But then you have to physically move the CD from some place to your place, which requires a distribution network and takes time. It's also costly to produce CDs. By simply requiring CDs, you restrict yourself to artists that have strong deals with distributors and enough money to produce them.
Also, what the hell are you going to do with a CD once you have it but rip it? I don't even have a CD reader anymore. I don't have the room to store thousands of CDs either, and it wouldn't be a practical way to manage my music library.
This is not hurting them in any way, since the game would have been available on pirate sites the day of its release anyway, quite the contrary it's providing for large advertisement just before the release.
It's already bad enough to think that a new Linux user would want a browser called "IceWeasel" or would understand that it's really just Firefox renamed
It's already bad enough to think that a new Linux user would want a browser called Firefox.
Optimal media still exist? They're a thing of the past. They're not practical and they take place. You can put thousands of them on a hard disk drive with easier access.
Also DVDs have crappy subtitles compared to what software softsubs can do.
I've ordered box sets when they became available in my area, entirely because I was able to watch the fansubs and enjoyed the series and wanted higher quality
If you want the highest quality, you'd better stick with the fansubs... They're generally much better than the commercial subtitles, both in the translation an in the typesetting/editing.
f they are going to be making such broad claims, at least try to find some sort of common gene that can be found with Muslims, Amish, Mormons, Catholics
Funnily enough I read that as Morons. Not that it changes the meaning much.
The actor in the video clearly said that the new architecture wasn't really compatible with binary blobs. Expect a mess unless you have an Intel GPU in the near future.
He defines a model, then performs a simulation to predict what the future will be according to that model. It is all perfectly rigorous and scientific.
How do you think scientists can predict what will happen? Magic?
there is no current way to compare the Quad Core PowerVR SGX543MP4+ against the PS3
There are metrics that can be used to compare arbitrary processors. FLOPS, floating point operations per second, is a metric of relevance here, since video games rendering uses floating point operations.
If I remember correctly, the Cell is about 1 teraflop and the RSX (the GPU of the PS3) is 500 gigaflops. The Cell is also a much nicer architecture to work with than the GPU, but Nvidia provides a full OpenGL stack on the GPU, which is what the video games developers unfortunately end up using.
Now again I don't know numbers for sure, but a 4-core Cortex-A9 should be under 500 gigaflops, that's quite less than the PS3.
Actually, out of all consoles, be it big or mobile ones, the PSP is the only one that gets good games these days.
Most "gamer" games, and by that mean old school japanese RPGs, only go out on the PSP. I guess the reason is that those games are not mainstream enough to warrant a release on the big consoles.
I would argue the only reason android is as popular as it is today, is because people wanted something AS GOOD as the iphone, but weren't willing to switch carriers
Doesn't it bother you to have an US-centric view of the world?
This leaves a massive amount of room for ambiguity, allowing the same sentence to have a half dozen different meanings or more. Tone and emphasis play a huge part in disambiguating a sentence.
Yes, you are right. As I said earlier, only spoken language is able to convey intonation well. I didn't mean that kind of ambiguities; I meant it in a mishearing context, as the beginning of the sentence you quoted implied. While you could badly interpret word boundaries when hearing, those are explicit when being read.
One example that is so often screwed up it drives me insane:
Bill and I went to the coffee shop and bought espresso for Dan, Cheryl, Bill and me.
That is the correct way to write the sentence, yet it is extremely common for people to say "Bill and me went to the coffee shop". Upon learning their mistake (as this is often corrected immediately by anybody who knows better), the same person will often begin to say "for Dan, Cheryl, Bill, and I" which they had previously been saying correctly! And to people who don't know any better, using "I" in the objective case actually sounds better and less awkward than the correct "me"!
It's simple: in English, pronouns are subject to declension. I don't see anything incredible or exceptional here.
The hardest part about it really is the yoda-like sentence structure.
Several languages other than Japanese also put verbs at the end of sentences.
Contrary to what some have claimed in other parts of the thread, written language is not merely a transliteration of spoken language. Both forms of speaking have their advantages, and in practice, written language is able to convey a lot more that spoken language can, while spoken language is able to convey intonation better.
