Actually, this is an opinion I got from a guy at a small development house I know. From what he'd seen of the new MS platform, is going to blow the cobbled collection of opensource devtools that the PS3 development is based on out of the water.
No. The software kits are nice, standard opensource tools - including doing all your testing and debugging while telnetted into the PS2 - afaik you debug through a bastardized command-line gdb.
Compare that to integrated direct graphical debugger support in a full-blown Visual-Studio like solution that MS is using, and MS completely eats Sony for development environment.
The PS3 is a big improvement over the PS2 for developers, but they're still lagging far behind MS in the tools department. Of course, I expect the tools will come with time, allowing the PS3 to surpass the X-box as it's hardware should allow.
Sony may have a usable devkit that doesn't cause permanent brain-damage by then.
The difference between the 360 and PS3 is pretty much an ideological one only - PS3 is designed with a focus on hardware power and capability, while the 360 is focussed on software architecture.
Notice how the antedeluvian PS2 hardware can still keep up with modern boxes - that's the payoff of Sony's approach. Conversely, the payoff of MS' approach is more solid launch titles and Live.
Besides that underlying core difference, they're pretty much Coke and Pepsi. I couldn't care less who wins....
Why? Am I the only one who's found Rare's games to be uniformly goregeous games with wonderful potential, mired by mindblowingly tedious gameplay and clunky engines?
Every rare game I've gotten involved in has frustrated me back out of it around 30% of the way through. Plus, they inevitably push the hardware just a little too hard, making the engine crunch under the strain with flickering and poor framerates. Finally, the games always just feel a little inexplicably clunky. Plus, even though every individual graphical element looks cool, the game all put together is inevitably hideous.
It happened to Diddy Kong Racing, BattleToads, Conker's Bad Fur Day, Goldeneye, and every other Rare title I've touched.
Yes, the games are always incredibly long, incredibly creative, and with solid multiplayer - but they also drive the player batshit crazy.
Or is it just me.
Re:C++ is cross-platform, dont know what your smok
on
Write Portable Code
·
· Score: 1
A-freakin'-men. The way that some metaprogramming systems I've seen abuse RTTI by handling all the members by name lookup make me wonder why the even bothered with a dynamic language in the first place. RTTI is basically a substitute for a solid metaprogramming model and a well-thought-out standard library.
Similar here - MP3 and iPod. Just rip the CDs to high-bitrate MP3 and forget the details. Sure, I eat it a bit when it comes to compression efficiency, but it saves trouble - my wife uses a Nano while I have various pieces of equipment that play CDs of MP3s, so MP3s are the universal standard. Just use a mainstream, standard encoder and avoid the esoteric options and your MP3s will work on anything.
Well, the PS2 is good except that it is small. Would you rather tha they pad the thing out with empty space to expand it out to the full width/depth? Then it would be cumbersomely large.
Personally, I think that the PS2 had the best approach - flat on top/bottom, small as it needs to be, and stands on it's side if necessary. You can put a Cube or a DC on it without much trouble.
I'm guessing he means Augmented Reality. Really, think about the detailed positioners they have on the Revolution gamepads.
Now, imagine using a lot more positional transmitters so you have precise position information on the "wands", anwhere in the whole room. Now give each player a VR headset with similar positioning.
At that point, you effectively can create and position 3D objects within the room that players can walk around and maniupate with the wand. This can be used for FPS/deathmatch titles, or just for a puzzle game where you physically have to drag the blocks into position. Even for conventional titles, you can play them with a screen that's as big as the room, with players walking around and looking around to see what's happening in various corners of the room - consider playing a fighting game with a giant table in the middle of the room showing the battle.
Basic Augmented Reality gaming has already been implemented. First was a simple shooter done by some Japanese researchers, then some simple sporting games. Recently, a university team ported Quake.
Given Miyamoto's thoughts, plus there experience with both 3D positioning technology and VR, I wouldn't be surprised if this is where Nintendo is headed.
I, for one, welcome our Live Action Quake overlords.
iirc, it isn't being made by Blizzard anyways. Which is why I'm confused about people caring abou this title - I mean, don't they remember what happens to a franchise when some other development team makes a sequel/spin-off? Star Control 3? OMF: Battlegrounds? This is going to be just another standard fare stealth-shooter that happens to be in the StarCraft universe. It won't be the perfectly polished gameplay (with just enough creativity to make it fresh) and beautiful artwork that Blizzard is known for.
