After swearing it off since my disaster with RedHat 4, I now know I am going to make the effort to explore Linux again. My email, browsing and documents are mine, and if the OS is capable of poking through them to advance the interests and profits of someone else, then the party is over. I can't trust them when they say they'd never do that; if the capability exists, it will get used at some point in time. I'll keep a windows box for gaming, but not much else, and certainly not any accurate identifable personal information.
The most recent game I shipped was FPS game that shipped simultaneously on PC, Xbox and PS2. Did rather well too. Doesn't change the fact I wrote a lot of code for best-selling RTS games too.
Look at what drewmca said - he got got it pretty close.
Basically, the Wii is seen as in a different group than PC/360/PS3. Different games, different audience and different content requirements, not to mention different levels of CPU and Graphics horsepower.
First off, the three platforms mentioned are the ones that are making use of the insanely high-def content with uber-normal maps and shader effects. It's a lot more expensive to make content at the Unreal 3 engine level than at the Wii level. Personally, I think Nintendo is freaking awsome for realizing that you don't need to have 2 artists and a programmer spend a week getting the specular sweat-drop effects working just right against the character's facial acne. That's where it seems like were going with the crazy levels of detail these days.
We do have plans for Wii and other (non next-gen) platforms, but it's best to approach them on their own terms and not try to force a 360/PS3 title onto them.
... as it was with the PS2. Simple fundamentals ate getting in the way of any developer not in Sony's (or MS's) back pocket.
As a 3rd party developer, I can say that our high-end titles are being developed for all three platforms: PC, Xbox 360 and PS3. We're doing that out of necessity; "Next Gen" games are costing 8 figures+ ($10+ million) these days, much due to content.
Now, how many Xbox 360's are there out there? How many will there be when we ship? What about the PS3 installed base? A "Hit" game can sell to well under 5% (say 2-3%) of a given console's owners. 20 Million Xbox's? Sell 500k units (2.5% penetration) and that's a hit. Unless you're a Halo or Grand Theft auto, that's realisitc.
Now, the cost of developing for both next-gen consoles (360, PS3) is not that much more than developing for just one console (maybe low as 1.1~1.2x) , but you stand to sell a lot more in total. Using an engine such as Unreal 3? Not much more effort and you have a PC version too.
Now, about that $10 to $20 million we just spent? We better sell a lot of copies, or it was a mistake to make the game in the first place. Right now, it'll be a good while before there is an installed base of 10 million on either console, but yet our games are much more expensive to make than the previous generation. To recoup advances and hopefully turn a profit means getting it out to the largest audience possible.
Oh, and there's the little matter of Xbox 360 being out first, and having signifiantly better developer tools than Sony that has developers developing on Xbox 360 as first/primary, and then porting their games to PS3. Last generation it was different, but this time Xbox was available first, and Sony's efforts to catchup to Xbox's tool and documentation quality is more than lacking.
I worked on the "Age of" games through Mythology, though not on the AI, and perhaps I can shed some light on what you were seeing. I know much less about the system used in Mythology, so things that were true for Age1 and Age2 may not be so for it.
In each of those games, there were actually multiple 'AI systems' that comprised the "AI". This allowed for separation of short term goals from long term strategy and computer player personality, as well as for exploration, expansion and reaction to events such as being attacked.
In all of the Age games, AI players could be put on your team as allies, or grouped in teams against other teams of AI players. You could reveal the map, and sit back and watch them duke it out against each other.
The AI players always had an advantage over humans in terms of issuing order to units. In one 1/20 of a second turn, it could locate every unit that was idle, determine a task for it, and issue the task command.
The AI players 'Age of' games I worked on did not ever cheat by creating resources out of thin air or get different gathering or building speeds. You could starve a computer opponent out of a resource. On the Harderst difficulty level, all AI players would get bonus resources at the start of the game (and possibly at the start of each age).
Multiple AI players would work together in various ways; coordinating attacks, trading with each other, and even acting as a 'feeder' player.. going all economy and then tributing other AI players to boost them up quickly.
In Age of Empires 1 & 2, the AI players did not look at your list of units of and buildings to determine what you had, where you were, and how to counter it. Same for the locations of resources. An AI Player had to see it first, before it was allowed to 'know' about and act on it. In the other big RTS games, this is defiantly not true as they just look at the global object list. For this reason, the 'Age of' AI sent out units specifically to scout the world map. Once noticed, the info would be shared with allied AI players.
You could exploit this: if you were on an island, and never let any units go close enough to the water to be seen by AI ships, the AI players would never send any units to attack you, as it did not 'know' where any of your stuff was. Another way was to build in an area that the AI's had previously explored but were unlikely to wander back into. The line-of-sight distances in Age2 were increased to help keep this from handicapping the AI's too badly.
One area where 'cheating' was necessary was path finding. If you took a unit, and told it to move to an unexplored location, a valid path would have to be computed, requiring that it know about unexplored obstacles. This could be exploited in some ways. If a wonder was surrounded by walls, yet there was hidden break in the wall somewhere, just pathing a unit from outside to the wonder, would make the unit take the break, even if it was in an unexplored area as it was moving along a validly computed path.
