"BT's Les King said that we're looking at 1.5Mb/sec for standard definition gaming, and 5Mb/sec for full 1080p HD resolution gaming."
Um what the hell is "standard resolution gaming" if not HD? I'm going to vent here...
I hate it when people think that HD is somehow awesome. It's not. HD is what gamers have been using for the last 10 damn years on a standard computer monitor, and then all these TV companies invented the retarded buzzword high definition and everyone's raving over it. HD is completely underwhelming. What this chump is saying basically, is that to play your games at 75% of their original resolution you need to be running a 5mb/sec connection.
No it wasn't, and this is exactly what I'm talking about.
For example Timesplitters, Goldeneye and Quake 3 on the Dreamcast came before Halo and were perfectly playable. Furthermore, 4 XBoxes might be easier to get together, but it's also a lot more awkward to actually play on a 4 way split screen, especially if it's a free for all match.
What irked me about Halo was the way Bungie were marketing it as the next best thing since sliced bread... Even more so, how the console gamers lapped it up. It's as if multiplayer FPS's hadn't existed before good ol' Bungie came down on the wings of Heaven and made it so. UT & Q3 owned multiplayer long before Halo's release, and Q3 is still owning it now in the form of Quake Live.
The problem is that with consoles holding back the gaming market, the hardware arms race has all but ended. Most games now start as console games and are ported to the PC, or at the very least, are targeted toward a console platform as well meaning that the game also has to run on it's dated hardware.
here here! Mod parent up! This is why I own a PC, heck, I even have Duke Nukem 3D on mine. I owned and still own a PC for the exact reasons that the parent listed. In fact, I grew up around making games and mods and levels for Doom all the way to Half-Life and ended up getting a degree in programming games, moving to Canada and soon with a few more portfolio pieces I'll be starting my own company. What hasn't changed through all this? The fact that I will always be a PC gamer. It is such a shame that younger generations will be introduced to 'gaming' in its current, pathetic watered down state. They will learn nothing from hacking the game's config files, nothing from building new levels, nothing from collaborating with mod projects and nothing from programming their own game or exercising their imagination. All they will learn is how to put a disc into a drive and to press the big green X button.
Having read your post, and rereading the President's quotes I see your point.
My response to some of the posts in this thread arose from my possibly naive assertion that the President's audience would see the wisdom in his speech, not being drawn in by any opinions of who to trust that he might have.
Coming from a political figure I think his speech was fairly "white" without a prohibitively large amount of propaganda or spin.
...Wow, did half of the posters here even read the article? Obama's not pro-censorship, he's not arguing that x-box's, twitter and facebook should be taken away:
"With iPods and iPads and Xboxes and PlayStations, -- none of which I know how to work -- information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment, rather than the means of emancipation,"
"some of the craziest claims can quickly claim traction," in the clamor of certain blogs and talk radio outlets.
What Obama is saying, is that in this day and age of massive media coverage you shouldn't always believe what you read. He's encouraging the students to find alternate sources of information, to actually investigate something before spouting off and further propagating the Chinese Whisper... You know, basically what most of the people replying to this article did.
I really wish slashdot admins wouldn't approve articles when the author is so obviously batting for one team. Seriously, who had even used Scribd before they dropped Flash support? I've had a few of their articles show up in my search results for programming and their site was an absolute pig! Definitely not a good example of how to use flash at all. And now suddenly everyone and their mum are singing the praises of a site who's design probably would have sucked ass even if it had been in HTML in the first place. Scribd dropping Flash support is possibly a GOOD thing for Adobe and Flash - that site was an abomination.
That's a great idea and all, until you run into the problem of latency and the fact that to play WoW even slightly competently you need to perform actions in a split second (easy with a keyboard, not with a touch screen). High latency gaming AND low response time from the user? Yeah I won't be grouping with anyone using an iPad...