Ultimately, a player could wire up a second PC with a video capture card and male-male cables for keyboard and mouse to control the other PC. At that point, the AI cheater is 100% indistinguishable from a human. On operating systems where a process can pipe into the keyboard/mouse buffers and access the video buffer (or wrap the 3D driver) you can do this on client.
The fact is that in any game a human is just providing input and output into the game. A software program can do this just as well. Unless a game requires thought processes that an AI cannot simulate, AI players will always be possible.
Well, I think Zonk is being harsh on Sam 2. Some of problems in Sam 2 are holdovers from Sam 1 - like the useless shotguns. Sam's shotgun has always been the weak end of the weaponspread - it's what you use when you're out of machinegun ammo. The super-shotgun is what you use when you're out of chaingun ammo and there are guys at point-blank range. I don't know why the developers chose to make the standard shotgun graphically into an autoshotgun without changing it's r.o.f., but it was a bad idea.
A problem is that the game didn't add too much - most of the good features are polish on the original. I mean, the vehicles are just stupid - they're basically "hey, let's go kick some ass in god mode!" - they don't actually add anything to the game but bigger carnage.
To me, the big good new thing the game brought to the table was the new variations on good old Sam combat, mixed in with the hilariously annoying natives. The "defend the village" scene is awesome fun.
I do have to say though that I love what they did with Sam himself - before, he was Duke Nukem with black hair - now he visibly has personality. He looks like some smug overgrown college football frat boy. It suits him.
And yes, the cutscenes are hilarious kitsch - and yes I skip half of them if I don't want to bother.
Sam 2 does have one awsome addition - a good autosave system, taking you back to the beginning of the scene when you die rather than leaving the player to mash the "quicksave" key every 5 seconds. I love being able to focus on combat and nothing but combat. Plus, no more annoying Netricsa messages interrupting the gameplay - Netty now talks.
I think this is partially a problem that the ESRB brougth on themselves - they have no distinction between pornography and adult material. No X vs NC-17. While it shouldn't matter (either way it requires an 18 year old to purchase) it does to the twitchy prudes. Whatever category hosts the porno games will be left off of store shelves in a blanket action.
Really, while I know that San Andreas isn't a kids' game, does it really belong in the same category as Battle Raper?
Now, I know WP isn't the most accurate source, but the article is well referenced so I'm inclined to believe at least part of it. Basically, the point is bluntly this: Mother Teresa's organisation provided only minimal medical care, and was generally bad at it, while spending gobs and gobs of cash on religious missions - even sending charity money back up the ladder to the general coffers of the Catholic church.
So basically, it describes a hardworking charitable woman driven completely in the wrong direction by her faith. She saved souls instead of lives.
There's also a cure for posting the same damn post over and over again - it's called moderation. Alternately, putting down the crackpipe and backing away from the computer.
Imho, Abuse topped Doom and Quake for outright terror. The game made the attacks much more sudden, and more significantly Abuse was not afraid to pit you against overwhelming odds. Very often the only thing to do in the game was to run like the dickens and spray ammunition at your pursuants, desperately hoping to find an exit from the carnage before your health ran out.
I guess the advantage that Sprite games had was that they were able to throw hundreds of opponents at you without your computer screaming in agony (well, the Serious Sam series has that now).
You did not just seriously suggest that Dia is a nice piece of software. You didn't just do that. I know you didn't, because if you did, I'd have to reach through your screen and punch you./tried to do many reports for my undergrad using Dia drawings.//regretted it every time.///actually have done much better with OpenOffice Draw.
Yep. Consider the apparent success of the DS - the market wasn't trusting of it, so Nintendo didn't make it a big deal. But now that word is out that it's a solid machine, people are picking it up.
Yes, I agree that C++ was overcomplicated - this is by necessity. They took an already complex language(C) added some new concepts to it (const, for example) and then implemented a thorough, versatile OOP system with it.
C# came and simplified the C language and removed some of those new concepts. Those were great steps. The problem is that they also ripped out a lot of the high-level and OO programming concepts too (like multiple inheritence and metaprogramming). That's where the problems came in. The fact is that while you can implement anything in C# and you can do it cleanly and legibly, it's really hard to refactor or consolidate your code. Everyone was sayign that they were going back to the simplicity of SmallTalk and Objective C, forgetting that those are dynamically-typed languages. Java and C# are statically typed, and so the static typing doesn't really get along with the object model.