I felt that we put much, *much* more work into making the 'Age of' AI's not cheat than most RTS games. What I learned from that though was that the public usually notice enough to care. A non cheating, general purpose AI often will not seem as 'intelligent' as an AI that cheats and has highly scripted or triggered events. The upside is that it allows the AI to play reasonably well on randomly generated maps; something most RTS games don't even bother to try.
Quite a few other, lesser known, computers were made during that time as well. Finding techinal information and replacement parts (unique ones, like keys) on those machines is a real challenege
I've got about 3 Exidy Sorcerers (2 working), a couple APF imagination Machines (working), and a non-working Compucolor II (circa 1979).
Supposedly, only 4,000 Compucolor IIs were made, and I have to find any technical info on them. If any/. reader knows anything about them, drop me a line!
As a game developer, the community following that Fallout and Fallout 2 have sustained to this day totally amazes me. Of course when I've encountered some of the ex-Black Isle guys, I had my moments of being reduced to a fanboy as well. No offence guys:-)
Anyway, the user community has slowly but surely reverse engineered most of the Fallout games with the intent of making mods and fixing bugs in the games. The release of the Fallout 2 Mapper (thanks to many of the former team, especially Chris A) help accelerate the process.
One of the great things that came out of their effort has been a few mods that fix most of the gameplay bugs in Fallout 2. Fixed Items, Quests, Dialog options, NPC's, missing encounters, and so on. I personally replayed the game last fall with Seraph's Fallout 2 patch, and _WOW_, what an improvement.
My recommendation: If this article made you think you would like to replay Fallout or Fallout 2, head on over to http://www.nma-fallout.com/ and dig up one the latest patches and play the game as the designers had intended it to be.
Naaah... The answer's simple: 1) It's a big house 2) I have a lot of multi-light fixtures in the house.
I've got a lot of ceiling fans (11), and most of them have 4 or 5 light bulbs in them, and there's several chandeliers (TCP makes some great Candelabera base CF bulbs for chandeliers) which adds another 30 bulbs. Change the bulbs in the garage, attics, outdoor enclosures, closets, and so on, and the total adds up.
Since I had so many bulbs to replace, I wound up getting CF bulbs from several different manufacturers, depending on size/type. Usually where I could find the best deal, and due ot the fact that despite a lot of searching, there is no place that had the bulbs I need.
I've got GE, MaxLite , Greenlite, TCP, and Feit brand CF bulbs among others, and I as commented, there are differences. Some snap on instantly at near-full brightness, others pause a second, others take up to 10 seconds. The color differs slightly by brand too, even for bulbs rated the same color temperature.
There also seem to be difference based on size of bulb: I have 4 chandeliers in which I installed TCP 9w Candelabra CF bulbs (40 watt replacements) which has a skinny nose-cone shape and they take up to 30 seconds to warm up. In my ceiling fans, I use 9w Greenlite x-bulbs (40 watt replacements), which have a fat round A-bulb shape, and there is more room inside for the spiral tubing. Those bulbs seem to snap on at 95% brightness without exception.
I just finished converting the lighting in my house to save energy, and learned a few things in the process. Most of the incandescent bulbs were replaced with compact fluorescents, but I did install 4 LED light bulbs in one application.
The current generation of compact fluorescent bulbs has come a long way from the ones I remember 10-20 years ago. They don't have the flicker or startup problem anymore, and they are available in a variety of color temperatures from 2700 degrees (yellowish, comparable to incandescent) to 6100 degrees (white, sterile). For the same light output (lumens), energy consumption is normally 22% to 27% of the incandescent bulbs they replace. They very slightly in things like color and wattage depending on the manufacturer.
Nobody who has visited my home has yet noticed the difference.
Since you can find common CF bulbs sizes for under $2 per unit (try Sams Club, etc), and they should last 4 to 8 times as long as an incandescent, the economic case is pretty sound even before factoring in the energy savings.
I replaced 4x 7.5 watt bulbs with LED bulbs and noticed a few things. The LED bulb itself is about twice as large, and as others have mentioned, the light emitted is an eerie blue-white light. You defiantly notice it. These bulbs consume 0.8 watts and produce an output pretty close to the 7.5 watt bulbs they replaced, though I could not find the output in lumens for either bulb anywhere. They were about $7 a bulb, and are rated to last 100K hours, or about 50 times as long the bulbs they replaced. Since the bulb is actually made of up 18 individual LEDs inside, I believe the rating is for the mean time until 50% of the LEDs are no longer functioning.
After converting 152 of 160 bulbs in my home, my electric bill happy.
I highly doubt that Adrian immediately spends all the money he has cleared after taxes. Not knowing anything about him, you are making the leap from his disagreement as to the fair value of his ownership stake in the company that he help found, to concluding that he is on the verge of going broke and in desperate need of funds. Good grief.
Now, I do know a little about him. He lives just down the street from me -- literally. His home is very nice, but nothing too extravagant -- A 2200sq ft 3/2/2 in soCal costs more. I've also worked with several of his co-workers, and not one has ever described him or his lifestyle in anything but modest terms. Unless he spends a whole lot more than meets the eye on his Halloween parties, he is most likely not concerned about being unemployed for a while. He is however concerned about getting a fair deal. And you would be too, if you were in his place.
