I think non-unified memory may be worth it for performance reasons -- compare an onboard chipset graphics part to a part with dedicated memory.
I don't know that I agree with your evaluation about "rethinking" the control scheme; for the most part, games that were not built around the Wii's controls tend to be subpar, simply because the options for native controls are so much different that they rebalance the game, rather than just changing which buttons you press.
I do agree that the PS3's "novel" architecture is probably crazy. PS2 had some of the same problem, but at >50% of the market, they could afford it.
That's an interesting point; I've noticed that I am much more likely to think of abuses of a game than people who never did much DMing. My text adventures have gotten praised for responding coherently to incoherent behavior.:)
True enough. It's less noticable, though, partially because it's smaller, and partially because it doesn't take a large and concrete amount of CPU -- say, one full core.
I think that, in the absence of Sony Pictures, the PS3 would have had 512MB of XDR, no hypervisor, and a DVD drive, and would have cost about $100-200 less at launch. They might well still be on the original design, which wouldn't have been remade four times to try to reduce costs, games would have come out a lot sooner, and so on. They might even have been able to not do the "one SPE disabled" thing which not only gimps the system directly, but also makes it impossible to use SPE affinity correctly -- since there's no way to predict at compile or design time where there will be adjacent SPEs.
Price savings would have come from not needing to push blu-ray (what a crock!) and not needing to spend nearly as much effort on the hypervisor and virtualization code; there would be more available memory, and the savings on using a more standard medium would have EASILY covered the cost of giving the machine a slightly roomier memory footprint -- which would have solved one of the biggest problems developers seem to be running into.
Having enough processor power and raw speed is great, but if you haven't got enough memory for enough data to keep the CPU busy, who cares?
Yeah, but since it has a unified architecture, a big chunk of that is stolen for video -- how much is hard to say.
In practice, they have comparable supplies, except that the PS3 can't skimp in VRAM to get main memory (or on main memory to get VRAM) on a game-by-game basis... And the PS3 OS takes up about 2.5x as much space as the 360 OS. The number's been dropping some, but it's still huge. Blame Sony's movie studios; they're the ones that mandated the hypervisor, so far as I can tell, and that's why the system's sort of gimped by running on a virtual machine.
Zonk's really improving. He used to post dups days or even weeks after CmdrTaco posted them. Today, he posted the dup several hours BEFORE CmdrTaco did!
Er, no. The PS3 has 256MB of RAM -- VRAM doesn't count. However, the OS chews up about 72MB of that, leaving you with less, and you need extra space for SPE buffers. The 360's crappy unified architecture, in practice, gives you a lot closer to a real full 256MB of RAM -- with only about 32 taken away by the OS.
The decision to cut back from 512MB of XDR to 256MB was a crappy decision.
Yeah, lots of companies, developing specifically for PS3, are able to work around the memory limitations -- but some games are built around the assumption of at least 200MB available for the actual game engine.
There's no defenders of the memory shortage who are actual PS3 programmers. There's some apologists who will admit that it's an issue, but argue that it can be worked around, but the people who claim it's not an issue are, curiously, never actually people who have developed for the target.
It's more complicated than just "if you can be bothered to learn it" -- making effective use of the PS3 frequently requires a complete redesign, and if your basic engine requires more memory than is left over for you after the hypervisor, you're just screwed. Sony made some very bad engineering decisions at the end to cut costs, and it shows.
The thing that makes a great DM is the ability to improvise in response to the unexpected. You can't improvise in response to the unexpected two years before it happens, write up a detailed response, and burn it to DVD.
A preview is supposed to talk about how the pre-release looks -- and I don't know that I've ever seen a game that was unplayably slow in pre-release suddenly becoming clean and fast in a final shipment.
Gaming sites don't get blacklisted for saying that a pre-release sucks. If they did, there'd be no previews anymore.
Same as their spam practice -- you're more likely to get spammed if you're a bad customer, because they have less to lose. This is why every complaint about them spamming gets met with dozens of "but I buy from them all the time and never get spam". Of course not; they have a lot to lose if they annoy you, and you're buying stuff anyway. It's the inactive people that seem to be most likely to end up getting unwanted mail. (And I know they don't hit everybody, but I know enough people getting enough spam from them to stick with the analysis.)
Star Wars was an incredible series, because I was something like 5 when the first one came out.
Star Wars is sort of mediocre now, because I'm an adult, and I can understand plots, and I can perceive plot holes.