I guess I'm just really sick of having to copy+paste my code.
My point is that it takes more than a nice inheritence tree to make clean code. Consider the mess of casting and wrapping that it takes simply to make use of a container. In C++, you design the container as a template and then just give it the right type, and it works. In these other languages, there isn't even a simple macro system to substitute. Likewise, the lack of multiple inheritence means that I'm always seeing the same functions re-implemented over and over again rather than just inherited in from a sibling class.
Yes, C++ gave you a lot more rope to hang yourself with - anybody who wrote oldschool C mixed with OOP paradigms was just making a trainwreck (sadly, that methodology is very common in OSS). But it also had many much higher level abstractions available.
You can re-implement many of the high level abstractions using reflection, but at such a crippling performance and legibility hit you may as well be using Perl.
I can understand being frustrated with embedded C++ - embedded C++ means living without the libraries that make C++ a joy to work with. You need to keep things stripped and avoid boost pointers and the like. But that's my point - C++ has the capability to do most of the neat things that people love about the newer languages plus a lot that they can't do - the problem is that it doesn't _force_ you to do those things, and instead lets you do stupid stupid crap.
I know that C++ needed a replacement - I'm just frustrated with disappointment in what we got. The new language we were waiting for was something robust and expressive, not these castrated glorified VB-with-single-inheritence languages.
Wow, they just figured out what it would take to get me to want a PS3. And I doubt that 200 is necessary - even assuming that the eye is pickier in stereographic mode, I'm sure that something like 150 would be perfect. 120 will probably suit my eyes just fine, I'm not bothered by low refresh rates (which is odd, because I'm good at picking up flickering in fluorescents and the color-delays in DLP projectors).
Slashdot Mirror
Nope. The UT2kX series is an extremely impressive exception to the rule.
Actually, this is an opinion I got from a guy at a small development house I know. From what he'd seen of the new MS platform, is going to blow the cobbled collection of opensource devtools that the PS3 development is based on out of the water.
No. The software kits are nice, standard opensource tools - including doing all your testing and debugging while telnetted into the PS2 - afaik you debug through a bastardized command-line gdb.
Compare that to integrated direct graphical debugger support in a full-blown Visual-Studio like solution that MS is using, and MS completely eats Sony for development environment.
The PS3 is a big improvement over the PS2 for developers, but they're still lagging far behind MS in the tools department. Of course, I expect the tools will come with time, allowing the PS3 to surpass the X-box as it's hardware should allow.
Sony may have a usable devkit that doesn't cause permanent brain-damage by then.
The difference between the 360 and PS3 is pretty much an ideological one only - PS3 is designed with a focus on hardware power and capability, while the 360 is focussed on software architecture.
Notice how the antedeluvian PS2 hardware can still keep up with modern boxes - that's the payoff of Sony's approach. Conversely, the payoff of MS' approach is more solid launch titles and Live.
Besides that underlying core difference, they're pretty much Coke and Pepsi. I couldn't care less who wins....
at any rate, I'm buying a Rev.
Do you remember the hoverbike level in BattleToads? Tell me that wasn't pointless frustration.
Like I said, incredibly creative, varied action - designed specifically to taunt the players.
Pardon me if I want the games I play to be actually... y'know... fun. And if I want to focus my attention, I'll read a book or play a strategy game.
Why? Am I the only one who's found Rare's games to be uniformly goregeous games with wonderful potential, mired by mindblowingly tedious gameplay and clunky engines?
Every rare game I've gotten involved in has frustrated me back out of it around 30% of the way through. Plus, they inevitably push the hardware just a little too hard, making the engine crunch under the strain with flickering and poor framerates. Finally, the games always just feel a little inexplicably clunky. Plus, even though every individual graphical element looks cool, the game all put together is inevitably hideous.
It happened to Diddy Kong Racing, BattleToads, Conker's Bad Fur Day, Goldeneye, and every other Rare title I've touched.
Yes, the games are always incredibly long, incredibly creative, and with solid multiplayer - but they also drive the player batshit crazy.
Or is it just me.
A-freakin'-men. The way that some metaprogramming systems I've seen abuse RTTI by handling all the members by name lookup make me wonder why the even bothered with a dynamic language in the first place. RTTI is basically a substitute for a solid metaprogramming model and a well-thought-out standard library.