It is faster to read than it is to speak, but you not only lose that advantage if you write phonetically, you make reading painfully slow; to me it becomes a deciphering exercise, since I have to read it in my head then try to hear what I "said" and put it back into words. Correct grammar also accelerates your understanding of the sentence structure. It is easier to mishear than it is to misread, and the written form of a sentence is less ambiguous than the spoken form. It is easier to understand unknown words with their written form, and the way they are written can often help you guess what they mean. Visualizing words is obviously much easier in their written form; and visualizing is very useful to organize thoughts.
Seriously, what's wrong with the French? Learning to write French is like learning yet another foreign language.
From my personal experience (I'm French, so I'm biased), pronunciation of French words from their written form is much more consistent than in English. There is almost no variation in the way a single letter or a combination of letters is pronounced, which is certainly not the case in English, where 'a' and 'e' change very often without consistent rules. In English, there are also many words that can be pronounced different ways, each way giving them a distinct meaning (heteronyms); the French language only has a couple of words like this ('fils' is the only purely French word that comes to mind, the others are probably limited to some English words that have been incorporated into French). I think the reasons the English have such a hard time with the written form of French is that they have problems with the idea of silent letters in a word, or that its writing may reflect its origin. English grammar is also so ridiculously simple than anything else appears overcomplicated. For example Latin, or even German, are much more complex than French grammatically.
If it helps, I found XII the most refreshing episode of the franchise, because it has what I still consider today to be one of the best fighting systems ever.
Or maybe they realised creating a new engine and a whole new set of art assets wasn't strictly necessary to create a new game, which is exactly right. Redoing everything everytime is just a waste of money, time and resources. It's better, both for them and for the players, if they can make a new game reusing that technology.
I could live with that. FF13 actually has a very decent plot for most of its duration (certainly the darkest of the FF-series plots, darker even than 6).
Not quite. Nothing beats the evilness of Kefka.
Square-Enix have lost the plot badly during this console generation. They were masterful with the PS2 (I still think Kingdom Hearts 2 was the best game ever released for that platform), but these days, they seem to make a bunch of shovelware low-budget titles and to completely mishandle their big-budget ones. They said for FF13 that it just wasn't practical to do towns and sidequests on the current hardware generation, due to development costs. I hate to break it to them, but Mistwalker had already done it with Blue Dragon and (in particular) Lost Odyssey, the latter of which leaves FF13 in the dust.
The funny thing is that The Last Remnant was a better Final Fantasy than Final Fantasy XIII was.
Somebody really needs to go around S-E's offices with a hammer and smash all of their DS, PSP and Wii devkits. The company was at its best in previous cycles when its focus was on developing games for the upper-end hardware. They need to rebuild their focus on the 360, PS3 (and PC) and actually show us that they're still capable of that.
Maybe if players weren't always asking for new graphics engines and better graphics -- even though those things are of little relevance to the quality of a game --, they could.
You joke, but X-2 was actually pretty good. It's one of the greatest games of all time according to the Japanese rankings. Now however, it wasn't so popular in the western world.
Incorrect. By naming Vista and Seven you are obviously thinking of hardware acceleration as that is the only feature that doesn't work in XP.
Or tabs on top etc., where support on XP is experimental.
When it comes to 64bit support, Windows is definitely the third class citizen of the three. 64bit is default on OS X, experimental on Linux but currently unsupported on Windows. You want to run a 64bit build on Windows? You'll have to rely on third party compiles.
If Firefox was well written, 32 or 64 bits wouldn't change anything at all.
hat makes you think that? 24/7 continuous tinderbox testing (http://tinderbox.mozilla.org/Firefox/) takes place on all platforms but with a strong focus on Linux.
I'm talking about real testing (as in done by Q&A testers), not regression testing or unit tests.
Hardware acceleration of many elements is done using Cairo and OpenGL on all platforms. However, the quality of OpenGL implementation on Windows is far from ideal because the GPU manufacturers focus their driver optimisation on DirectX and not OpenGL. Therefor, Mozilla could choose between mediocre performance using OpenGL or good performance using Direct2D for some pieces of the hardware acceleration effort. They chose best performance, perhaps not a very idealist stance but certainly the most user-friendly.