I just recently built a file server for my home. The most important considerations for me were data protection (I've got too much to lose), reliability, economy of operation and quietness, since the server would be in my office running 24/7.
First off, Low-noise is my new religion (with 8 PC's in my office, it makes a huge difference), and secondly I don't belive in skimping... being frugal and practical yes, but cutting quality to save a buck (a la walmart).. NO.
So to achive that I acquired the following: - Antec Sonata Lifestyle case. - nForce 2 motherboard with out chipset cooling fan (just heat sink) - ATI Radeon 9200se video card with out cooling fan (just heat sink) - Mobile Athlon XP 2400+ CPU - 35 watts - 22 db Socket A Heat sink/Cooling fan unit - 22 db 12cm fan. - Gigabit NIC - 512mb RAM - Combo optical drive - Samsung 120gb drive (to hold OS, and work space) - 3ware Escalade 7504-LP RAID controller - 4x Maxtor 300gb 5400 RPM Drives (chosen for lower heat output over 7200 RPM) drives - APC 1000va UPS
So put it all together and you get a system that has a total of only 4 fans in it including the one in the power supply. It is the quietist PC I have. The case has a nice rack to hold the 4 RAID drives with cushions to reduce vibration/noise and mount a 12cm fan draw air directly across them, as well as another at the back to produce decent airflow despite their lower cfm ratings.
It runs cool and very quiet. I can't hear *anything* out of that system if my ears are more than a foot away from it. I can transfer large files like.iso to/from it at more than 40mb a second. It's protected and will safely shutdown in an extended power outage.
It wasn't $250, but it's good enough for me to do real production work on and sleep better at night.
So I may not have the fastest possible server, but it's still more than enough
You could replicate using 400gb drives for 1.2TB of storage by trading off for the slightly higher heat of 7200 RPM.
What I notice the most when I view classic cartoons with my kids is the compression artifacts. The old cartoons often had smooth curved lines and solid color fills, which don't fare very well when compressed by lossy algorithms that were designed primary for photographic data and operate on square cells of pixels. Not to mention the stingy bit-rates of digital TV providers.
Re:Slight clarification-Bus-ted.
on
GPU Gems 2
·
· Score: 1
This is good, but how much of the GPU's power can't be used because of bus limitiations?
The AGP/PCIe bus is not really the issue with Deferred (embedded DRAM is, but that's another story). The PC's video cards holds all the rendered attributes and accumulated light values in render targets on the card. Those render targets are then read back as textures in subsequent passes. Data is not sent back to PC across the bus as the CPU doesn't get involved. Render Target Changes (among other things) are a slowdown as the GPU pipeline has to be flushed. All those attribute buffers can eat up VRAM, reducing the amount available for textures and increasing thrashing though.
Deferred shading isn't really dependent on the version of hardware you are using. It's more a question of whether it provides value.
Sort of. You're right about the value proposition, but regarding hardware, here is an example:
One most important thing that is needed during the shading pass is to obtain the fragments position in the space you are working in. This usually means getting it's X,Y and Z values and transforming them into a space such as view space. On PC video cards, you can't read Z info from the Z-buffer (really would be nice), so you have to store it off somewhere. On a DX9 card such a Radeon 9600 you usually write out the Z to a separate render target using 32F format. On a DX8 card such as a Geforce 3, there is no support for float render targets, in fact nothing beyond 8888 and x555/x565 formats is supported. At lot more work is needed to get the fragment's position, and you have fewer pixel shaders ops to do it in.
You are not entirely right in saying that Deferred shading saves computations by eliminating overdraw, and yes fast-Z rejection on subsequent passes is a big help. Yes, overdraw is saved, but your lighting costs now directly turned into fill, and it is possible to have situations that are worse than forward (traditional) shading. The biggest benefit of Deferred shading IMHO is that you separate out attribute rendering from lighting. Other benefits include complete per-pixel lighting and normal mapping for the scene, and the visual consistency across the entire scene.
As an example, if you are going to render a character using forward shading, and there are several point lights that might impact the character, at each frame you need to determine which lights can impact the character and select a shader (or multi-pass) that supports all N number (and types) of lights.
With deferred shading, you just render out the character's attributes (albedo, position, normal, specular info, whatever) to buffers (DX9 multi-render targets are a big help). Then, in the lighting passes, you project the volume affected by the light into 2d screen space and render a ligthing shader into that volume. The shader looks at each fragment and calculates the light influence on that fragment and accumulates it (separately for diffuse and specular usually). Repeat for each light in the scene. The upshot is that the amount of fill/pixel shader needed is dependent upon the projected area affected by the light. The possible downside is that many of the fragments in that area may be in front or behind the light volume, in which case the lighting calculation is performed on a pixel that's the light doesn't impact (it just accumulates zero light).
For large numbers of small, dynamic lights, deferred can be a huge win. For static lighting it could also be a win. It all really depends on what the game is doing. There are other aspects of Deferred that are different or more difficult such as alpha-blending, but a full discussion is outside the scope of this forum.
I found chapter 9 by Oles Shishkovtsov on deferred shading in the soon-to-be-released computer game S.T.A.L.K.E.R. quite interesting. The game features a full deferred shading renderer, which is probably a first for a commercial game.
