you have a good design (and a good test farm).
Now you may be confusing drivers with game engines but even then you would be wrong just not insane.
What we call graphics drivers nowadays is not just the code that allows to interact with the hardware. It's an OpenGL and DirectX implementation. With the advent of programmable GPUs, this abstraction has become much too high-level. A C compiler is quite a better one.
The problem is that as soon as you've got any variation at all in the hardware you very quickly start to have to code for every individual unit that you're going to support.
If your software is of good quality, it is generic and easily retargetable.
Also, if you just consider GPUs, the interfaces to program them (CUDA in particular) has been there for quite a few generations and probably will stay for a long time still. And all NVIDIA (and probably also AMD) drivers use the same code, with relatively few low-level details that change depending on model.
Become an expert in something the young do not know. That will give you more value.
Web development is the worst idea you could have. Everyone does it and it could be done by anyone. Better make yourself irreplaceable by going for a niche.
They rely too much on drivers, they should just attack the hardware and make their own renderer rather than relying on crappy OpenGL and DirectX... But of course, they don't really want to invest in R&D. Game development is more of a "do something dirty quickly and then throw it again" kind of thing.
John Carmack has been quoted on saying that full-blown ray-tracing just isn't feasible for real-time graphics due to the poor memory access patterns involved, as casting multiple rays per pixel, with multiple recursive steps ends up touching a lot of memory in your geometry data set, which just thrashes the cache on CPU and modern/future GPU hardware alike.
It's not good for a vector processor, but it's still pretty good for a many-core processor.
the knee-jerk reaction of the/. community is "DRM IS EVIL, Boycott the Publisher"
It's not a political opinion, it's a well-established fact. Well, "evil" is not a fact, but "hurts legitimate users without even being able to prevent pirating" is one.
No DRM system can work -- it's just not possible from a technical point of view. All it can do is delay the inevitable.
I am a long time WoW player, and I have never regretted any time spent as a passenger in a car/bus/train when I couldn't log in. So there's going to be times when you can't plug into Diablo III, big fucking deal.
What if you're moving for business reasons, and you're in a crappy motel and you want to play a bit in the evening to relax a bit? What if you're taking a 10 hours+ trip and you want to pass the time? What if you're a student on a campus or in a boarding school without Internet connectivity?
You might as well require an internet connection to read books.
Because it gives a referential to your actions, which allows to put them into perspective and make them more meaningful. You can also better identify with the character you're playing if it's realistic enough.
So it's a very important characteristic to have for a game that involves roleplaying, in one way or another.
Slashdot Mirror
The reason we're not doing is that nuclear scares people.
Nuclear power plants are being closed and replaced by burning more oil as we speak.
The idea is to ditch that model of "write once then throw away" and replace it with "write a good engine and reuse it throughout all your projects".
That's what the big game development companies are moving towards. The ones that can't do their own or can't license that of a third party will have to fall back to casual games that don't require much processing power.
It's a perfectly valid pronunciation. That's actually how Robert Zemeckis' scientific advisor said it.
The summary suggests it comes from the battery.
It's written Gigawatts not jiggawatts.
It being from Back to the Future doesn't mean it's made up.
This is irrelevant, game developers don't care about whether you can play old games on new hardware. That's not their business model.
Again, I've already addressed this in another subthread. Go read it for more details.
CUDA and OpenCL should be all you need.
All flavours of NVIDIA cards run the same base OpenGL implementation, likewise for ATI/AMD.
Intel GMA cannot even start most recent games.
As I said in another subthread, it doesn't matter if you have choice since there are only two manufacturers anyway (with Nvidia being better supported by games in general).
Games usually can't even run on Intel GMA even on the lowest settings.
And if you need to replace your graphics card every two years to run new games, it's no different than buying a Sound Blaster 16 or whatever other fancy hardware a game at the time required.
Anyway, the point is that of course ray casting is better suited to that hardware, but a lot of raytracing applications, like in medical or semiconductor imaging, already benefit from GPUs greatly.