Similar here - MP3 and iPod. Just rip the CDs to high-bitrate MP3 and forget the details. Sure, I eat it a bit when it comes to compression efficiency, but it saves trouble - my wife uses a Nano while I have various pieces of equipment that play CDs of MP3s, so MP3s are the universal standard. Just use a mainstream, standard encoder and avoid the esoteric options and your MP3s will work on anything.
Well, the PS2 is good except that it is small. Would you rather tha they pad the thing out with empty space to expand it out to the full width/depth? Then it would be cumbersomely large.
Personally, I think that the PS2 had the best approach - flat on top/bottom, small as it needs to be, and stands on it's side if necessary. You can put a Cube or a DC on it without much trouble.
I'm guessing he means Augmented Reality. Really, think about the detailed positioners they have on the Revolution gamepads.
Now, imagine using a lot more positional transmitters so you have precise position information on the "wands", anwhere in the whole room. Now give each player a VR headset with similar positioning.
At that point, you effectively can create and position 3D objects within the room that players can walk around and maniupate with the wand. This can be used for FPS/deathmatch titles, or just for a puzzle game where you physically have to drag the blocks into position. Even for conventional titles, you can play them with a screen that's as big as the room, with players walking around and looking around to see what's happening in various corners of the room - consider playing a fighting game with a giant table in the middle of the room showing the battle.
Basic Augmented Reality gaming has already been implemented. First was a simple shooter done by some Japanese researchers, then some simple sporting games. Recently, a university team ported Quake.
Given Miyamoto's thoughts, plus there experience with both 3D positioning technology and VR, I wouldn't be surprised if this is where Nintendo is headed.
I, for one, welcome our Live Action Quake overlords.
iirc, it isn't being made by Blizzard anyways. Which is why I'm confused about people caring abou this title - I mean, don't they remember what happens to a franchise when some other development team makes a sequel/spin-off? Star Control 3? OMF: Battlegrounds? This is going to be just another standard fare stealth-shooter that happens to be in the StarCraft universe. It won't be the perfectly polished gameplay (with just enough creativity to make it fresh) and beautiful artwork that Blizzard is known for.
Real ultimate solution:
design games that an AI can't be good at.
Ultimately, a player could wire up a second PC with a video capture card and male-male cables for keyboard and mouse to control the other PC. At that point, the AI cheater is 100% indistinguishable from a human. On operating systems where a process can pipe into the keyboard/mouse buffers and access the video buffer (or wrap the 3D driver) you can do this on client.
The fact is that in any game a human is just providing input and output into the game. A software program can do this just as well. Unless a game requires thought processes that an AI cannot simulate, AI players will always be possible.
Good god, that will take like 5 seconds to work around.
Well, I think Zonk is being harsh on Sam 2. Some of problems in Sam 2 are holdovers from Sam 1 - like the useless shotguns. Sam's shotgun has always been the weak end of the weaponspread - it's what you use when you're out of machinegun ammo. The super-shotgun is what you use when you're out of chaingun ammo and there are guys at point-blank range. I don't know why the developers chose to make the standard shotgun graphically into an autoshotgun without changing it's r.o.f., but it was a bad idea.
A problem is that the game didn't add too much - most of the good features are polish on the original. I mean, the vehicles are just stupid - they're basically "hey, let's go kick some ass in god mode!" - they don't actually add anything to the game but bigger carnage.
To me, the big good new thing the game brought to the table was the new variations on good old Sam combat, mixed in with the hilariously annoying natives. The "defend the village" scene is awesome fun.
I do have to say though that I love what they did with Sam himself - before, he was Duke Nukem with black hair - now he visibly has personality. He looks like some smug overgrown college football frat boy. It suits him.
And yes, the cutscenes are hilarious kitsch - and yes I skip half of them if I don't want to bother.
Sam 2 does have one awsome addition - a good autosave system, taking you back to the beginning of the scene when you die rather than leaving the player to mash the "quicksave" key every 5 seconds. I love being able to focus on combat and nothing but combat. Plus, no more annoying Netricsa messages interrupting the gameplay - Netty now talks.
I think this is partially a problem that the ESRB brougth on themselves - they have no distinction between pornography and adult material. No X vs NC-17. While it shouldn't matter (either way it requires an 18 year old to purchase) it does to the twitchy prudes. Whatever category hosts the porno games will be left off of store shelves in a blanket action.
