Most commercial games seem to be written primarily in C/LUA.
The engine is mostly C/C++, but every part of it has tight bindings to LUA for the regular non-programmer game-designers.
I mean, there's literally thousands of games using LUA, which I agree is more than Java, and probably more than C#.
Regarding your Quake 3 statement - no, it'd be slower in C#; but it might not be slower in Java.
Quake2 ported to java ran very fast even on last generation hardware and JVMs. I'm curious how well it would run with a newer JVM. I remember someone testing it on a weak machine(I think it was a 300mhz P2 laptop?); he found that although memory usage was higher, it actually had a higher framerate, indicating that its CPU usage was probably lower.
(Reference count indicates it can no longer be used.)
Modern garbage collectors don't use reference counting.
JIT Compilers are neat (especially Hotspot). Java actually sometimes generates more optimized code than C; but you still have the extra memory overhead, and garbage collection slows it down by anywhere from 10-15% (possibly more in server environments, as memory usage approaches capacity)
So in a theoretical computer with unlimited memory, Java would be faster because of the dynamic optimizing nature, but such a system doesn't exist.:P
From speaking with genius software engineers, I've concluded that maybe 4-5% of C programmers should actually be coding in C. The rest should be coding in a language like Java or C#, which holds their hands.
If ~95% of C programmers moved to these languages, we'd get less buggy faster running software. (because few of us know how to optimize C properly, or bother to do it, so more often then not a JVM or JIT compiler does it better)
Lets wait and see how well it sells before we point fingers.;)
Most of those downloaders are probably just eager to get it early. It makes them feel special/happy. If the game is solid, that should translate into more sales.
Demigod did well enough, didn't it? Things looked bleak for it in the first few days!
That's why all my DVD's are illegally on my media center now
In some countries it's not illegal to convert your legitimately owned DVDs to another format for personal use. One example would be Canada.
It's not even illegal to crack DRM or other protections so long as it's for personal use only. The companies selling DRM infested stuff say it's to enhance the consumer's experience. That makes it completely arguable in court that you're just enhancing your own experience for personal use only. The only way they'd get you is if you downloaded the new copies. (while simultaneously uploading them)
But in the US, yep, it's illegal!:P
Oh yeah - why are all my newlines messed up? This slashdot update changed something?
Every time the linux kernel gets updated, speeds in benchmarks (both synthetic and real world) go up.
Sure, software like Gnome or KDE gets slower over time, but the kernel gets faster and faster.
Exact same thing for OSX, and BSD. New versions are usually faster at specific things.
Windows, though - always slower by a few percent with each new version of Windows. Then they patch the performance up a bit with service packs, and after that they worsen it by implementing new DRM. With Vista, media playback took a big CPU usage hit!
If you look at the benchmarks in other articles, XP still reliably comes out ahead of Vista, and by proxy ahead of Win7.
I found that CFQ gave best results on my Ubuntu box. When moving files around, it was usually about 20% faster than deadline, and 100% faster than anticipatory. I can't remember if I tested noop.
For regular software, yes - but for operating systems and kernels, performance regressions are the exception rather than the rule, and Microsoft is almost always that exception.
They also forgot the most important test with Crysis - framerates!
Older tests have proven that SSDs have a massive impact on the minimum framerate for texture hungry games. Waiting 15ms for some textures is bad since that wastes most of that whole frame.
I don't understand why the article writer is so enamored by burst speeds. Burst is just data coming in from cache... my old 320GB Seagate drives get burst speeds over 200MB/sec. I threw four of them in RAID and was enjoying a comfortable 700MB/sec burst speed; though sustained read was barely over 220MB/sec.
But burst almost never comes into play. The most likely scenario for seeing its effect would be... starting up a game, exiting, then starting the same game over again. Although I suppose burst is several seconds long, so it does reflect on the drives' skill in reading data before it's needed. (Something SSDs don't really have to do, so no impressive data bursts; just super high sustained read)
The USSR had very strict border control and it was more to keep their populace in than to keep foreigners out. Thus I see this as a step down a very bad path.
Uh? VLC's default hotkey scheme may not be the best, but it's completely configurable which earns it +1000 karma points over just about every other player I've tried.
