...if this works back-projected, combined with the automated moving floor tiles and some sort of haptic glove device, we'd be a damn sight closer to a holodeck than anything else I've seen lately.
No it won't. Nintendo will continue making consoles and games for gamers, while Sony and MS will cater to people who consider only wanting 2 or 3 games for a console justifies the purchase of one.
Jesus dude, you're going to drive them out of business, if you say you like the console, pick up more games because they're selling those to you at a loss!!!
I love games. I am a gamer, and have been for about 20 years. I have many games on many consoles, and on my PC. I am by no means a 'casual' gamer, I quite like hardcore shmups as well as more mainstream games. Nintendo have been relying on the same core franchises since around the time I started playing games in the early 80s, and I think for many people these hold little to no meaning, and in some cases are getting pretty tired. Nintendo makes games for Nintendo fans, and has done for some time now, I feel. If they want to keep that strategy going, they might get a shock...
I mean, even the Zelda fans I knew, who sang the praises of Wind Waker when it came out on GC, admit that after a few weeks when the novely of the lovely cel-shaded graphics had worn off, it was quite a laboured game experience (which is how I'd always felt about Zelda, but that's another story).
Now, I'm not saying Nintendo should stray from their core values, or at least what it's generally perceived that their core values are. I'm all for innovative games, good gameplay, and ***fun*** in games. I just don't get that from Nintendo 99% of the time. And I don't think I'm the only one...
And anyway, I thought MS was the only current console company selling hardware at a loss? It's been said on here many times:)
I'm not a fan of any of their money-spinning franchises. I don't really like Mario since it went 3D. Never really liked Zelda. I don't "get" Metroid, I can recognise some of its goodness, but I don't enjoy it. Even their few exclusives don't really float my boat (Resident Evil? No thanks!).
Whether good or bad, PS2 has the breadth and depth of range that the Gamecube could only dream of. Whether you like sports games, driving games, beat 'em ups, survival horrors, shooters, or even just strange things you won't find on another console (just look at EyeToy and SingStar, all you people who say only Nintendo innovate!), you'll find at least 2 or 3 possible purchases. Maybe only one will be good, who knows. But the point is, there's a wide choice.
Xbox gets more ports, I think. That's just a gut call by the way, I haven't checked it out in terms of titles, but certainly it seems that way to me as a slightly interested observer. The ports are usually enhanced in some way (almost always graphically at least, but things like multiplayer Tenchu for instance).
And what does Gamecube have for me? Well, I do own one. And I own one game. It was made by Sega, and it is Super Monkey Ball. I looked in my local games shop a few weeks ago for something to buy, and the only thing that I considered was Super Monkey Ball 2.
Ah well. Maybe Revolution will have more for general gamers like me...:/
I'm a games programmer, and know a few guys at Rockstar but don't and didn't work there. I know that this stuff was in the game, and was taken out by them before publication. Having disabled a few things at the last minute on published titles (nothing this controversial, just memory card stuff on Xbox) I feel some sympathy for the guys and gals in Edinburgh on this one.
So, how come it's still there? I can guess that, rather than being taken out like this:
#if 0 void ShowFilthyPornToKids() { // This will corrupt the youth of America!
<code snipped> } #endif
// This will corrupt the youth of America!
<code snipped> }
And thus, I suspect, the compiler leaves the code in there waiting for stuff to be re-enabled. The in-game models and so forth are all still there, etc, so the stuff can just get turned on (no pun intended) for the poor children to "accidentally" see! Someone think of the children, please!:/
...and its pretty cool. As an artist, you can use it to get your artwork printed onto say archival-quality paper, or a big canvas, or whatever. As a shopper you can get artwork you like on objects of various sorts.
Dunno if its something I'd bet a large amount of money on as an investor, since I'm not sure how much money they'd expect a site like that to make, but its a pretty friendly and good site for what it does. Maybe that's enough...