Really, while I know that San Andreas isn't a kids' game, does it really belong in the same category as Battle Raper?
Wow. After reading your post I went to Wikipedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother_Teresa
Now, I know WP isn't the most accurate source, but the article is well referenced so I'm inclined to believe at least part of it. Basically, the point is bluntly this: Mother Teresa's organisation provided only minimal medical care, and was generally bad at it, while spending gobs and gobs of cash on religious missions - even sending charity money back up the ladder to the general coffers of the Catholic church.
So basically, it describes a hardworking charitable woman driven completely in the wrong direction by her faith. She saved souls instead of lives.
There's also a cure for posting the same damn post over and over again - it's called moderation. Alternately, putting down the crackpipe and backing away from the computer.
Linking to junkscience isn't going to win you any arguments. Junkscience itself is junk science - just right-wing junk science.
Whoa, didn't notice that. Will have to try that next time I play - hope it won't bring my 9600 to it's knees.
Imho, Abuse topped Doom and Quake for outright terror. The game made the attacks much more sudden, and more significantly Abuse was not afraid to pit you against overwhelming odds. Very often the only thing to do in the game was to run like the dickens and spray ammunition at your pursuants, desperately hoping to find an exit from the carnage before your health ran out.
I guess the advantage that Sprite games had was that they were able to throw hundreds of opponents at you without your computer screaming in agony (well, the Serious Sam series has that now).
You did not just seriously suggest that Dia is a nice piece of software. You didn't just do that. I know you didn't, because if you did, I'd have to reach through your screen and punch you. /tried to do many reports for my undergrad using Dia drawings. //regretted it every time. ///actually have done much better with OpenOffice Draw.
Yep. Consider the apparent success of the DS - the market wasn't trusting of it, so Nintendo didn't make it a big deal. But now that word is out that it's a solid machine, people are picking it up.
Yes, I agree that C++ was overcomplicated - this is by necessity. They took an already complex language(C) added some new concepts to it (const, for example) and then implemented a thorough, versatile OOP system with it.
C# came and simplified the C language and removed some of those new concepts. Those were great steps. The problem is that they also ripped out a lot of the high-level and OO programming concepts too (like multiple inheritence and metaprogramming). That's where the problems came in. The fact is that while you can implement anything in C# and you can do it cleanly and legibly, it's really hard to refactor or consolidate your code. Everyone was sayign that they were going back to the simplicity of SmallTalk and Objective C, forgetting that those are dynamically-typed languages. Java and C# are statically typed, and so the static typing doesn't really get along with the object model.
I guess I'm just really sick of having to copy+paste my code.
My point is that it takes more than a nice inheritence tree to make clean code. Consider the mess of casting and wrapping that it takes simply to make use of a container. In C++, you design the container as a template and then just give it the right type, and it works. In these other languages, there isn't even a simple macro system to substitute. Likewise, the lack of multiple inheritence means that I'm always seeing the same functions re-implemented over and over again rather than just inherited in from a sibling class.
Yes, C++ gave you a lot more rope to hang yourself with - anybody who wrote oldschool C mixed with OOP paradigms was just making a trainwreck (sadly, that methodology is very common in OSS). But it also had many much higher level abstractions available.
You can re-implement many of the high level abstractions using reflection, but at such a crippling performance and legibility hit you may as well be using Perl.
I can understand being frustrated with embedded C++ - embedded C++ means living without the libraries that make C++ a joy to work with. You need to keep things stripped and avoid boost pointers and the like. But that's my point - C++ has the capability to do most of the neat things that people love about the newer languages plus a lot that they can't do - the problem is that it doesn't _force_ you to do those things, and instead lets you do stupid stupid crap.
I know that C++ needed a replacement - I'm just frustrated with disappointment in what we got. The new language we were waiting for was something robust and expressive, not these castrated glorified VB-with-single-inheritence languages.
Wow, they just figured out what it would take to get me to want a PS3. And I doubt that 200 is necessary - even assuming that the eye is pickier in stereographic mode, I'm sure that something like 150 would be perfect. 120 will probably suit my eyes just fine, I'm not bothered by low refresh rates (which is odd, because I'm good at picking up flickering in fluorescents and the color-delays in DLP projectors).