Really? Since when has it been that way? I just checked, and you are correct, although it still fails because it can't assign identical hotkeys to identical tasks.
Like toggling fullscreen. Alt+Enter can't be used for both entering and exiting fullscreen.
Media Player Classic has had this feature longer, and it actually recognizes you may want to use the same key combination to toggle something. (like fullscreen mode)
The difference is more pronounced on older systems.
For example, when trying to get a video to play on an old 300mhz P2 laptop with 2.5MB of video memory and 128MB of RAM!
VLC? Good luck playing anything. Media Player Classic + ffdshow? Actually fast enough to watch xvids if you pick a properly optimized version and tweak the output settings a bit.
That was an experiment I did on an old lappy... I was quite impressed that I got it to play mostly stutter-free.:D
Unzip into its own folder somewhere. Lots of people use C:\Program Files\Media Player Classic\
Start it up, open the options and set file associations. If you want to be able to open it without opening a video, create a shortcut too, and drag it to the start menu.
For output options, I find EVR custom works best - but if that isn't available, go for VMR9 renderless.
So what you're saying is, you had no problem downloading the program, but you want source code instead?
Well, I'll be honest - I have no clue where the source is available - but does it really matter?
When most people go to download VLC, they're looking for a compiled binary - not the source code. I'm pretty sure your complaint isn't a valid slight against the project. It's just your personal preference to not use something where the source isn't available.
I'm fine with that - but don't make it into a problem of the software. There's tons of great closed source software. I'm not sure if it's supposed to be closed source, but I really wouldn't care if it was, since it does the job and does it well.
PS. I believe some of the filters have their source code included, but that's hardly the entire project.
Yes, I agree with most of your points. VLC is very well supported, on a lot of operating systems - but certain parts of it just aren't good.
For example, the lack of acceleration makes compatibility great across the board, but it makes it dog slow on every OS. Until recently it was also single threaded - actually, it might still be. 1080p isn't even possible on most CPUs, while with MPC-HC, DirectShow + GPU acceleration, you'd be looking at 15-20% CPU usage max. (and you get to enable quality enhancing shaders)
I'm not saying it's bad; it just has a different featureset, with compatibility prioritized over...
-An intuitive UI -A good hotkey scheme -Hardware acceleration -GPU shader/codec support -Ability to use (impressive) directshow codecs
Unfortunately for me, compatibility hasn't been so great on my computers. I've always had less trouble with MPC-HC. VLC doesn't play audio on one of my computers, and it gets aspect ratios screwed up on another. (How? No clue. It doesn't have any acceleration, so I'm totally baffled.)
I've also repeatedly come across videos that it has no support for. In the end, if MPC-HC + KliteMega can't open it, I just go for MPlayer. (which almost never fails, but has an even worse UI. Or rather, it has no UI; it's just a box with the video playing in it.:x
To each his own. My Uncle has a Mac, and he says VLC beats the pants off Quicktime. Heh - I agree with him!:P
I just wouldn't take VLC if I had the chance to get a nice DirectShow media player(like MPC-HC) and ffdshow.
Slashdot Mirror
Most commercial games seem to be written primarily in C/LUA.
The engine is mostly C/C++, but every part of it has tight bindings to LUA for the regular non-programmer game-designers.
I mean, there's literally thousands of games using LUA, which I agree is more than Java, and probably more than C#.
Regarding your Quake 3 statement - no, it'd be slower in C#; but it might not be slower in Java.
Quake2 ported to java ran very fast even on last generation hardware and JVMs. I'm curious how well it would run with a newer JVM. I remember someone testing it on a weak machine(I think it was a 300mhz P2 laptop?); he found that although memory usage was higher, it actually had a higher framerate, indicating that its CPU usage was probably lower.
but a poor programmer will always find ways to do things wrong.
But at least it won't leak memory up the wazzoo and crash constantly, right? :P I'd take horrible performance over that!
You could use a wireless keyboard.
You could map remote control keys to keyboard keys. It's easily doable on Windows, so I assume there's something similar on Linux.