The first commercial game that I know of to use a full deferred shading engine was Shrek for the Xbox, which was released in Fall 2001. I also worked on an unannounced PC game in 2003 that had a fully deferred shading (lighting) renderer. Alas, that title was cancelled.
Deferred Shading on the PC is not very practical on pre-shader model 2.0 hardware, though possible I'm sure. The Xbox allows direct access to the register combiners, exposing more than 2x the fragment processing power than DX8 / Shader 1-1.3 on the PC.
Yea, right. I've seen this claim before enough times. You just can't create meaningful image data out of thin air. If it is not there to begin with, you're just making a (educated) guess.
"communicate gloss, depth and texture." -- sounds like a nice big filter kernel. Yawn. Next.
Just recently we had a bunch of guys from the Calgary Flames (pro Hockey team) come by our offices (Ensemble Studios, makers of Age of Empires, Age of Mythology, etc) and visit while they were in town to play the Dallas Stars. There is a write up on our web site at http://www.ensemblestudios.com/
It seems that a bunch of these guys are serious Conquerors (Age of Kings expansion) players, to the point where they've gone out and bought new laptops and carry on a portable network switch onto their flights and have major LAN game battles when flying from city to city between hockey games.
When they came over we gave them the red carpet treatment and showed them around our offices. Yet they were far more like awe-struck fan boys than pro athletes who are used to people approaching them as fans. A couple of the guys were so looking forward to the visit they said they were glad they weren't traded before visting Dallas... and I don't think they were joking.
Anyway, after showing them around we set up some team games for them to take on a few of our best players. (full story on our site). They had a blast, and we had a blast.
Considering that most pro athletes are males ages 22 to 36, which makes them part of the generation that grew up with Nintendo, etc, and have persued a life a professional cometitive gaming, its not surprising to find a bunch of them are passionate about computer and video games.
So what's to prevent this company from selling the information to the highest bidder?
What I want to know is this: What's to prevent said private company from moving their data processing operations offshore where they can do the work cheaper? In such a case, what's to prevent the government of that country, or other entities, from stopping by and getting a copy of the database(s)?
If I worked for a foreign government that wanted to 'compromise' a few US citizens for their intelligence program, what better way to select targets. There are many different possibile uses for that data by foreign interests that one could imagine.
Saw this one coming when..
on
42-Volt Autos
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Saw this one coming when we bought a new car for my wife and it had a water cooled alternator!
Her car has more luxuries and gizmos than any of our previous cars: Navagation System, Universal Garage Door Opener, 11-speaker sound system w/ DSP, CD Changer, Rear hatch auto-closer (close hatch the last inch), 8 airbags, 16-way power seats, rear wiper arm, etc.. bla.. bla.. bla... and so on..
I talked to my mechanic about it and they already knew the 42-volt systems were coming. They said 42-volts was chosen to avoid amperages that would harm humans while providing enough capacity for all the stuff being piled onto the latest models.
It's a small miracle that the battery drain if the car isn't driven every day....
I've come 10+ year old Apple Laser Writers that had over 100,000 (100K) pages output (in an office environment).
I was wondering this same thing just the other day. I have a NEC Silentwriter 95, circa 1992-3 here in my home office, with 14,000+ pages on it and it's still going and looking like new. It's fairly big in size compared to the printers that came out a few years after it, which I attribute to being engineered to a different set of specifications.
There are two reasons for it's remaining useful to me:
#1) Postscript. (Level 2 to be exact)
Postscript is the closest thing printers have to a universal language. Platform and OS agnostic not to mention resolution independent. I used it 10 years ago with my DOS based word processor (Lotus Manuscript) and use it today with various versions of Windows, and Mac OS9 and OSX.
#2) Network Print Server/Printer Port Adapter.
I bought this little device made by Hawking Electronics for about $70 that connects to the printer's parallel port and plugs into my LAN. It runs print server software that understands IPP, Appletalk, Novell and a few others, and allows me to make the printer available to every computer in the house (7 at the moment), greatly increasing the value/usefulness of the printer.
I've stashed away a few spare NEC hi-output toner cartridges that I found on closeout, and hope to heck that the electronics hold up - so I should be good with this "antique" printer for another 5 to 10 years. 20 years on a single laser printer sounds about right to me.:)
300 DPI may not be hi-res anymore, and 8 PPM mac isn't the fastest, but it's still good enough for almost everything I print.
I know it's old new to many/.'ers, but here is a link to my article "How to the Hackers: The Scoop on Internet Cheating and How You Can Combat It" from the July 2000 issue of Game Developer Magazine.
It's a programmer's view on a variety of cheating methods and some disuccsion of limitations and countermeasures. And before you even say it-- I didn't choose the title for the article, my editor did, so don't email me again about the misuse of the word 'hackers'.:-)
The phone companies charge us for unlisted numbers on our land lines. On our cell phones, however, they've realized they have been giving away for free something most people want.
By switching the system as a so-called "benefit" - allowing people to find out our cells numbers to call us, which we have pay airtime for incidentally, they EXPECT that most people will say "hey! Keep my number unlisted!" To which they will happily say "Sure, we can do that for $6.95 a month." BAM! Instant stealth revenue enhancement in a very price competitive industry.