Why look for changes in the series, when we have a perfectly adequate explanation now? This is like asking when Curious George stopped being incredibly fascinating and started being sort of tedious.
I think you misunderstand "innocent until proven guilty".
If you add the qualifier "in a court of law", it applies to both sides of that equation.
She is innocent only in a court of law until proven guilty in a court of law. Look at OJ; obviously, he's legally innocent of murder. Just as obviously, everyone knows he killed two people.
People are not saying that Lori Drew is a criminal -- she has, after all, not been charged with anything, and she is, after all, innocent of any crime until proven guilty. People are saying that, by her own explicit admission, she was directly involved in a romantic relationship with a thirteen-year-old under the assumed identity of a hot sixteen-year-old boy, which culminated in the boy sending messages to the girl which resulted in the girl's suicide -- and doing so when, as it happens, Lori Drew knew from direct observation that the girl in question was dangerously depressed.
Mobs do what they do. Sometimes they're right, sometimes they're wrong. It's not clear at all, though, that the mob mentality will be best addressed by criticising it in a case where the accused is accused by her own words, filed in a police report.
If the people posting Lori Drew's name were killing her, or putting her in jail, you'd have a point.
They're not. Their responses are, like the investigation, not within the scope of things that private citizens are prohibited from doing on their own time for their own reasons.
Note also that, given her explicit confession, I think there's a lot less concern than there might be otherwise over the possibility of a wrongful accusation...
You seem to be dismissing the possibility that someone could actually disagree with you, rather than merely not yet having had the experiences that opened your eyes.
You might as well get nothing but responses saying "Well, when it's your daughter dead, and the perpetrators aren't getting any trouble from law enforcement, you'll understand."
When you get nothing but responses like that, and you're the one thinking they don't even address your point, you'll understand.:p
They've been raising production for that whole year; it was 1M/month originally, up to 1.5M/month last spring, and now up to 1.8M/month. They said a while back it takes about 5 months for a change in production levels to take effect, so they have to guess 5 months in advance, and they seem to guess sort of conservatively.
The spotty controls wouldn't necessarily be better on a "classic" controller -- there have been spotty controls on those, too, on many occasions.
I agree that the new controller may be a bit harder to code for, but... Look at reviews of, say, Medal of Honor 2, or Super Mario Galaxy, or play SMG. It is not hard to get absolutely flawless control.
Just a reminder, for all the people who loved Monkey Island or Grim Fandango, or any other point-and-click adventure:
Capcom did a point and click for Wii, called Zack & Wiki. It's not selling well, but it is an absolutely awesome game. Don't mind the appearance of being a little cartoony; this is a serious, challenging, adventure game.
It's not supposed to be 1:1; it's just supposed to be a reasonably intuitive interface.
Who are you to make proclamations about a "real gamer"? I've been playing video games for thirty years, on pretty much every platform, I've got a PS3, I've got a PS2 and a gamecube, I've got a dedicated multicore machine I got to run video games on, and when I'm not too busy with work, I game 40-60 hours a week.
The Wii is the best gaming console I've ever had. Seems to me the person missing something is you.
Er, because they're still selling out, now something like 1.8M consoles a month worldwide?
The tightness of the race is partially due to Nintendo not being big enough to scale up instantaneously -- and not foolhardy enough to spend the money it would take to do it immediately.
But IMHO, SMG is innovative on many levels. Yeah, there were bits and pieces of sort of similar stuff, here and there, but the gameplay is totally unlike anything else.
Sounds like baby duck syndrome; you're sticking with what you're used to.
Maybe if you, you know, got some of the incredible games that have come out in the "months" since you last tried it, you might enjoy it? I mean, just a thought -- I've found that systems I don't own any games for don't get much play, too.
The thing is, you're just plain missing the point. The newness of the controller wearing off is a good thing. The thing that makes the Wiimote the best thing to happen to console gaming in the last fifteen years is not that it's hard to get used to, but that you're used to it almost instantly.
The goal is not to think about controls; it's to think about games instead of controls, and that's where the Wiimote wins.
I've been playing console games since the Intellivision. This is the best controller I've ever used, not because of "newness" but because it's transparent to me; I just move my little guy without really thinking about it.
Slashdot Mirror
I think non-unified memory may be worth it for performance reasons -- compare an onboard chipset graphics part to a part with dedicated memory.