Yeah, agreed. Profiting from the iPod with the marginal iTunes store was a smart move. I don't think it would be replicable by MS for movies - anyone out there think MS would be capable of an iPod equivalent for movies?:D
I don't think MS wan't to be in on the content-provision side, Apple seem to have proven that (for music at least) large profit isn't to be had.
I think that MS just want to be the sole software technology provider to multiple hardware/content providers, that way they can leverage their desktop OS monopoly to the fullest extent when exacting license fees from several small companies, rather than having a larger corporate entity which could dictate terms to MS.
Doom 3 had excellent lighting tech, but did virtually nothing with it coz the levels were all dark.
Deus Ex 2, on the other hand, was rubbish but had a use for good lighting - seeing bad guys round corners because of the shadows they cast, etc. Similar tech, less good looking, rubbish game, but I reckon that's where this kind of thing is taking us:)
Yeah, and "hacking" isn't literally taking an axe or other sharp implement and hitting something with it.
We can sometimes use words to denote something other than their current literal definition you know. Attack the *ideas*, not the words used to express them. Even if the words are designed to elicit a negative emotional response...
To derive its piracy rate, IDC estimates the average amount of software that is installed on a PC per country, using data from surveys, interviews and other studies. That figure is then reduced by the known quantity of software sold per country-a calculation in which IDC specialises. The result: a (supposed) amount of piracy per country. Multiplying that figure by the revenue from legitimate sales thus yields the retail value of the unpaid-for software. This, IDC and BSA claim, equals the amount of lost revenue.
So, if there's 3,000,000 people with an operating system, but our members have only sold 2,000,000, that's 1,000,000 pirated copies of our member's operating systems! Call the police/FBI/attack-squads!!!
Surely that can't be how they work it out. Anyone ever had one of these IDC surveys? How specific are they, would they allow them to filter out software by publisher/developer so that for instance GIMP and Photoshop don't both show up as "Graphics Tools"? If not, that means every copy of GIMP would be a loss to Adobe!
(Note - it wouldn't surprise me if that is exactly how it works, and that it was entirely deliberate, but that's a different matter...)
A racing game, which sold quite well, had a fully working play-tested "ghost car" time-trial game mode (where your best lap is saved, and a see-through version of your car can be watched driving it from then on, until you beat it, and so on).
This ghost car system, it turns out, is patented by Atari, and at the time they wanted a huge pot-o-cash, far more than the developer could really afford (or wished to pay, frankly), so the ghost car got removed. The time trial mode stayed, but was for me at least less fun than it had been.
That is despite the patents never mentioning a computer game, but a "driver training system". The patents in question (US at least) are 5,269,687, 5,354,202 and 5,577,913. Atari may well have invented it, but that isn't my point. The point is that it is an extremely simple to implement *fun* addition to a game, and the possible validity of the patent means that games are either less fun, or cost more if you license the patents which *might* apply to them. Bah, where did all the fun go?:(
Examples of places where this might not apply - top secret underground bases, space, outdoors. Some games involve going into these places.
Also, most of these maps are fairly detail-free, not to scale, and don't have a flashing arrow showing where you are on them, so are of limited use in a game environment.
I do know what you meant, though. It's worth noting that many games have signs telling you where to go, and some games do even have lobby-maps as textures on objects in lobbies. Just not hugely useful, really.
I had to go and read the linked article to work that one out. The argument is as follows:
In-order cores are much smaller, cheaper, and easier to design than out-of-order cores. Therefore, hardware manufacturers use in-order cores.
In-order cores are harder to use efficiently than out-of-order cores, as the developer has to do more work. Therefore, more effort will have to be expended to get the same amount of work done.
Game developers are bad at programming, therefore will write poor AI code because...
And that's where I get kind of lost. I'd always thought that games programmers were meant to be one of the last proponents of hardcore optimization skillz0rs. Certainly the guys I've worked with have been pretty good at it. I've never had to optimize (as a formal task) myself, but I know the general approaches. Why having in-order cores is meant to hurt AI, I don't know.