I ran into this problem a few months ago when trying to connect to a flash media server owned by a client - the media player running on the Mac would take over a minute to connect, and would fail at least once. The client insisted it was a bug in my code (I was the third programmer to be assigned the project after 2 others bailed), but my colleague and I uncovered similar horror stories with Mac OS 10.5, after my version of the player indicated a problem with the connection attempt timing out. The first two programmers couldn't prove this because their error trapping was non existent, so their players simply looked like they were crashing. Ah the joys of cross platform development!
I should have clarified, my comment was targeted more at AAA titles and player's expectations to be pampered instead of challenged.
Focusing on the FPS genre, games tend to have adopted the checkpoint system every 50 metres (Dead Space, Mass Effect 2) which rarely leads to any genuinely difficult encounters. Compare this to the original AvP which only allowed you to save a couple of times per mission... Combined with sometimes random encounters with foes, that was a scary game to play as a Marine.
Nostalgia and dated (xb360) or confusing (ps3) console hardware holding back PC Gaming (Crysis is still the most graphically advanced game on the market) aside, there are some seriously inspired games out there for the PC. There's no need to dig out your pocket calculator to play 'let's write words on the screen in numbers' just yet. Athough I would concede the point that they're all rather too forgiving. Perhaps Star Control III will save us all?
Try joining a martial arts club, I'm living in what could reliably be termed a "redneck" town in Canada, and found that MA tended to attract disciplined, motivated and generally interesting people of all ages and sizes.
I also find that the bar-stewards collaborate on their commercial breaks, meaning that switching to a different channel often gets you the same inane ads about fuel efficiency, automobile collision legal advice and the anti depression pill whose side effects are more depressing than anything you could possibly be feeling before taking it.
Already tried that, the game is made infinitely more difficult by the physics engine which treats each block as if they have minimal mass in an almost weightless environment, furthermore, the pieces continue to move after they are 'placed'.
I do hope you didn't resurrect this thread purely to make a point about Quake 2 running horribly in a browser with all manner of hacks? Yes, I'm sure that was easy to program and doesn't use a million libraries for everything. If you want to get into a dick swinging contest though, check out what Flash can do with 3D and pixel shaders here: http://away3d.com/ the demo reel pretty much stomps the Quake 2 port in terms of looks.
Once again you're throwing Flash into the fire because a bunch of marketing dick-heads use it to piss you off, this isn't a valid argument for why Flash should be thrown out and in fact, sadly, is a pretty good argument for why it's going to stay: It's easy to do stuff with it, intermediate stuff, advanced stuff, and artists and programmers can collaborate with it and extend it to whatever their level of proficiency is. Apple's refusal of it won't change a thing, and their closed mindedness to everything in general is going to come back and bite them in the ass soon enough.
The comment about Math was a jab at how boring you probably are, how boring is that? I'm not sure about the exact numbers, perhaps you should get out your slide-rule and find out...
I used to live in Bradley Stoke in the UK, one of Europe's more sizeable housing estates, and they put the idea in TFA to use... And it was horrible. They introduced speed bumps every 150 metres or so in some areas, specifically designed to damage your tracking if you went over them faster than 20mph, they put cycle lanes into roads that had not been designed for them, thereby forcing traffic closer to the centre of the road (on one road, hilariously, the cycle lane actually switches sides in the middle, with no road island to help the cyclist cross over), introduced pedestrian crossings with traffic lights that *instantly* begin to switch to red when a pedestrian has pushed the walk button, and my personal favourite; put a pedestrian crossing around a blind bend on a hill so dangerous that they had to replace the road surface to increase grip in the winter.
Making roads more dangerous to decrease the speed of motorists only makes the road more dangerous.