Slashdot Mirror
My limits finally being hit.
After swearing it off since my disaster with RedHat 4, I now know I am going to make the effort to explore Linux again. My email, browsing and documents are mine, and if the OS is capable of poking through them to advance the interests and profits of someone else, then the party is over. I can't trust them when they say they'd never do that; if the capability exists, it will get used at some point in time. I'll keep a windows box for gaming, but not much else, and certainly not any accurate identifable personal information.
The most recent game I shipped was FPS game that shipped simultaneously on PC, Xbox and PS2. Did rather well too. Doesn't change the fact I wrote a lot of code for best-selling RTS games too.
Look at what drewmca said - he got got it pretty close.
Basically, the Wii is seen as in a different group than PC/360/PS3. Different games, different audience and different content requirements, not to mention different levels of CPU and Graphics horsepower.
First off, the three platforms mentioned are the ones that are making use of the insanely high-def content with uber-normal maps and shader effects. It's a lot more expensive to make content at the Unreal 3 engine level than at the Wii level. Personally, I think Nintendo is freaking awsome for realizing that you don't need to have 2 artists and a programmer spend a week getting the specular sweat-drop effects working just right against the character's facial acne. That's where it seems like were going with the crazy levels of detail these days.
We do have plans for Wii and other (non next-gen) platforms, but it's best to approach them on their own terms and not try to force a 360/PS3 title onto them.
... as it was with the PS2. Simple fundamentals ate getting in the way of any developer not in Sony's (or MS's) back pocket.
As a 3rd party developer, I can say that our high-end titles are being developed for all three platforms: PC, Xbox 360 and PS3. We're doing that out of necessity; "Next Gen" games are costing 8 figures+ ($10+ million) these days, much due to content.
Now, how many Xbox 360's are there out there? How many will there be when we ship? What about the PS3 installed base? A "Hit" game can sell to well under 5% (say 2-3%) of a given console's owners. 20 Million Xbox's? Sell 500k units (2.5% penetration) and that's a hit. Unless you're a Halo or Grand Theft auto, that's realisitc.
Now, the cost of developing for both next-gen consoles (360, PS3) is not that much more than developing for just one console (maybe low as 1.1~1.2x) , but you stand to sell a lot more in total. Using an engine such as Unreal 3? Not much more effort and you have a PC version too.
Now, about that $10 to $20 million we just spent? We better sell a lot of copies, or it was a mistake to make the game in the first place. Right now, it'll be a good while before there is an installed base of 10 million on either console, but yet our games are much more expensive to make than the previous generation. To recoup advances and hopefully turn a profit means getting it out to the largest audience possible.
Oh, and there's the little matter of Xbox 360 being out first, and having signifiantly better developer tools than Sony that has developers developing on Xbox 360 as first/primary, and then porting their games to PS3. Last generation it was different, but this time Xbox was available first, and Sony's efforts to catchup to Xbox's tool and documentation quality is more than lacking.
I worked on the "Age of" games through Mythology, though not on the AI, and perhaps I can shed some light on what you were seeing. I know much less about the system used in Mythology, so things that were true for Age1 and Age2 may not be so for it.
In each of those games, there were actually multiple 'AI systems' that comprised the "AI". This allowed for separation of short term goals from long term strategy and computer player personality, as well as for exploration, expansion and reaction to events such as being attacked.
In all of the Age games, AI players could be put on your team as allies, or grouped in teams against other teams of AI players. You could reveal the map, and sit back and watch them duke it out against each other.
The AI players always had an advantage over humans in terms of issuing order to units. In one 1/20 of a second turn, it could locate every unit that was idle, determine a task for it, and issue the task command.
The AI players 'Age of' games I worked on did not ever cheat by creating resources out of thin air or get different gathering or building speeds. You could starve a computer opponent out of a resource. On the Harderst difficulty level, all AI players would get bonus resources at the start of the game (and possibly at the start of each age).
Multiple AI players would work together in various ways; coordinating attacks, trading with each other, and even acting as a 'feeder' player.. going all economy and then tributing other AI players to boost them up quickly.
In Age of Empires 1 & 2, the AI players did not look at your list of units of and buildings to determine what you had, where you were, and how to counter it. Same for the locations of resources. An AI Player had to see it first, before it was allowed to 'know' about and act on it. In the other big RTS games, this is defiantly not true as they just look at the global object list. For this reason, the 'Age of' AI sent out units specifically to scout the world map. Once noticed, the info would be shared with allied AI players.
You could exploit this: if you were on an island, and never let any units go close enough to the water to be seen by AI ships, the AI players would never send any units to attack you, as it did not 'know' where any of your stuff was. Another way was to build in an area that the AI's had previously explored but were unlikely to wander back into. The line-of-sight distances in Age2 were increased to help keep this from handicapping the AI's too badly.
One area where 'cheating' was necessary was path finding. If you took a unit, and told it to move to an unexplored location, a valid path would have to be computed, requiring that it know about unexplored obstacles. This could be exploited in some ways. If a wonder was surrounded by walls, yet there was hidden break in the wall somewhere, just pathing a unit from outside to the wonder, would make the unit take the break, even if it was in an unexplored area as it was moving along a validly computed path.