The shiny graphics point I think is a reference to the current focussing on GPUs, shading languages and so on, which people seem to think is to the detriment of the rest of the game. I'm of the opposite opinion - having used shaders in games, it leaves you more time to focus on gameplay (well, it leaves you more time with which you *could* focus on gameplay, but that's a different discussion);)
I was going to write a long point-by-point discussion (and partial refutation) of the points listed in this article thing. It would of course take forever, no one would read it, and the problems would still be there at the end of it.
Most of the things in the article (having shorter load times, better AI, no invisible borders, etc) are things decent game developers strive to do on every title. However, many of these problems are hardware-bound (you can only stream data from dvd so quickly regardless of how you optimize your code), knowledge-bound (AI isn't exactly a solved problem is it!), or practicality-bound (yeah, "come up with a new genre" is easy to say, you do it, find funding, get it published, etc.)
Another few quick points -
"bullshit" about graphics is indeed bullshit, but it *sells games* and people put up with it for some reason. Trade description laws might well apply, if they do, use 'em!
Save points are a fairly nice way of saving progress in a completely linear world, like for instance Halo. Less so in free-roamers like Resident Evil, but thats just my opinion. I can see why developers use them, and I've worked on games which have them in, and its better than the alternative. They're not there to save space!
Sports game commentary will suck for quite some time, game DVDs aren't 9Gb (usually, anyway), and commentary is difficulty not because of how much speech you record...
"Superimposing shit" on the screen is going to happen until you can come up with a way of conveying all information without text (or sound, because deaf people play games too y'know). Even cunningly hiding it like in The Movies isn't getting rid of it.
And do you have some kind of magical map that shows you floor layouts of places you've never been before? No? Didn't think so. How do you find your way around? Exactly.
Just as an aside, real-time rendering of movies from the scene files would indeed be bigger than the resultant movie, probably by quite a margin - mainly because of textures, unless they're all procedural...
...the specs kind of confirm something I'd thought before most of the details were announced:
The Xbox 360 and PS3 are quite similar in philosophy to their immediate predecessors, in terms of development philosophy at least.
Xbox was more conventional, by modeling itself after a PC for the most part, developers had a good grounding in how to take immediate advantage of the platform. Look at early games such as DOA3 and Halo, which still stack up fairly well today. The latest Xbox games haven't really pushed the Xbox a huge amount further (and have in some cases failed when trying to, yes Halo 2 I'm looking at you!).
PS2 on the other hand started off fairly tamely, because of its off-kilter architecture. Early games were fairly iffy, especially on the graphics side, but with the performance waiting to be unlocked as the console's life cycle has progressed - just look at San Andreas compared to the original GTA3. It creaks a bit, but the world is over 3 times larger, and has a load more stuff in it.
I reckon the same is going to be true now - Xbox performance stats look like being tamer than PS3, but more workable for early adopters, and easier to get to grips with. PS3, without a good set of early libs from Sony (which they aren't known for) or a nice early version of Renderware or other middleware, is going to be a developer headache. But the power it has waiting to be unlocked should better Xbox 360's best.
My biggest question is, will Xbox's early start this time around help it get a foothold before PS3's eventual ascendance? Time will tell. But frankly, I want both - hopefully quality games will appear on both platforms!
PS - I don't care about Revolution, unless there's a sequel to Super Monkey Ball for it. I'm not a Mario/Zelda/Metroid fan, Nintendo means nothing to me...:(
From the sounds of things, the BT fault line lied when they dealt with me about 12 months ago. Unless its a change in policy, of course! My line died completely one afternoon, called the fault number, they said they could only come out and fix it mon-fri 9-5. I was commuting to work, so was out of the house from 7-7:/
Slashdot Mirror
...if this works back-projected, combined with the automated moving floor tiles and some sort of haptic glove device, we'd be a damn sight closer to a holodeck than anything else I've seen lately.