While it is possible to create skindeep flashy marketing tricks, it's also possible to do some pretty awesome things with it. For example, I recently built a google maps style application for a client that plots their hotel properties on a map, drawing the data from an xml file, which allows you to filter in almost any way imagineable, group hotels by cities, and copy their contact details to your clipboard at the push of a button. I built the app in Flex (being primarily a Flex developer/programmer first, and artist second), which is something a little more than Flash. For instance, Flex completely does away with the horrible Flash timeline, settling instead for a Visual Studio style IDE. So now I have all the code management tools of anyone running Visual Studio, with the power of Flash's animation capabilities at my finger tips. It's truly amazing the kind of things you can pull off with it.
Unfortunately for you gramps, the internet has moved beyond tables and frames.Now you say "we", in some attempt to big up your point of view, but the internet is full of creative people who beg to differ. You cannot do any form of fluid animation with HTML, and Javascript only performs the most rudimentary movement of objects. I loathe people like you, your apparent lack of creativity astounds me, you're the kind of person who thinks that math is just something that adds A1 and B1 together. You think that because Flash has been used in such a myriad of interesting and diverse ways, by the advanced and the amateur, that it should be banned.
You're so scared that you use blockers so your poor little eyes don't have to witness the horror of creativity. Furthermore, your homing in on my examples of marketing prowess (Dos Aquis ought to be commended for their excellent web-site and beer commercials, right up there with Heineken) and blog widgets shows your complete lack of understanding of what Flash is capable of. A small example would be google street view... No wait, don't tell me, you've blocked that too.
But here's the real kicker sir, even if all you wish for comes true, guess what? All those people that really *did* make atrocities in UI design will be back, with HTML5, or whatever tool is most like Flash, and they'll be deforming, mangling and desecrating your precious homogeneous vision of the internet all over again. Boohoo.
Slashdot Mirror
"BT's Les King said that we're looking at 1.5Mb/sec for standard definition gaming, and 5Mb/sec for full 1080p HD resolution gaming."
Um what the hell is "standard resolution gaming" if not HD? I'm going to vent here...
I hate it when people think that HD is somehow awesome. It's not. HD is what gamers have been using for the last 10 damn years on a standard computer monitor, and then all these TV companies invented the retarded buzzword high definition and everyone's raving over it. HD is completely underwhelming. What this chump is saying basically, is that to play your games at 75% of their original resolution you need to be running a 5mb/sec connection.
HD my arse.
No it wasn't, and this is exactly what I'm talking about.
For example Timesplitters, Goldeneye and Quake 3 on the Dreamcast came before Halo and were perfectly playable. Furthermore, 4 XBoxes might be easier to get together, but it's also a lot more awkward to actually play on a 4 way split screen, especially if it's a free for all match.
What irked me about Halo was the way Bungie were marketing it as the next best thing since sliced bread... Even more so, how the console gamers lapped it up. It's as if multiplayer FPS's hadn't existed before good ol' Bungie came down on the wings of Heaven and made it so. UT & Q3 owned multiplayer long before Halo's release, and Q3 is still owning it now in the form of Quake Live.
The problem is that with consoles holding back the gaming market, the hardware arms race has all but ended. Most games now start as console games and are ported to the PC, or at the very least, are targeted toward a console platform as well meaning that the game also has to run on it's dated hardware.
here here! Mod parent up! This is why I own a PC, heck, I even have Duke Nukem 3D on mine. I owned and still own a PC for the exact reasons that the parent listed. In fact, I grew up around making games and mods and levels for Doom all the way to Half-Life and ended up getting a degree in programming games, moving to Canada and soon with a few more portfolio pieces I'll be starting my own company. What hasn't changed through all this? The fact that I will always be a PC gamer. It is such a shame that younger generations will be introduced to 'gaming' in its current, pathetic watered down state. They will learn nothing from hacking the game's config files, nothing from building new levels, nothing from collaborating with mod projects and nothing from programming their own game or exercising their imagination. All they will learn is how to put a disc into a drive and to press the big green X button.
Long live PC gaming indeed.
Having read your post, and rereading the President's quotes I see your point.
My response to some of the posts in this thread arose from my possibly naive assertion that the President's audience would see the wisdom in his speech, not being drawn in by any opinions of who to trust that he might have.