I don't know that I agree with your evaluation about "rethinking" the control scheme; for the most part, games that were not built around the Wii's controls tend to be subpar, simply because the options for native controls are so much different that they rebalance the game, rather than just changing which buttons you press.
I do agree that the PS3's "novel" architecture is probably crazy. PS2 had some of the same problem, but at >50% of the market, they could afford it.
That's an interesting point; I've noticed that I am much more likely to think of abuses of a game than people who never did much DMing. My text adventures have gotten praised for responding coherently to incoherent behavior. :)
True enough. It's less noticable, though, partially because it's smaller, and partially because it doesn't take a large and concrete amount of CPU -- say, one full core.
I'm not under any NDAs at the moment. :)
I think that, in the absence of Sony Pictures, the PS3 would have had 512MB of XDR, no hypervisor, and a DVD drive, and would have cost about $100-200 less at launch. They might well still be on the original design, which wouldn't have been remade four times to try to reduce costs, games would have come out a lot sooner, and so on. They might even have been able to not do the "one SPE disabled" thing which not only gimps the system directly, but also makes it impossible to use SPE affinity correctly -- since there's no way to predict at compile or design time where there will be adjacent SPEs.
Price savings would have come from not needing to push blu-ray (what a crock!) and not needing to spend nearly as much effort on the hypervisor and virtualization code; there would be more available memory, and the savings on using a more standard medium would have EASILY covered the cost of giving the machine a slightly roomier memory footprint -- which would have solved one of the biggest problems developers seem to be running into.
Having enough processor power and raw speed is great, but if you haven't got enough memory for enough data to keep the CPU busy, who cares?
Yeah, but since it has a unified architecture, a big chunk of that is stolen for video -- how much is hard to say.
In practice, they have comparable supplies, except that the PS3 can't skimp in VRAM to get main memory (or on main memory to get VRAM) on a game-by-game basis... And the PS3 OS takes up about 2.5x as much space as the 360 OS. The number's been dropping some, but it's still huge. Blame Sony's movie studios; they're the ones that mandated the hypervisor, so far as I can tell, and that's why the system's sort of gimped by running on a virtual machine.
Zonk's really improving. He used to post dups days or even weeks after CmdrTaco posted them. Today, he posted the dup several hours BEFORE CmdrTaco did!
Er, no. The PS3 has 256MB of RAM -- VRAM doesn't count. However, the OS chews up about 72MB of that, leaving you with less, and you need extra space for SPE buffers. The 360's crappy unified architecture, in practice, gives you a lot closer to a real full 256MB of RAM -- with only about 32 taken away by the OS.
The decision to cut back from 512MB of XDR to 256MB was a crappy decision.
Yeah, lots of companies, developing specifically for PS3, are able to work around the memory limitations -- but some games are built around the assumption of at least 200MB available for the actual game engine.
There's no defenders of the memory shortage who are actual PS3 programmers. There's some apologists who will admit that it's an issue, but argue that it can be worked around, but the people who claim it's not an issue are, curiously, never actually people who have developed for the target.
It's more complicated than just "if you can be bothered to learn it" -- making effective use of the PS3 frequently requires a complete redesign, and if your basic engine requires more memory than is left over for you after the hypervisor, you're just screwed. Sony made some very bad engineering decisions at the end to cut costs, and it shows.
This wouldn't help.
The thing that makes a great DM is the ability to improvise in response to the unexpected. You can't improvise in response to the unexpected two years before it happens, write up a detailed response, and burn it to DVD.
This is the POINT of previews, though!
A preview is supposed to talk about how the pre-release looks -- and I don't know that I've ever seen a game that was unplayably slow in pre-release suddenly becoming clean and fast in a final shipment.
Gaming sites don't get blacklisted for saying that a pre-release sucks. If they did, there'd be no previews anymore.
Same as their spam practice -- you're more likely to get spammed if you're a bad customer, because they have less to lose. This is why every complaint about them spamming gets met with dozens of "but I buy from them all the time and never get spam". Of course not; they have a lot to lose if they annoy you, and you're buying stuff anyway. It's the inactive people that seem to be most likely to end up getting unwanted mail. (And I know they don't hit everybody, but I know enough people getting enough spam from them to stick with the analysis.)
Star Wars was an incredible series, because I was something like 5 when the first one came out.
Star Wars is sort of mediocre now, because I'm an adult, and I can understand plots, and I can perceive plot holes.
Why look for changes in the series, when we have a perfectly adequate explanation now? This is like asking when Curious George stopped being incredibly fascinating and started being sort of tedious.