No it won't. Nintendo will continue making consoles and games for gamers, while Sony and MS will cater to people who consider only wanting 2 or 3 games for a console justifies the purchase of one.
:)
Jesus dude, you're going to drive them out of business, if you say you like the console, pick up more games because they're selling those to you at a loss!!!
I love games. I am a gamer, and have been for about 20 years. I have many games on many consoles, and on my PC. I am by no means a 'casual' gamer, I quite like hardcore shmups as well as more mainstream games. Nintendo have been relying on the same core franchises since around the time I started playing games in the early 80s, and I think for many people these hold little to no meaning, and in some cases are getting pretty tired. Nintendo makes games for Nintendo fans, and has done for some time now, I feel. If they want to keep that strategy going, they might get a shock...
I mean, even the Zelda fans I knew, who sang the praises of Wind Waker when it came out on GC, admit that after a few weeks when the novely of the lovely cel-shaded graphics had worn off, it was quite a laboured game experience (which is how I'd always felt about Zelda, but that's another story).
Now, I'm not saying Nintendo should stray from their core values, or at least what it's generally perceived that their core values are. I'm all for innovative games, good gameplay, and ***fun*** in games. I just don't get that from Nintendo 99% of the time. And I don't think I'm the only one...
And anyway, I thought MS was the only current console company selling hardware at a loss? It's been said on here many times
...are the problem Nintendo has. Seriously.
:/
I'm not a fan of any of their money-spinning franchises. I don't really like Mario since it went 3D. Never really liked Zelda. I don't "get" Metroid, I can recognise some of its goodness, but I don't enjoy it. Even their few exclusives don't really float my boat (Resident Evil? No thanks!).
Whether good or bad, PS2 has the breadth and depth of range that the Gamecube could only dream of. Whether you like sports games, driving games, beat 'em ups, survival horrors, shooters, or even just strange things you won't find on another console (just look at EyeToy and SingStar, all you people who say only Nintendo innovate!), you'll find at least 2 or 3 possible purchases. Maybe only one will be good, who knows. But the point is, there's a wide choice.
Xbox gets more ports, I think. That's just a gut call by the way, I haven't checked it out in terms of titles, but certainly it seems that way to me as a slightly interested observer. The ports are usually enhanced in some way (almost always graphically at least, but things like multiplayer Tenchu for instance).
And what does Gamecube have for me? Well, I do own one. And I own one game. It was made by Sega, and it is Super Monkey Ball. I looked in my local games shop a few weeks ago for something to buy, and the only thing that I considered was Super Monkey Ball 2.
Ah well. Maybe Revolution will have more for general gamers like me...
Everyone was implanted with an ID chip which could be read wirelessly and used to track them?
...but:
:)
"This XBE file hasn't been tested, as we don't have a modchipped XBOX."
Anyone out there with a chipped xbox know if this works at all?
...NO! :)
So, how come it's still there? I can guess that, rather than being taken out like this:It may instead have been removed like this:And thus, I suspect, the compiler leaves the code in there waiting for stuff to be re-enabled. The in-game models and so forth are all still there, etc, so the stuff can just get turned on (no pun intended) for the poor children to "accidentally" see! Someone think of the children, please!
...stuff that matters?
If the best thing they could come up with was that it had a single bug fix, perhaps not very newsworthy? Does it matter?
...and its pretty cool. As an artist, you can use it to get your artwork printed onto say archival-quality paper, or a big canvas, or whatever. As a shopper you can get artwork you like on objects of various sorts.
Dunno if its something I'd bet a large amount of money on as an investor, since I'm not sure how much money they'd expect a site like that to make, but its a pretty friendly and good site for what it does. Maybe that's enough...
Yeah, agreed. Profiting from the iPod with the marginal iTunes store was a smart move. I don't think it would be replicable by MS for movies - anyone out there think MS would be capable of an iPod equivalent for movies? :D
I don't think MS wan't to be in on the content-provision side, Apple seem to have proven that (for music at least) large profit isn't to be had.