And those things actually run in real (or interactive) time.
This is irrelevant, since the industry does not try to make money out of old games. What they want is to make money at launch, then milk the cash cow for some time with a couple of people working on DLCs, then move on.
Also notice how your old Playstation games don't work without a Playstation (short of using an emulator). This is not a serious issue. Games are not meant to yield profits for life, so if they're limited to the lifetime of the platform it's fine.
What matters is that the game is groundbreaking and people want to buy it when it goes out.
Back when the Cell was released, it was a very powerful (it still is, but to a lesser extent). Game developers could have used it instead of the graphics card to do very innovative things (and Sony actually supported this idea). They didn't, even though it was available in many homes.
Game developers just can't handle doing serious R&D in graphics. They need hardware manufacturers or middleware people to do it for them. I know for a fact there are only a couple of Cell experts in the whole of Ubisoft.
It wasn't a commented directed at Id in particular, but at the game developer industry in general.
Don't you have to do this anyway?
It's true consoles have stopped PC games from requiring new hardware, but a few years ago, you needed to replace your graphics card every other year to play new games.
GPUs have no cache.
(Fermi has one, but it doesn't really work, so we might as well not count it)
I guess it's a matter of taste.
I find that Visual Studio is very unintuitive and impractical for the way I code in C++.
In that category, I've had better experience with Eclipse.
With some work, you can probably use any compiler you want, since it directly executes machine code (albeit in a custom executable format, and I couldn't find information about the ABI).
The reference compiler is GCC.
You say this as if the market wasn't essentially restricted to two vendors, with one clearly preferred by gamers.
I write software tools for high-performance computing that work on a variety of hardware, including all variations of x86, POWER, PowerPC and Cell, ARM, GPUs, multi-core, clusters... and other more confidential architectures (many-core, VLIW, FPGA, ASICs...)
Supporting a lot of different hardware is not an insurmountable problem if you have a good design (and a good test farm).
What we call graphics drivers nowadays is not just the code that allows to interact with the hardware. It's an OpenGL and DirectX implementation.
With the advent of programmable GPUs, this abstraction has become much too high-level. A C compiler is quite a better one.
If your software is of good quality, it is generic and easily retargetable.
Also, if you just consider GPUs, the interfaces to program them (CUDA in particular) has been there for quite a few generations and probably will stay for a long time still.
And all NVIDIA (and probably also AMD) drivers use the same code, with relatively few low-level details that change depending on model.
Discarding Google will make them disappear.
Problem is, there still isn't any good web browser.
You'll lose.
Become an expert in something the young do not know. That will give you more value.
Web development is the worst idea you could have. Everyone does it and it could be done by anyone.
Better make yourself irreplaceable by going for a niche.
They rely too much on drivers, they should just attack the hardware and make their own renderer rather than relying on crappy OpenGL and DirectX...
But of course, they don't really want to invest in R&D. Game development is more of a "do something dirty quickly and then throw it again" kind of thing.
It's not good for a vector processor, but it's still pretty good for a many-core processor.
It's not a political opinion, it's a well-established fact.
Well, "evil" is not a fact, but "hurts legitimate users without even being able to prevent pirating" is one.
No DRM system can work -- it's just not possible from a technical point of view. All it can do is delay the inevitable.
What if you're moving for business reasons, and you're in a crappy motel and you want to play a bit in the evening to relax a bit?
What if you're taking a 10 hours+ trip and you want to pass the time?
What if you're a student on a campus or in a boarding school without Internet connectivity?
You might as well require an internet connection to read books.
Not really. Every heard of that concept of moving out of your basement?
Whenever you're on the move, you don't have a connection.
The pirate copy will likely not require Internet at all, so only legitimate users will hurt from this.
Because it gives a referential to your actions, which allows to put them into perspective and make them more meaningful.
You can also better identify with the character you're playing if it's realistic enough.
So it's a very important characteristic to have for a game that involves roleplaying, in one way or another.