I felt that we put much, *much* more work into making the 'Age of' AI's not cheat than most RTS games. What I learned from that though was that the public usually notice enough to care. A non cheating, general purpose AI often will not seem as 'intelligent' as an AI that cheats and has highly scripted or triggered events. The upside is that it allows the AI to play reasonably well on randomly generated maps; something most RTS games don't even bother to try.
Quite a few other, lesser known, computers were made during that time as well. Finding techinal information and replacement parts (unique ones, like keys) on those machines is a real challenege
/. reader knows anything about them, drop me a line!
I've got about 3 Exidy Sorcerers (2 working), a couple APF imagination Machines (working), and a non-working Compucolor II (circa 1979).
Supposedly, only 4,000 Compucolor IIs were made, and I have to find any technical info on them. If any
As a game developer, the community following that Fallout and Fallout 2 have sustained to this day totally amazes me. Of course when I've encountered some of the ex-Black Isle guys, I had my moments of being reduced to a fanboy as well. No offence guys :-)
Anyway, the user community has slowly but surely reverse engineered most of the Fallout games with the intent of making mods and fixing bugs in the games. The release of the Fallout 2 Mapper (thanks to many of the former team, especially Chris A) help accelerate the process.
One of the great things that came out of their effort has been a few mods that fix most of the gameplay bugs in Fallout 2. Fixed Items, Quests, Dialog options, NPC's, missing encounters, and so on. I personally replayed the game last fall with Seraph's Fallout 2 patch, and _WOW_, what an improvement.
My recommendation: If this article made you think you would like to replay Fallout or Fallout 2, head on over to http://www.nma-fallout.com/ and dig up one the latest patches and play the game as the designers had intended it to be.
Naaah... The answer's simple: 1) It's a big house 2) I have a lot of multi-light fixtures in the house.
I've got a lot of ceiling fans (11), and most of them have 4 or 5 light bulbs in them, and there's several chandeliers (TCP makes some great Candelabera base CF bulbs for chandeliers) which adds another 30 bulbs. Change the bulbs in the garage, attics, outdoor enclosures, closets, and so on, and the total adds up.
Since I had so many bulbs to replace, I wound up getting CF bulbs from several different manufacturers, depending on size/type. Usually where I could find the best deal, and due ot the fact that despite a lot of searching, there is no place that had the bulbs I need.
I've got GE, MaxLite , Greenlite, TCP, and Feit brand CF bulbs among others, and I as commented, there are differences. Some snap on instantly at near-full brightness, others pause a second, others take up to 10 seconds. The color differs slightly by brand too, even for bulbs rated the same color temperature.
There also seem to be difference based on size of bulb: I have 4 chandeliers in which I installed TCP 9w Candelabra CF bulbs (40 watt replacements) which has a skinny nose-cone shape and they take up to 30 seconds to warm up. In my ceiling fans, I use 9w Greenlite x-bulbs (40 watt replacements), which have a fat round A-bulb shape, and there is more room inside for the spiral tubing. Those bulbs seem to snap on at 95% brightness without exception.
I just finished converting the lighting in my house to save energy, and learned a few things in the process. Most of the incandescent bulbs were replaced with compact fluorescents, but I did install 4 LED light bulbs in one application.
The current generation of compact fluorescent bulbs has come a long way from the ones I remember 10-20 years ago. They don't have the flicker or startup problem anymore, and they are available in a variety of color temperatures from 2700 degrees (yellowish, comparable to incandescent) to 6100 degrees (white, sterile). For the same light output (lumens), energy consumption is normally 22% to 27% of the incandescent bulbs they replace. They very slightly in things like color and wattage depending on the manufacturer.
Nobody who has visited my home has yet noticed the difference.
Since you can find common CF bulbs sizes for under $2 per unit (try Sams Club, etc), and they should last 4 to 8 times as long as an incandescent, the economic case is pretty sound even before factoring in the energy savings.
I replaced 4x 7.5 watt bulbs with LED bulbs and noticed a few things. The LED bulb itself is about twice as large, and as others have mentioned, the light emitted is an eerie blue-white light. You defiantly notice it. These bulbs consume 0.8 watts and produce an output pretty close to the 7.5 watt bulbs they replaced, though I could not find the output in lumens for either bulb anywhere. They were about $7 a bulb, and are rated to last 100K hours, or about 50 times as long the bulbs they replaced. Since the bulb is actually made of up 18 individual LEDs inside, I believe the rating is for the mean time until 50% of the LEDs are no longer functioning.
After converting 152 of 160 bulbs in my home, my electric bill happy.
I highly doubt that Adrian immediately spends all the money he has cleared after taxes. Not knowing anything about him, you are making the leap from his disagreement as to the fair value of his ownership stake in the company that he help found, to concluding that he is on the verge of going broke and in desperate need of funds. Good grief.
Now, I do know a little about him. He lives just down the street from me -- literally. His home is very nice, but nothing too extravagant -- A 2200sq ft 3/2/2 in soCal costs more. I've also worked with several of his co-workers, and not one has ever described him or his lifestyle in anything but modest terms. Unless he spends a whole lot more than meets the eye on his Halloween parties, he is most likely not concerned about being unemployed for a while. He is however concerned about getting a fair deal. And you would be too, if you were in his place.