I think that MS just want to be the sole software technology provider to multiple hardware/content providers, that way they can leverage their desktop OS monopoly to the fullest extent when exacting license fees from several small companies, rather than having a larger corporate entity which could dictate terms to MS.
Doom 3 had excellent lighting tech, but did virtually nothing with it coz the levels were all dark.
:)
Deus Ex 2, on the other hand, was rubbish but had a use for good lighting - seeing bad guys round corners because of the shadows they cast, etc. Similar tech, less good looking, rubbish game, but I reckon that's where this kind of thing is taking us
Yeah, and "hacking" isn't literally taking an axe or other sharp implement and hitting something with it.
We can sometimes use words to denote something other than their current literal definition you know. Attack the *ideas*, not the words used to express them. Even if the words are designed to elicit a negative emotional response...
So, if there's 3,000,000 people with an operating system, but our members have only sold 2,000,000, that's 1,000,000 pirated copies of our member's operating systems! Call the police/FBI/attack-squads!!!
Surely that can't be how they work it out. Anyone ever had one of these IDC surveys? How specific are they, would they allow them to filter out software by publisher/developer so that for instance GIMP and Photoshop don't both show up as "Graphics Tools"? If not, that means every copy of GIMP would be a loss to Adobe!
(Note - it wouldn't surprise me if that is exactly how it works, and that it was entirely deliberate, but that's a different matter...)
...of how patents affect games in development.
:(
A racing game, which sold quite well, had a fully working play-tested "ghost car" time-trial game mode (where your best lap is saved, and a see-through version of your car can be watched driving it from then on, until you beat it, and so on).
This ghost car system, it turns out, is patented by Atari, and at the time they wanted a huge pot-o-cash, far more than the developer could really afford (or wished to pay, frankly), so the ghost car got removed. The time trial mode stayed, but was for me at least less fun than it had been.
That is despite the patents never mentioning a computer game, but a "driver training system". The patents in question (US at least) are 5,269,687, 5,354,202 and 5,577,913. Atari may well have invented it, but that isn't my point. The point is that it is an extremely simple to implement *fun* addition to a game, and the possible validity of the patent means that games are either less fun, or cost more if you license the patents which *might* apply to them. Bah, where did all the fun go?
Examples of places where this might not apply - top secret underground bases, space, outdoors. Some games involve going into these places.
Also, most of these maps are fairly detail-free, not to scale, and don't have a flashing arrow showing where you are on them, so are of limited use in a game environment.
I do know what you meant, though. It's worth noting that many games have signs telling you where to go, and some games do even have lobby-maps as textures on objects in lobbies. Just not hugely useful, really.
I had to go and read the linked article to work that one out. The argument is as follows:
;)
In-order cores are much smaller, cheaper, and easier to design than out-of-order cores. Therefore, hardware manufacturers use in-order cores.
In-order cores are harder to use efficiently than out-of-order cores, as the developer has to do more work. Therefore, more effort will have to be expended to get the same amount of work done.
Game developers are bad at programming, therefore will write poor AI code because...
And that's where I get kind of lost. I'd always thought that games programmers were meant to be one of the last proponents of hardcore optimization skillz0rs. Certainly the guys I've worked with have been pretty good at it. I've never had to optimize (as a formal task) myself, but I know the general approaches. Why having in-order cores is meant to hurt AI, I don't know.
The shiny graphics point I think is a reference to the current focussing on GPUs, shading languages and so on, which people seem to think is to the detriment of the rest of the game. I'm of the opposite opinion - having used shaders in games, it leaves you more time to focus on gameplay (well, it leaves you more time with which you *could* focus on gameplay, but that's a different discussion)
I was going to write a long point-by-point discussion (and partial refutation) of the points listed in this article thing. It would of course take forever, no one would read it, and the problems would still be there at the end of it.
