Yes, it's true - most things in almost every creative discipline's commercial side are NOT particularly original!
I'm a game developer by trade, working on console games. For various reasons, most of the time console games don't try to reach too hard for innovation. The reasons for it are purely business - making what you know will sell makes for a steady, predictable revenue stream, whereas taking a risk on a more experimental title runs the risk of pouring money down the drain.
You get the odd thing that bucks this trend, and it often involves hardware (Singstar and Eye Toy are the most obvious recent candidates I can think of), but sadly games like Ico or Rez or whatever just don't sell in the quantities that a Madden or a FIFA will.
The other thing preventing much originality on consoles is the entry barrier - devkits and licenses and middleware cost lots! I am therefore often surprised at the lack of more originality in PC games, where you can download DirectX for free (or SDL/OpenGL if you're feeling cross platform).
Take a look around at the PC game scene - the derivative FPS/platform/shmup titles still vastly outweigh truly original games.
All of which isn't to say that even the most derivative of games don't have touches of originality in them, or twists which differentiate them from their competitors. Maybe as someone who works in games I tend to pay more attention, but stuff like the melee combat in FEAR, or the black/white shield in Ikaruga are things that make me a happy gamer...
Wrong. You already do use them, except they are professional instead of "professional". You can use tools that are fast, efficient and can be easily scripted; the point&grunt interface is for the naives who will shell out money just to get an advertised tool.
I am entirely capable of writing a script, but I prefer to point and grunt. I guess that makes me naive for using tools to make my life easier. Silly me:(
I suspect many papers (e.g. SIGGRAPH ones which I read regularly, and are thus technically computer science) don't have an objective "right" or "wrong", but do have a conclusion. Often, this conclusion is subjective (something which looks or performs "good enough", or is a workable approximation, etc).
So yeah, maybe half the papers are "wrong" in some sense, but that doesn't mean they aren't useful, or indeed that they aren't known to be "wrong" by the people who create them!
...in terms of speed and file availability, as well as ease of use (built-in client searching which seems to work really well) it's very nice.
However, the bigger servers (Razorback et al) don't always work very well with NAT - behind an ADSL router you can't change the setup of, you may as well not bother. In those cases, Bittorrent works faster because it usually ends up with more valid, reachable seeds/peers.
Don't know if there's good technical reasons for the edonkey servers not allowing people like me on (my old house had a nice person in charge of the router, new house doesn't, so I can't connect to any decent edonkey servers any more), but torrents do nicely, albeit more cumbersome to deal with...
Motorola actually do make decent phones for talking to people on. My V3 RAZR has excellent clarity and (for me) a decent battery life. It comes with loads of other crap on it that I don't use, yes, including a camera, but it's easily the best mobile I've had (which list includes Nokias, Ericsson both pre and post Sony, and Siemens).
Most of the time when I get a dodgy-sounding connection, it's the other person's phone or just poor signal. But that isn't the fault of the handset developers, because most people I know have older phones, and live in areas with poor signals.
I've briefly tried current offerings from Nokia and Sony, and they also seem fairly clear when used in areas of good reception. Where they could definitely be improved, IMO, is that they're often too quiet, and that outside noise leaks in too much. Not sure how they might tackle that, but then I'm just a games programmer. Your mileage may vary, of course, but it does seem like handsets are improving in those core areas as well as the useless attachments...
I don't know too much about worms, but I'd assume that something like this would have to happen deliberately - ie someone deliberately put an infected executable into the drive image? Or are worms smart enough to infect things inside disk images (or whatever they might be using - how do industrial processes get stuff onto hard disks???)
The authors also say that,
with further tweaking, their nanotube sheets may be useful for building a space elevator tether. They're planning to put the sheets to the test by entering the Spaceward Foundation's Elevator:2010 contest.
Emphasis mine. Seems to suggest that they think they're not too far away from it, so you're not totally off the mark, but we all know that the last few tweaks can be the bit that don't work, relegating this to other uses...
I thought Kevin Mitnick was held without trial for several years? Without a trial, can one actually enter any plea? I don't know the US legal system really, so that's a genuine question:)
In my experience with my previous employer (I work in the games industry), triple-A means virtually nothing in practice. It's a goal, an aim, and a bunch of marketing drivel designed to make something sound better than it is. What they failed to realise was that while it may be possible to polish a turd, all you end up with is a shiny turd. But I digress...