I just recently built a file server for my home. The most important considerations for me were data protection (I've got too much to lose), reliability, economy of operation and quietness, since the server would be in my office running 24/7.
.. NO.
.iso to/from it at more than 40mb a second. It's protected and will safely shutdown in an extended power outage.
First off, Low-noise is my new religion (with 8 PC's in my office, it makes a huge difference), and secondly I don't belive in skimping... being frugal and practical yes, but cutting quality to save a buck (a la walmart)
So to achive that I acquired the following:
- Antec Sonata Lifestyle case.
- nForce 2 motherboard with out chipset cooling fan (just heat sink)
- ATI Radeon 9200se video card with out cooling fan (just heat sink)
- Mobile Athlon XP 2400+ CPU - 35 watts
- 22 db Socket A Heat sink/Cooling fan unit
- 22 db 12cm fan.
- Gigabit NIC
- 512mb RAM
- Combo optical drive
- Samsung 120gb drive (to hold OS, and work space)
- 3ware Escalade 7504-LP RAID controller
- 4x Maxtor 300gb 5400 RPM Drives (chosen for lower heat output over 7200 RPM) drives
- APC 1000va UPS
So put it all together and you get a system that has a total of only 4 fans in it including the one in the power supply. It is the quietist PC I have. The case has a nice rack to hold the 4 RAID drives with cushions to reduce vibration/noise and mount a 12cm fan draw air directly across them, as well as another at the back to produce decent airflow despite their lower cfm ratings.
It runs cool and very quiet. I can't hear *anything* out of that system if my ears are more than a foot away from it. I can transfer large files like
It wasn't $250, but it's good enough for me to do real production work on and sleep better at night.
So I may not have the fastest possible server, but it's still more than enough
You could replicate using 400gb drives for 1.2TB of storage by trading off for the slightly higher heat of 7200 RPM.
I wonder how long before one of them fails, or if there aren't any incompaiblities between them.... That'll be fun to debug.
What I notice the most when I view classic cartoons with my kids is the compression artifacts. The old cartoons often had smooth curved lines and solid color fills, which don't fare very well when compressed by lossy algorithms that were designed primary for photographic data and operate on square cells of pixels. Not to mention the stingy bit-rates of digital TV providers.
The AGP/PCIe bus is not really the issue with Deferred (embedded DRAM is, but that's another story). The PC's video cards holds all the rendered attributes and accumulated light values in render targets on the card. Those render targets are then read back as textures in subsequent passes. Data is not sent back to PC across the bus as the CPU doesn't get involved. Render Target Changes (among other things) are a slowdown as the GPU pipeline has to be flushed. All those attribute buffers can eat up VRAM, reducing the amount available for textures and increasing thrashing though.
Sort of. You're right about the value proposition, but regarding hardware, here is an example:
One most important thing that is needed during the shading pass is to obtain the fragments position in the space you are working in. This usually means getting it's X,Y and Z values and transforming them into a space such as view space. On PC video cards, you can't read Z info from the Z-buffer (really would be nice), so you have to store it off somewhere. On a DX9 card such a Radeon 9600 you usually write out the Z to a separate render target using 32F format. On a DX8 card such as a Geforce 3, there is no support for float render targets, in fact nothing beyond 8888 and x555/x565 formats is supported. At lot more work is needed to get the fragment's position, and you have fewer pixel shaders ops to do it in.
You are not entirely right in saying that Deferred shading saves computations by eliminating overdraw, and yes fast-Z rejection on subsequent passes is a big help. Yes, overdraw is saved, but your lighting costs now directly turned into fill, and it is possible to have situations that are worse than forward (traditional) shading. The biggest benefit of Deferred shading IMHO is that you separate out attribute rendering from lighting. Other benefits include complete per-pixel lighting and normal mapping for the scene, and the visual consistency across the entire scene.
As an example, if you are going to render a character using forward shading, and there are several point lights that might impact the character, at each frame you need to determine which lights can impact the character and select a shader (or multi-pass) that supports all N number (and types) of lights.
With deferred shading, you just render out the character's attributes (albedo, position, normal, specular info, whatever) to buffers (DX9 multi-render targets are a big help). Then, in the lighting passes, you project the volume affected by the light into 2d screen space and render a ligthing shader into that volume. The shader looks at each fragment and calculates the light influence on that fragment and accumulates it (separately for diffuse and specular usually). Repeat for each light in the scene. The upshot is that the amount of fill/pixel shader needed is dependent upon the projected area affected by the light. The possible downside is that many of the fragments in that area may be in front or behind the light volume, in which case the lighting calculation is performed on a pixel that's the light doesn't impact (it just accumulates zero light).
For large numbers of small, dynamic lights, deferred can be a huge win. For static lighting it could also be a win. It all really depends on what the game is doing. There are other aspects of Deferred that are different or more difficult such as alpha-blending, but a full discussion is outside the scope of this forum.
The first commercial game that I know of to use a full deferred shading engine was Shrek for the Xbox, which was released in Fall 2001.