How can Amazon be a "patent reformer"? Should there be this much doublespeak on Slashdot?
I think you misunderstand "innocent until proven guilty".
If you add the qualifier "in a court of law", it applies to both sides of that equation.
She is innocent only in a court of law until proven guilty in a court of law. Look at OJ; obviously, he's legally innocent of murder. Just as obviously, everyone knows he killed two people.
People are not saying that Lori Drew is a criminal -- she has, after all, not been charged with anything, and she is, after all, innocent of any crime until proven guilty. People are saying that, by her own explicit admission, she was directly involved in a romantic relationship with a thirteen-year-old under the assumed identity of a hot sixteen-year-old boy, which culminated in the boy sending messages to the girl which resulted in the girl's suicide -- and doing so when, as it happens, Lori Drew knew from direct observation that the girl in question was dangerously depressed.
Mobs do what they do. Sometimes they're right, sometimes they're wrong. It's not clear at all, though, that the mob mentality will be best addressed by criticising it in a case where the accused is accused by her own words, filed in a police report.
If the people posting Lori Drew's name were killing her, or putting her in jail, you'd have a point.
They're not. Their responses are, like the investigation, not within the scope of things that private citizens are prohibited from doing on their own time for their own reasons.
Note also that, given her explicit confession, I think there's a lot less concern than there might be otherwise over the possibility of a wrongful accusation...
That's not even an argument.
:p
You seem to be dismissing the possibility that someone could actually disagree with you, rather than merely not yet having had the experiences that opened your eyes.
You might as well get nothing but responses saying "Well, when it's your daughter dead, and the perpetrators aren't getting any trouble from law enforcement, you'll understand."
When you get nothing but responses like that, and you're the one thinking they don't even address your point, you'll understand.
They've been raising production for that whole year; it was 1M/month originally, up to 1.5M/month last spring, and now up to 1.8M/month. They said a while back it takes about 5 months for a change in production levels to take effect, so they have to guess 5 months in advance, and they seem to guess sort of conservatively.
The spotty controls wouldn't necessarily be better on a "classic" controller -- there have been spotty controls on those, too, on many occasions.
I agree that the new controller may be a bit harder to code for, but... Look at reviews of, say, Medal of Honor 2, or Super Mario Galaxy, or play SMG. It is not hard to get absolutely flawless control.
Just a reminder, for all the people who loved Monkey Island or Grim Fandango, or any other point-and-click adventure:
Capcom did a point and click for Wii, called Zack & Wiki. It's not selling well, but it is an absolutely awesome game. Don't mind the appearance of being a little cartoony; this is a serious, challenging, adventure game.
You've pretty much totally missed the point.
It's not supposed to be 1:1; it's just supposed to be a reasonably intuitive interface.
Who are you to make proclamations about a "real gamer"? I've been playing video games for thirty years, on pretty much every platform, I've got a PS3, I've got a PS2 and a gamecube, I've got a dedicated multicore machine I got to run video games on, and when I'm not too busy with work, I game 40-60 hours a week.
The Wii is the best gaming console I've ever had. Seems to me the person missing something is you.
Er, because they're still selling out, now something like 1.8M consoles a month worldwide?
The tightness of the race is partially due to Nintendo not being big enough to scale up instantaneously -- and not foolhardy enough to spend the money it would take to do it immediately.
In general? Not necessarily anything.
But IMHO, SMG is innovative on many levels. Yeah, there were bits and pieces of sort of similar stuff, here and there, but the gameplay is totally unlike anything else.
While a couple of the Rayman minigames are vaguely familiar, mostly, they're experiences never before available on a console.
Seems to me you're missing the point of the system.
Sounds like baby duck syndrome; you're sticking with what you're used to.
Maybe if you, you know, got some of the incredible games that have come out in the "months" since you last tried it, you might enjoy it? I mean, just a thought -- I've found that systems I don't own any games for don't get much play, too.
Super Mario Galaxy.
The thing is, you're just plain missing the point. The newness of the controller wearing off is a good thing. The thing that makes the Wiimote the best thing to happen to console gaming in the last fifteen years is not that it's hard to get used to, but that you're used to it almost instantly.
The goal is not to think about controls; it's to think about games instead of controls, and that's where the Wiimote wins.
I've been playing console games since the Intellivision. This is the best controller I've ever used, not because of "newness" but because it's transparent to me; I just move my little guy without really thinking about it.