Real triple-A titles are those which achieve critical and commercial success. So, things like Deus Ex, Half-Life, Mario 64, Zelda (not that I like it personally), Goldeneye, GTA3, etc.
I should probably explain further. My approach would be to generate the basic street layouts, buildings, and maybe even internal floor & room layouts procedurally, say in a Maya/Max plugin. This would act as the basis for artists/designers to then tweak and adjust to produce something good, hopefully in a fraction of the time.
Using control maps (for population density, affluence, terrain, etc) it should be possible to have fairly fine control over how the city is generated. Add to that a decent set of rules to govern the generation, and a big stock library textures/shaders to give a nice looking generic output, that should give a decent start point.
I know some of the guys who worked on GTA3/VC/SA, and one of their big problems was generating the sheer amount of content to make these large play areas. Starting with a pre-populated one and using it as a base might let them concentrate on making it good...
It's worth pointing out that he doesn't design games because he's a renderer/technology programmer. Id (id? iD?) Software will have designers responsible for designing the gameplay and so on.
JC isn't really responsible for the shortcomings of the games *as games*, except in as much as the ability of the engines he makes for them limits & influences gameplay decisions by those designers...
There's plenty. Try watching any film with decent CG effects, it'll be full of procedural shaders which are fairly realistic.
See, the thing about shaders is they can be as realistic as you're willing to let them get. The problem is how long it takes to calculate them - realtime games use more shortcuts, hacks and estimates to get something that looks "good enough". Not just in shaders, either. That's why we don't do realtime raytraced games, instead we use lightmaps or whatever to approximate them.
The argument generally is, as far as I know, that it's overkill for the current generation of hardware. Rather than procedural noise generated realtime, a few pregenerated detail noise textures can do the job with a fraction of the gpu time. It's pretty hard to tell the difference with a decent artist doing the noise maps, really.
Maybe during the next-gen consoles' lifespan we'll start seeing more procedural stuff. It'll become more important as we start pushing more polys and going down the High Definition route, I think.
(I'm more interested in offline procedural content generation, personally - automatically generated cities, it's the way of the future!:D)
Nice feature list, and I'm sure it all works fine.
However...
Quake 3 also runs on Linux & Mac. Not to denigrate your project whatsoever, but it *is* DirectX and thus (depending on how you've organised stuff) might not be straightforward to port.
They allow EULAs on shrink-wrapped software and shrink-wrapped DVDs already, what makes books any different?
Personally I think EULAs are a crock, and the issues of liability and usage they may or may not cover should be dealt sensibly in some different way. Possibly, in the case of software, by companies taking some responsibility for their products. In the case of DVDs, I don't think there should be a license of any kind. But maybe that's just me...
...Amazon in the UK have been doing DVD rentals for a while now. Presumably this hasn't been true in the US until now?
I wonder if they've held off to iron out the logistical problems that having a considerably larger distribution area will cause compared to us over in our tiny country:)
Is that a big increase?
on
Xbox 360 for $300
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Here in the UK, new game releases on all 3 current consoles typically cost 30GBP (you can get them for less in some places, but more in others, so I reckon it balances out). That translates to about 60 bucks doesn't it?
How much were Xbox games when the Xbox was first released? They were about 40GBP (80 dollars!) when I got mine, and that was a while after its official release. Maybe 60 bucks isn't that bad...
Linux (and open source / free software in general) are one of the biggest success stories of recent times in the world of software, and one of the first not to come from Microsoft.
What lessons (if any) do you think that Microsoft could learn from Linux and other open source / free software?
Do you think that Microsoft is adaptable enough to be able to learn those lessons successfully?
...three apartments I've lived in, we've struggled to get over 20Mbps with 100Mbps-rated gear. Does this mean we'll actually get 100Mbps from this, or will they somehow be able to avoid whatever's causing current-gen wireless gear to degrade when going through anything thicker than a fibreboard partition?:(
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, it's true - most things in almost every creative discipline's commercial side are NOT particularly original!
I'm a game developer by trade, working on console games. For various reasons, most of the time console games don't try to reach too hard for innovation. The reasons for it are purely business - making what you know will sell makes for a steady, predictable revenue stream, whereas taking a risk on a more experimental title runs the risk of pouring money down the drain.