Support for Direct2D could have been added in Cairo directly, as an alternative to the OpenGL backend. Also, sorry, but saying that OpenGL support isn't as good as DirectX is just Microsoft-spread FUD.
The good news is that Mozilla is uncovering so many bugs in video drivers at the moment, in all three major OSes, that the quality of those is rapidly improving.
Right, because we all know how a web browser has so much more advanced graphics than games.
Currently, the various compliance test show Firefox as the best, or one of the most compliant HTML5 browsers, certainly not lagging.
I've seen a lot of demos that only worked in Webkit and not in latest Gecko, and when they worked in Gecko they were buggy, slow, and the text wasn't correctly antialiased. By HTML5, I mean the whole lot of "new web 2.0" technologies, with CSS3, video, SVG, and whatnot.
Doesn't prevent Firefox from modifying Cairo; Cairo refusing to include the patches upstream (which seems unlikely) should not limit modifying the version used by Firefox in any way.
Different priorities, a lot was done.
Yes, as I said, we got personas and tabs on top instead.
Firefox has had a JIT for a few years now.
Not quite. JIT doesn't come before JägerMonkey, which comes with Firefox 4, which isn't out yet. And it's not really a full JIT engine like Tamarin, it's just SpiderMonkey which some localized optimizations.
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But then you have to physically move the CD from some place to your place, which requires a distribution network and takes time. It's also costly to produce CDs.
By simply requiring CDs, you restrict yourself to artists that have strong deals with distributors and enough money to produce them.
Also, what the hell are you going to do with a CD once you have it but rip it? I don't even have a CD reader anymore. I don't have the room to store thousands of CDs either, and it wouldn't be a practical way to manage my music library.
This is not hurting them in any way, since the game would have been available on pirate sites the day of its release anyway, quite the contrary it's providing for large advertisement just before the release.
Any finite resource can be a currency. Scarce yet widely spread resources work best (gold, for example).
Computing power, which is derived from energy.
It's already bad enough to think that a new Linux user would want a browser called Firefox.
Optimal media still exist? They're a thing of the past. They're not practical and they take place.
You can put thousands of them on a hard disk drive with easier access.
Also DVDs have crappy subtitles compared to what software softsubs can do.
If you want the highest quality, you'd better stick with the fansubs... They're generally much better than the commercial subtitles, both in the translation an in the typesetting/editing.
That's 0.01% of the computing power of my machine.
Funnily enough I read that as Morons. Not that it changes the meaning much.
The actor in the video clearly said that the new architecture wasn't really compatible with binary blobs.
Expect a mess unless you have an Intel GPU in the near future.
He defines a model, then performs a simulation to predict what the future will be according to that model.
It is all perfectly rigorous and scientific.
How do you think scientists can predict what will happen? Magic?
Have fun playing real games with a touchscreen. The most important thing in gaming is having a good controller.
There are metrics that can be used to compare arbitrary processors. FLOPS, floating point operations per second, is a metric of relevance here, since video games rendering uses floating point operations.
If I remember correctly, the Cell is about 1 teraflop and the RSX (the GPU of the PS3) is 500 gigaflops. The Cell is also a much nicer architecture to work with than the GPU, but Nvidia provides a full OpenGL stack on the GPU, which is what the video games developers unfortunately end up using.
Now again I don't know numbers for sure, but a 4-core Cortex-A9 should be under 500 gigaflops, that's quite less than the PS3.
Actually, out of all consoles, be it big or mobile ones, the PSP is the only one that gets good games these days.
Most "gamer" games, and by that mean old school japanese RPGs, only go out on the PSP. I guess the reason is that those games are not mainstream enough to warrant a release on the big consoles.
Much more impressive for sure, but you missed the point: it is not for sale, and if it were it wouldn't be at such an affordable price.
Doesn't it bother you to have an US-centric view of the world?