:(
Most of the things in the article (having shorter load times, better AI, no invisible borders, etc) are things decent game developers strive to do on every title. However, many of these problems are hardware-bound (you can only stream data from dvd so quickly regardless of how you optimize your code), knowledge-bound (AI isn't exactly a solved problem is it!), or practicality-bound (yeah, "come up with a new genre" is easy to say, you do it, find funding, get it published, etc.)
Another few quick points -
"bullshit" about graphics is indeed bullshit, but it *sells games* and people put up with it for some reason. Trade description laws might well apply, if they do, use 'em!
Save points are a fairly nice way of saving progress in a completely linear world, like for instance Halo. Less so in free-roamers like Resident Evil, but thats just my opinion. I can see why developers use them, and I've worked on games which have them in, and its better than the alternative. They're not there to save space!
Sports game commentary will suck for quite some time, game DVDs aren't 9Gb (usually, anyway), and commentary is difficulty not because of how much speech you record...
"Superimposing shit" on the screen is going to happen until you can come up with a way of conveying all information without text (or sound, because deaf people play games too y'know). Even cunningly hiding it like in The Movies isn't getting rid of it.
And do you have some kind of magical map that shows you floor layouts of places you've never been before? No? Didn't think so. How do you find your way around? Exactly.
Hmm. This turned into a huge post.
Just as an aside, real-time rendering of movies from the scene files would indeed be bigger than the resultant movie, probably by quite a margin - mainly because of textures, unless they're all procedural...
Funny you should say that...
I recently took a trip from Glasgow to Amsterdam, for a job interview. In Glasgow airport, I saw a Tux Racer arcade cabinet!
I was actually pretty shocked, didn't know the thing existed, but the little kiddies playing Tux Racer seemed to be having fun.
Yeah, I meant that! No, really, I did! Honest! :D
No!
Given that the positive-meaning hacker is virtually unknown amongst the non-technical, you're always going to be outnumbered vastly on this.
Why not use a different word, which won't have the negative connotations, instead of trying to order back the tide?
It is twice the price, but offers equivalent (and in some cases worse) performance than cards with half the memory, because they have faster memory.
Show-offs only need apply, for now.
...the specs kind of confirm something I'd thought before most of the details were announced:
:(
The Xbox 360 and PS3 are quite similar in philosophy to their immediate predecessors, in terms of development philosophy at least.
Xbox was more conventional, by modeling itself after a PC for the most part, developers had a good grounding in how to take immediate advantage of the platform. Look at early games such as DOA3 and Halo, which still stack up fairly well today. The latest Xbox games haven't really pushed the Xbox a huge amount further (and have in some cases failed when trying to, yes Halo 2 I'm looking at you!).
PS2 on the other hand started off fairly tamely, because of its off-kilter architecture. Early games were fairly iffy, especially on the graphics side, but with the performance waiting to be unlocked as the console's life cycle has progressed - just look at San Andreas compared to the original GTA3. It creaks a bit, but the world is over 3 times larger, and has a load more stuff in it.
I reckon the same is going to be true now - Xbox performance stats look like being tamer than PS3, but more workable for early adopters, and easier to get to grips with. PS3, without a good set of early libs from Sony (which they aren't known for) or a nice early version of Renderware or other middleware, is going to be a developer headache. But the power it has waiting to be unlocked should better Xbox 360's best.
My biggest question is, will Xbox's early start this time around help it get a foothold before PS3's eventual ascendance? Time will tell. But frankly, I want both - hopefully quality games will appear on both platforms!
PS - I don't care about Revolution, unless there's a sequel to Super Monkey Ball for it. I'm not a Mario/Zelda/Metroid fan, Nintendo means nothing to me...
From the sounds of things, the BT fault line lied when they dealt with me about 12 months ago. Unless its a change in policy, of course! My line died completely one afternoon, called the fault number, they said they could only come out and fix it mon-fri 9-5. I was commuting to work, so was out of the house from 7-7 :/