Heck yes. I played Left4Dead on a PC from 2002, and was getting 30fps!
But I did finally succumb and pick up a brand new 8800GS... for $45CAD... about $35 USD.
True geeks don't need a monster card like this. ;)
(Reference count indicates it can no longer be used.)
Modern garbage collectors don't use reference counting.
JIT Compilers are neat (especially Hotspot). Java actually sometimes generates more optimized code than C; but you still have the extra memory overhead, and garbage collection slows it down by anywhere from 10-15% (possibly more in server environments, as memory usage approaches capacity)
So in a theoretical computer with unlimited memory, Java would be faster because of the dynamic optimizing nature, but such a system doesn't exist. :P
From speaking with genius software engineers, I've concluded that maybe 4-5% of C programmers should actually be coding in C. The rest should be coding in a language like Java or C#, which holds their hands.
If ~95% of C programmers moved to these languages, we'd get less buggy faster running software. (because few of us know how to optimize C properly, or bother to do it, so more often then not a JVM or JIT compiler does it better)
Lets wait and see how well it sells before we point fingers. ;)
Most of those downloaders are probably just eager to get it early. It makes them feel special/happy. If the game is solid, that should translate into more sales.
Demigod did well enough, didn't it? Things looked bleak for it in the first few days!
That's why all my DVD's are illegally on my media center now
In some countries it's not illegal to convert your legitimately owned DVDs to another format for personal use. One example would be Canada.
It's not even illegal to crack DRM or other protections so long as it's for personal use only. The companies selling DRM infested stuff say it's to enhance the consumer's experience. That makes it completely arguable in court that you're just enhancing your own experience for personal use only. The only way they'd get you is if you downloaded the new copies. (while simultaneously uploading them)
But in the US, yep, it's illegal! :P
Oh yeah - why are all my newlines messed up? This slashdot update changed something?
Disclaimer: IANAL, blah blah.
I don't quite understand why this was flamebait.
Every time the linux kernel gets updated, speeds in benchmarks (both synthetic and real world) go up.
Sure, software like Gnome or KDE gets slower over time, but the kernel gets faster and faster.
Exact same thing for OSX, and BSD. New versions are usually faster at specific things.
Windows, though - always slower by a few percent with each new version of Windows. Then they patch the performance up a bit with service packs, and after that they worsen it by implementing new DRM. With Vista, media playback took a big CPU usage hit!
If you look at the benchmarks in other articles, XP still reliably comes out ahead of Vista, and by proxy ahead of Win7.
I found that CFQ gave best results on my Ubuntu box. When moving files around, it was usually about 20% faster than deadline, and 100% faster than anticipatory. I can't remember if I tested noop.
For regular software, yes - but for operating systems and kernels, performance regressions are the exception rather than the rule, and Microsoft is almost always that exception.
They also forgot the most important test with Crysis - framerates!
Older tests have proven that SSDs have a massive impact on the minimum framerate for texture hungry games. Waiting 15ms for some textures is bad since that wastes most of that whole frame.
I don't understand why the article writer is so enamored by burst speeds. Burst is just data coming in from cache... my old 320GB Seagate drives get burst speeds over 200MB/sec. I threw four of them in RAID and was enjoying a comfortable 700MB/sec burst speed; though sustained read was barely over 220MB/sec.
But burst almost never comes into play. The most likely scenario for seeing its effect would be... starting up a game, exiting, then starting the same game over again. Although I suppose burst is several seconds long, so it does reflect on the drives' skill in reading data before it's needed. (Something SSDs don't really have to do, so no impressive data bursts; just super high sustained read)
Well, he freed up a whole megabyte and a half.
If memory usage is that tight, then I congratulate you for saving roughly 4.7% of the available memory.
The USSR had very strict border control and it was more to keep their populace in than to keep foreigners out. Thus I see this as a step down a very bad path.
You might be interested in this video:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1294790/
It presents some interesting info on Fascism, and the parallels that have been appearing between the US and Germany(of the past).
Even if you disagree with it (unlikely), it educates on what to watch out for. The rights of the US citizen are slowly slipping away.
Edit: My bad. Latest version actually makes the jump that if no exit key is set, it lets you exit with the fullscreen key.