Coming from a political figure I think his speech was fairly "white" without a prohibitively large amount of propaganda or spin.
...Wow, did half of the posters here even read the article? Obama's not pro-censorship, he's not arguing that x-box's, twitter and facebook should be taken away:
"With iPods and iPads and Xboxes and PlayStations, -- none of which I know how to work -- information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment, rather than the means of emancipation,"
"some of the craziest claims can quickly claim traction," in the clamor of certain blogs and talk radio outlets.
What Obama is saying, is that in this day and age of massive media coverage you shouldn't always believe what you read. He's encouraging the students to find alternate sources of information, to actually investigate something before spouting off and further propagating the Chinese Whisper... You know, basically what most of the people replying to this article did.
I really wish slashdot admins wouldn't approve articles when the author is so obviously batting for one team. Seriously, who had even used Scribd before they dropped Flash support? I've had a few of their articles show up in my search results for programming and their site was an absolute pig! Definitely not a good example of how to use flash at all. And now suddenly everyone and their mum are singing the praises of a site who's design probably would have sucked ass even if it had been in HTML in the first place. Scribd dropping Flash support is possibly a GOOD thing for Adobe and Flash - that site was an abomination.
Want to raid with 900 ping and a sloppy control scheme? There's an app for that!
That's a great idea and all, until you run into the problem of latency and the fact that to play WoW even slightly competently you need to perform actions in a split second (easy with a keyboard, not with a touch screen). High latency gaming AND low response time from the user? Yeah I won't be grouping with anyone using an iPad...
I ran into this problem a few months ago when trying to connect to a flash media server owned by a client - the media player running on the Mac would take over a minute to connect, and would fail at least once. The client insisted it was a bug in my code (I was the third programmer to be assigned the project after 2 others bailed), but my colleague and I uncovered similar horror stories with Mac OS 10.5, after my version of the player indicated a problem with the connection attempt timing out. The first two programmers couldn't prove this because their error trapping was non existent, so their players simply looked like they were crashing. Ah the joys of cross platform development!
So show us an app made in HTML 5 that is comparable in its presentation to something similar made in Flash
I should have clarified, my comment was targeted more at AAA titles and player's expectations to be pampered instead of challenged.
Focusing on the FPS genre, games tend to have adopted the checkpoint system every 50 metres (Dead Space, Mass Effect 2) which rarely leads to any genuinely difficult encounters. Compare this to the original AvP which only allowed you to save a couple of times per mission... Combined with sometimes random encounters with foes, that was a scary game to play as a Marine.
Nostalgia and dated (xb360) or confusing (ps3) console hardware holding back PC Gaming (Crysis is still the most graphically advanced game on the market) aside, there are some seriously inspired games out there for the PC. There's no need to dig out your pocket calculator to play 'let's write words on the screen in numbers' just yet. Athough I would concede the point that they're all rather too forgiving. Perhaps Star Control III will save us all?
Try joining a martial arts club, I'm living in what could reliably be termed a "redneck" town in Canada, and found that MA tended to attract disciplined, motivated and generally interesting people of all ages and sizes.
oh man made my day, if only i had points to mod parent up!
I also find that the bar-stewards collaborate on their commercial breaks, meaning that switching to a different channel often gets you the same inane ads about fuel efficiency, automobile collision legal advice and the anti depression pill whose side effects are more depressing than anything you could possibly be feeling before taking it.
Your wall of text appears to have bricks missing, and the cement is crumbling
Already tried that, the game is made infinitely more difficult by the physics engine which treats each block as if they have minimal mass in an almost weightless environment, furthermore, the pieces continue to move after they are 'placed'.
I do hope you didn't resurrect this thread purely to make a point about Quake 2 running horribly in a browser with all manner of hacks? Yes, I'm sure that was easy to program and doesn't use a million libraries for everything. If you want to get into a dick swinging contest though, check out what Flash can do with 3D and pixel shaders here: http://away3d.com/ the demo reel pretty much stomps the Quake 2 port in terms of looks.