But you can't do all of these at the same time.
Yes, you are right. As I said earlier, only spoken language is able to convey intonation well.
I didn't mean that kind of ambiguities; I meant it in a mishearing context, as the beginning of the sentence you quoted implied. While you could badly interpret word boundaries when hearing, those are explicit when being read.
It's simple: in English, pronouns are subject to declension.
I don't see anything incredible or exceptional here.
Several languages other than Japanese also put verbs at the end of sentences.
Contrary to what some have claimed in other parts of the thread, written language is not merely a transliteration of spoken language.
Both forms of speaking have their advantages, and in practice, written language is able to convey a lot more that spoken language can, while spoken language is able to convey intonation better.
It is faster to read than it is to speak, but you not only lose that advantage if you write phonetically, you make reading painfully slow; to me it becomes a deciphering exercise, since I have to read it in my head then try to hear what I "said" and put it back into words. Correct grammar also accelerates your understanding of the sentence structure.
It is easier to mishear than it is to misread, and the written form of a sentence is less ambiguous than the spoken form.
It is easier to understand unknown words with their written form, and the way they are written can often help you guess what they mean.
Visualizing words is obviously much easier in their written form; and visualizing is very useful to organize thoughts.
From my personal experience (I'm French, so I'm biased), pronunciation of French words from their written form is much more consistent than in English.
There is almost no variation in the way a single letter or a combination of letters is pronounced, which is certainly not the case in English, where 'a' and 'e' change very often without consistent rules. In English, there are also many words that can be pronounced different ways, each way giving them a distinct meaning (heteronyms); the French language only has a couple of words like this ('fils' is the only purely French word that comes to mind, the others are probably limited to some English words that have been incorporated into French).
I think the reasons the English have such a hard time with the written form of French is that they have problems with the idea of silent letters in a word, or that its writing may reflect its origin. English grammar is also so ridiculously simple than anything else appears overcomplicated. For example Latin, or even German, are much more complex than French grammatically.
If it helps, I found XII the most refreshing episode of the franchise, because it has what I still consider today to be one of the best fighting systems ever.
I have played all three, and didn't see what the fuss was all about.
Well, maybe it's the console version that's crappy; it's originally a PC engine.
Or maybe they realised creating a new engine and a whole new set of art assets wasn't strictly necessary to create a new game, which is exactly right.
Redoing everything everytime is just a waste of money, time and resources.
It's better, both for them and for the players, if they can make a new game reusing that technology.
Not quite. Nothing beats the evilness of Kefka.
The funny thing is that The Last Remnant was a better Final Fantasy than Final Fantasy XIII was.
Maybe if players weren't always asking for new graphics engines and better graphics -- even though those things are of little relevance to the quality of a game --, they could.
You joke, but X-2 was actually pretty good.
It's one of the greatest games of all time according to the Japanese rankings. Now however, it wasn't so popular in the western world.
... then you're doing it wrong
Or tabs on top etc., where support on XP is experimental.
If Firefox was well written, 32 or 64 bits wouldn't change anything at all.
I'm talking about real testing (as in done by Q&A testers), not regression testing or unit tests.
Support for Direct2D could have been added in Cairo directly, as an alternative to the OpenGL backend.
Also, sorry, but saying that OpenGL support isn't as good as DirectX is just Microsoft-spread FUD.
Right, because we all know how a web browser has so much more advanced graphics than games.
I've seen a lot of demos that only worked in Webkit and not in latest Gecko, and when they worked in Gecko they were buggy, slow, and the text wasn't correctly antialiased.
By HTML5, I mean the whole lot of "new web 2.0" technologies, with CSS3, video, SVG, and whatnot.
Doesn't prevent Firefox from modifying Cairo; Cairo refusing to include the patches upstream (which seems unlikely) should not limit modifying the version used by Firefox in any way.
Yes, as I said, we got personas and tabs on top instead.
Not quite. JIT doesn't come before JägerMonkey, which comes with Firefox 4, which isn't out yet. And it's not really a full JIT engine like Tamarin, it's just SpiderMonkey which some localized optimizations.