You get the odd thing that bucks this trend, and it often involves hardware (Singstar and Eye Toy are the most obvious recent candidates I can think of), but sadly games like Ico or Rez or whatever just don't sell in the quantities that a Madden or a FIFA will.
The other thing preventing much originality on consoles is the entry barrier - devkits and licenses and middleware cost lots! I am therefore often surprised at the lack of more originality in PC games, where you can download DirectX for free (or SDL/OpenGL if you're feeling cross platform).
Take a look around at the PC game scene - the derivative FPS/platform/shmup titles still vastly outweigh truly original games.
All of which isn't to say that even the most derivative of games don't have touches of originality in them, or twists which differentiate them from their competitors. Maybe as someone who works in games I tend to pay more attention, but stuff like the melee combat in FEAR, or the black/white shield in Ikaruga are things that make me a happy gamer...
Wrong. You already do use them, except they are professional instead of "professional". You can use tools that are fast, efficient and can be easily scripted; the point&grunt interface is for the naives who will shell out money just to get an advertised tool.
:(
I am entirely capable of writing a script, but I prefer to point and grunt. I guess that makes me naive for using tools to make my life easier. Silly me
...that all depends on how you look at it.
I suspect many papers (e.g. SIGGRAPH ones which I read regularly, and are thus technically computer science) don't have an objective "right" or "wrong", but do have a conclusion. Often, this conclusion is subjective (something which looks or performs "good enough", or is a workable approximation, etc).
So yeah, maybe half the papers are "wrong" in some sense, but that doesn't mean they aren't useful, or indeed that they aren't known to be "wrong" by the people who create them!
Yep, its pretty easy.
:(
Except that the router is managed by my flatmate's employer, and my chances of them opening ports for P2P is very very slim indeed
...in terms of speed and file availability, as well as ease of use (built-in client searching which seems to work really well) it's very nice.
However, the bigger servers (Razorback et al) don't always work very well with NAT - behind an ADSL router you can't change the setup of, you may as well not bother. In those cases, Bittorrent works faster because it usually ends up with more valid, reachable seeds/peers.
Don't know if there's good technical reasons for the edonkey servers not allowing people like me on (my old house had a nice person in charge of the router, new house doesn't, so I can't connect to any decent edonkey servers any more), but torrents do nicely, albeit more cumbersome to deal with...
Was gonna mod this, but I decided to reply...
Motorola actually do make decent phones for talking to people on. My V3 RAZR has excellent clarity and (for me) a decent battery life. It comes with loads of other crap on it that I don't use, yes, including a camera, but it's easily the best mobile I've had (which list includes Nokias, Ericsson both pre and post Sony, and Siemens).
Most of the time when I get a dodgy-sounding connection, it's the other person's phone or just poor signal. But that isn't the fault of the handset developers, because most people I know have older phones, and live in areas with poor signals.
I've briefly tried current offerings from Nokia and Sony, and they also seem fairly clear when used in areas of good reception. Where they could definitely be improved, IMO, is that they're often too quiet, and that outside noise leaks in too much. Not sure how they might tackle that, but then I'm just a games programmer. Your mileage may vary, of course, but it does seem like handsets are improving in those core areas as well as the useless attachments...
I don't know too much about worms, but I'd assume that something like this would have to happen deliberately - ie someone deliberately put an infected executable into the drive image? Or are worms smart enough to infect things inside disk images (or whatever they might be using - how do industrial processes get stuff onto hard disks???)
...write a "fix Slashdot's broken posting?" sidebar as well? :)
"...the need for a Firefox or IE is almost eliminated..."
:)
Other than that minor, troublesome web-browsing feature presumably?
Emphasis mine. Seems to suggest that they think they're not too far away from it, so you're not totally off the mark, but we all know that the last few tweaks can be the bit that don't work, relegating this to other uses...
I thought Kevin Mitnick was held without trial for several years? Without a trial, can one actually enter any plea? I don't know the US legal system really, so that's a genuine question :)
In my experience with my previous employer (I work in the games industry), triple-A means virtually nothing in practice. It's a goal, an aim, and a bunch of marketing drivel designed to make something sound better than it is. What they failed to realise was that while it may be possible to polish a turd, all you end up with is a shiny turd. But I digress...