I also worked on an unannounced PC game in 2003 that had a fully deferred shading (lighting) renderer. Alas, that title was cancelled.
Deferred Shading on the PC is not very practical on pre-shader model 2.0 hardware, though possible I'm sure. The Xbox allows direct access to the register combiners, exposing more than 2x the fragment processing power than DX8 / Shader 1-1.3 on the PC.
Yea, right. I've seen this claim before enough times. You just can't create meaningful image data out of thin air. If it is not there to begin with, you're just making a (educated) guess.
"communicate gloss, depth and texture." -- sounds like a nice big filter kernel. Yawn. Next.
Just recently we had a bunch of guys from the Calgary Flames (pro Hockey team) come by our offices (Ensemble Studios, makers of Age of Empires, Age of Mythology, etc) and visit while they were in town to play the Dallas Stars. There is a write up on our web site at http://www.ensemblestudios.com/
It seems that a bunch of these guys are serious Conquerors (Age of Kings expansion) players, to the point where they've gone out and bought new laptops and carry on a portable network switch onto their flights and have major LAN game battles when flying from city to city between hockey games.
When they came over we gave them the red carpet treatment and showed them around our offices. Yet they were far more like awe-struck fan boys than pro athletes who are used to people approaching them as fans. A couple of the guys were so looking forward to the visit they said they were glad they weren't traded before visting Dallas... and I don't think they were joking.
Anyway, after showing them around we set up some team games for them to take on a few of our best players. (full story on our site). They had a blast, and we had a blast.
Considering that most pro athletes are males ages 22 to 36, which makes them part of the generation that grew up with Nintendo, etc, and have persued a life a professional cometitive gaming, its not surprising to find a bunch of them are passionate about computer and video games.
-Mp
So what's to prevent this company from selling the information to the highest bidder?
What I want to know is this: What's to prevent said private company from moving their data processing operations offshore where they can do the work cheaper? In such a case, what's to prevent the government of that country, or other entities, from stopping by and getting a copy of the database(s)?
If I worked for a foreign government that wanted to 'compromise' a few US citizens for their intelligence program, what better way to select targets. There are many different possibile uses for that data by foreign interests that one could imagine.
Saw this one coming when we bought a new car for my wife and it had a water cooled alternator!
Her car has more luxuries and gizmos than any of our previous cars: Navagation System, Universal Garage Door Opener, 11-speaker sound system w/ DSP, CD Changer, Rear hatch auto-closer (close hatch the last inch), 8 airbags, 16-way power seats, rear wiper arm, etc.. bla.. bla.. bla... and so on..
I talked to my mechanic about it and they already knew the 42-volt systems were coming. They said 42-volts was chosen to avoid amperages that would harm humans while providing enough capacity for all the stuff being piled onto the latest models.
It's a small miracle that the battery drain if the car isn't driven every day....
I've come 10+ year old Apple Laser Writers that had over 100,000 (100K) pages output (in an office environment).
:)
I was wondering this same thing just the other day. I have a NEC Silentwriter 95, circa 1992-3 here in my home office, with 14,000+ pages on it and it's still going and looking like new. It's fairly big in size compared to the printers that came out a few years after it, which I attribute to being engineered to a different set of specifications.
There are two reasons for it's remaining useful to me:
#1) Postscript. (Level 2 to be exact)
Postscript is the closest thing printers have to a universal language. Platform and OS agnostic not to mention resolution independent. I used it 10 years ago with my DOS based word processor (Lotus Manuscript) and use it today with various versions of Windows, and Mac OS9 and OSX.
#2) Network Print Server/Printer Port Adapter.
I bought this little device made by Hawking Electronics for about $70 that connects to the printer's parallel port and plugs into my LAN. It runs print server software that understands IPP, Appletalk, Novell and a few others, and allows me to make the printer available to every computer in the house (7 at the moment), greatly increasing the value/usefulness of the printer.
I've stashed away a few spare NEC hi-output toner cartridges that I found on closeout, and hope to heck that the electronics hold up - so I should be good with this "antique" printer for another 5 to 10 years. 20 years on a single laser printer sounds about right to me.
300 DPI may not be hi-res anymore, and 8 PPM mac isn't the fastest, but it's still good enough for almost everything I print.
-Mp
And if they can get the Turbo Plasma version, our boys will be unstoppable, even if their opponents have Power Armor... We should annex Canada first.
-Mp
War. War never Changes.
"How to the Hackers: The Scoop on Internet Cheating and How You Can Combat It" from the July 2000 issue of Game Developer Magazine.
It's a programmer's view on a variety of cheating methods and some disuccsion of limitations and countermeasures. And before you even say it-- I didn't choose the title for the article, my editor did, so don't email me again about the misuse of the word 'hackers'. :-)
-Mp
The phone companies charge us for unlisted numbers on our land lines. On our cell phones, however, they've realized they have been giving away for free something most people want.
By switching the system as a so-called "benefit" - allowing people to find out our cells numbers to call us, which we have pay airtime for incidentally, they EXPECT that most people will say "hey! Keep my number unlisted!" To which they will happily say "Sure, we can do that for $6.95 a month." BAM! Instant stealth revenue enhancement in a very price competitive industry.
-Mp