And ontop of that, Space pauses the video! When I first started using VLC, Space did nothing. :P
Anyway, my point about MPC having it longer still stands. ;)
Very nice! Downloaded; I'll be sure to use it in the future!
Uh? VLC's default hotkey scheme may not be the best, but it's completely configurable which earns it +1000 karma points over just about every other player I've tried.
Really? Since when has it been that way? I just checked, and you are correct, although it still fails because it can't assign identical hotkeys to identical tasks.
Like toggling fullscreen. Alt+Enter can't be used for both entering and exiting fullscreen.
Media Player Classic has had this feature longer, and it actually recognizes you may want to use the same key combination to toggle something. (like fullscreen mode)
Even phones have plenty of RAM. What they lack is CPU power, so any sort of acceleration he can take advantage of will help.
And acceleration usually means even more memory usage. :P
The difference is more pronounced on older systems.
For example, when trying to get a video to play on an old 300mhz P2 laptop with 2.5MB of video memory and 128MB of RAM!
VLC? Good luck playing anything. Media Player Classic + ffdshow? Actually fast enough to watch xvids if you pick a properly optimized version and tweak the output settings a bit.
That was an experiment I did on an old lappy... I was quite impressed that I got it to play mostly stutter-free. :D
Hey, it's Windows software. Tarballs are more of a hassle than SVN on windows! :P
Thank goodness for TortoiseSVN.
I'm pretty sure an .exe file is a "usable binary".
32bit link
64bit link
Unzip into its own folder somewhere. Lots of people use C:\Program Files\Media Player Classic\
Start it up, open the options and set file associations. If you want to be able to open it without opening a video, create a shortcut too, and drag it to the start menu.
For output options, I find EVR custom works best - but if that isn't available, go for VMR9 renderless.
So what you're saying is, you had no problem downloading the program, but you want source code instead?
Well, I'll be honest - I have no clue where the source is available - but does it really matter?
When most people go to download VLC, they're looking for a compiled binary - not the source code. I'm pretty sure your complaint isn't a valid slight against the project. It's just your personal preference to not use something where the source isn't available.
I'm fine with that - but don't make it into a problem of the software. There's tons of great closed source software. I'm not sure if it's supposed to be closed source, but I really wouldn't care if it was, since it does the job and does it well.
PS. I believe some of the filters have their source code included, but that's hardly the entire project.
It's okay - the MPAA are shooting themselves in the foot. Every time a Windows user can't figure out how to play a DVD, a new pirate is born. :D
Yep. Every single one of those would work. Klite, VLC, MPC/MPC-HC!
Heck, most computers come with extra software like PowerDVD. I'm amazed they had nothing.
Yes, I agree with most of your points. VLC is very well supported, on a lot of operating systems - but certain parts of it just aren't good.
For example, the lack of acceleration makes compatibility great across the board, but it makes it dog slow on every OS. Until recently it was also single threaded - actually, it might still be. 1080p isn't even possible on most CPUs, while with MPC-HC, DirectShow + GPU acceleration, you'd be looking at 15-20% CPU usage max. (and you get to enable quality enhancing shaders)
I'm not saying it's bad; it just has a different featureset, with compatibility prioritized over...
-An intuitive UI
-A good hotkey scheme
-Hardware acceleration
-GPU shader/codec support
-Ability to use (impressive) directshow codecs
Unfortunately for me, compatibility hasn't been so great on my computers. I've always had less trouble with MPC-HC. VLC doesn't play audio on one of my computers, and it gets aspect ratios screwed up on another. (How? No clue. It doesn't have any acceleration, so I'm totally baffled.)
I've also repeatedly come across videos that it has no support for. In the end, if MPC-HC + KliteMega can't open it, I just go for MPlayer. (which almost never fails, but has an even worse UI. Or rather, it has no UI; it's just a box with the video playing in it. :x
To each his own. My Uncle has a Mac, and he says VLC beats the pants off Quicktime. Heh - I agree with him! :P
I just wouldn't take VLC if I had the chance to get a nice DirectShow media player(like MPC-HC) and ffdshow.