Once again you're throwing Flash into the fire because a bunch of marketing dick-heads use it to piss you off, this isn't a valid argument for why Flash should be thrown out and in fact, sadly, is a pretty good argument for why it's going to stay: It's easy to do stuff with it, intermediate stuff, advanced stuff, and artists and programmers can collaborate with it and extend it to whatever their level of proficiency is. Apple's refusal of it won't change a thing, and their closed mindedness to everything in general is going to come back and bite them in the ass soon enough.
The comment about Math was a jab at how boring you probably are, how boring is that? I'm not sure about the exact numbers, perhaps you should get out your slide-rule and find out...
I used to live in Bradley Stoke in the UK, one of Europe's more sizeable housing estates, and they put the idea in TFA to use... And it was horrible. They introduced speed bumps every 150 metres or so in some areas, specifically designed to damage your tracking if you went over them faster than 20mph, they put cycle lanes into roads that had not been designed for them, thereby forcing traffic closer to the centre of the road (on one road, hilariously, the cycle lane actually switches sides in the middle, with no road island to help the cyclist cross over), introduced pedestrian crossings with traffic lights that *instantly* begin to switch to red when a pedestrian has pushed the walk button, and my personal favourite; put a pedestrian crossing around a blind bend on a hill so dangerous that they had to replace the road surface to increase grip in the winter.
Making roads more dangerous to decrease the speed of motorists only makes the road more dangerous.
Nocturnal Emissions I believe... This factually accurate comic strip summarizes it pretty eloquently:
http://manga.clone-army.org/t42r.php?page=25&lang=
While it is possible to create skindeep flashy marketing tricks, it's also possible to do some pretty awesome things with it. For example, I recently built a google maps style application for a client that plots their hotel properties on a map, drawing the data from an xml file, which allows you to filter in almost any way imagineable, group hotels by cities, and copy their contact details to your clipboard at the push of a button. I built the app in Flex (being primarily a Flex developer/programmer first, and artist second), which is something a little more than Flash. For instance, Flex completely does away with the horrible Flash timeline, settling instead for a Visual Studio style IDE. So now I have all the code management tools of anyone running Visual Studio, with the power of Flash's animation capabilities at my finger tips. It's truly amazing the kind of things you can pull off with it.
Certainly, I'd point you to Lionhead studios if the year were 2000, but sadly their newest site is rather boring, Dos Equis is a fine example of how you can make something more interesting than your average website: http://dosequis.com/ Here's an example of using flash for more than web-sites, from Slashdot no less: http://games.slashdot.org/story/09/10/10/1134217/emStar-Guardem-mdash-an-Old-School-Platformer-Done-Right?from=rss
Unfortunately for you gramps, the internet has moved beyond tables and frames.Now you say "we", in some attempt to big up your point of view, but the internet is full of creative people who beg to differ. You cannot do any form of fluid animation with HTML, and Javascript only performs the most rudimentary movement of objects. I loathe people like you, your apparent lack of creativity astounds me, you're the kind of person who thinks that math is just something that adds A1 and B1 together. You think that because Flash has been used in such a myriad of interesting and diverse ways, by the advanced and the amateur, that it should be banned.
You're so scared that you use blockers so your poor little eyes don't have to witness the horror of creativity. Furthermore, your homing in on my examples of marketing prowess (Dos Aquis ought to be commended for their excellent web-site and beer commercials, right up there with Heineken) and blog widgets shows your complete lack of understanding of what Flash is capable of. A small example would be google street view... No wait, don't tell me, you've blocked that too.
But here's the real kicker sir, even if all you wish for comes true, guess what? All those people that really *did* make atrocities in UI design will be back, with HTML5, or whatever tool is most like Flash, and they'll be deforming, mangling and desecrating your precious homogeneous vision of the internet all over again. Boohoo.