Real triple-A titles are those which achieve critical and commercial success. So, things like Deus Ex, Half-Life, Mario 64, Zelda (not that I like it personally), Goldeneye, GTA3, etc.
Oh, that game :D
I should probably explain further. My approach would be to generate the basic street layouts, buildings, and maybe even internal floor & room layouts procedurally, say in a Maya/Max plugin. This would act as the basis for artists/designers to then tweak and adjust to produce something good, hopefully in a fraction of the time.
Using control maps (for population density, affluence, terrain, etc) it should be possible to have fairly fine control over how the city is generated. Add to that a decent set of rules to govern the generation, and a big stock library textures/shaders to give a nice looking generic output, that should give a decent start point.
I know some of the guys who worked on GTA3/VC/SA, and one of their big problems was generating the sheer amount of content to make these large play areas. Starting with a pre-populated one and using it as a base might let them concentrate on making it good...
It's worth pointing out that he doesn't design games because he's a renderer/technology programmer. Id (id? iD?) Software will have designers responsible for designing the gameplay and so on.
JC isn't really responsible for the shortcomings of the games *as games*, except in as much as the ability of the engines he makes for them limits & influences gameplay decisions by those designers...
Nice shader example that I quite like:
Renderman water shader
There's plenty. Try watching any film with decent CG effects, it'll be full of procedural shaders which are fairly realistic.
See, the thing about shaders is they can be as realistic as you're willing to let them get. The problem is how long it takes to calculate them - realtime games use more shortcuts, hacks and estimates to get something that looks "good enough". Not just in shaders, either. That's why we don't do realtime raytraced games, instead we use lightmaps or whatever to approximate them.
The argument generally is, as far as I know, that it's overkill for the current generation of hardware. Rather than procedural noise generated realtime, a few pregenerated detail noise textures can do the job with a fraction of the gpu time. It's pretty hard to tell the difference with a decent artist doing the noise maps, really.
:D)
Maybe during the next-gen consoles' lifespan we'll start seeing more procedural stuff. It'll become more important as we start pushing more polys and going down the High Definition route, I think.
(I'm more interested in offline procedural content generation, personally - automatically generated cities, it's the way of the future!
Nice feature list, and I'm sure it all works fine.
However...
Quake 3 also runs on Linux & Mac. Not to denigrate your project whatsoever, but it *is* DirectX and thus (depending on how you've organised stuff) might not be straightforward to port.
...just had a horrible thought of Bill Gates in a Batman costume. Old Batman that is - you know, spandex.
:S
My eyes!
Yeah, because I didn't spend money to get the DVD from them in the first place did I?
Oh wait... Maybe they should just allow copyright and trademark law to allow them protection instead of saying I can't watch my DVDs however I like.
They allow EULAs on shrink-wrapped software and shrink-wrapped DVDs already, what makes books any different?
Personally I think EULAs are a crock, and the issues of liability and usage they may or may not cover should be dealt sensibly in some different way. Possibly, in the case of software, by companies taking some responsibility for their products. In the case of DVDs, I don't think there should be a license of any kind. But maybe that's just me...
...Amazon in the UK have been doing DVD rentals for a while now. Presumably this hasn't been true in the US until now?
:)
I wonder if they've held off to iron out the logistical problems that having a considerably larger distribution area will cause compared to us over in our tiny country
Here in the UK, new game releases on all 3 current consoles typically cost 30GBP (you can get them for less in some places, but more in others, so I reckon it balances out). That translates to about 60 bucks doesn't it?
How much were Xbox games when the Xbox was first released? They were about 40GBP (80 dollars!) when I got mine, and that was a while after its official release. Maybe 60 bucks isn't that bad...
How apt, first five or six attempts to view this got:
:)
Nothing for you to see here. Please move along.
Linux (and open source / free software in general) are one of the biggest success stories of recent times in the world of software, and one of the first not to come from Microsoft.
What lessons (if any) do you think that Microsoft could learn from Linux and other open source / free software?
Do you think that Microsoft is adaptable enough to be able to learn those lessons successfully?
...three apartments I've lived in, we've struggled to get over 20Mbps with 100Mbps-rated gear. Does this mean we'll actually get 100Mbps from this, or will they somehow be able to avoid whatever's causing current-gen wireless gear to degrade when going through anything thicker than a fibreboard partition? :(