..and thats why the fastest encryption libraries are written in high level languages, right?
oh, erm.. encryption algorithms need the exact things you claim compilers are great at, yet the fastest encryption libraries are in hand-written assembler.
Because the GP claimed that there was no use for assembler at all? Oh wait, they didn't.
The fact is that this "compilers are better than humans" meme is complete bullshit and has always been bullshit. This fact can clearly be demonstrated by looking at the change logs of those compilers. For well over a decade this meme has been out there and for well over a decade there has been continual performance improvements to those compilers..
Yes, it is not true that the most well-optimized assembly code will beat the best compiler. But any good programmer has learned that rewriting all parts of a program in assembler does not always gain significant returns for your effort and in some cases these "optimizations" can actually have deleterious effects on the overall execution speed of the program. Not to mention the fact that there are numerous assembly language programmers that just flat out suck at coding in it and can in many cases produce slower code than that output from a compiler (have seen this in many cases). There is no guarantee that just cause you wrote it in assembly that it's going to be faster than a compiled C/C++ program.
What it all boils down to is that HLL's use an abstract machine that has nothing at all to do with the real world details of computing on a specific architecture, and that my friend is why hand written essembler will always win the performance war.
Yes, but in many cases that peformance gain is quite minimal compared to the extra effort put in to writing and debugging the asm.
Actually his points are quite valid. It is not a good choice to write everything in assembly when the speedups you gain in most places is not worth the amount of time and effort you spend in hand-optimizing the code. And considering how many bugs I've seen in people's asm code that they didn't spot till later his second point is also true.
Even with pipelining updates from the compilers that help the look-ahead caches on the CPU, there's very few times that hand-coded assembler isn't going to be faster.
No software got popular with such a restrictive licence! Heaven forbid they give it away free for personal use, all the most popular OSs are free for all!
The only non-free OSes that have have actually been used by more than 5 people actually provided more features than "Can play a 13 year old game fast".
(I don't disagree with you that it might seem a pointless licence, depending on what their plans for it are, but I don't think this has much relevance to popularity.)
Actually it does. Since this is clearly not a commercially viable OS the only segment of the population that might possibly use it would be tinkerers in the FOSS crowd, but they are going to be turned off by the license. There is really no viable reason to run the OS if you aren't allowed to tinker with the source code.
No, the process you describe is referred to as disassembling. Decompiling has a connotation of going from the compiled asm code in an executable back to the original source code in a higher level language.
1) Free for personal and educational use.
2) Contact menuetos.net for commercial use.
3) Redistribution, reverse engineering, disassembly or decompilation
prohibited without permission from the copyright holders.
Probably won't gain much steam with a license like that. Enjoy your obscurity and 3 users.
I agree. Why learn the languages that 60% of all new code is written in when you can learn the latest niche language that barely accounts for.3% of all new code written and will probably be forgotten when Twitter rewrites itself in the newest and greatest flavor of the month in a couple of years. Clearly the GP is the stupid one in this.
My hypothesis: In general, major players want consoles to live, and minor players want consoles to die.
I would disagree with that too. The numerous indie developers that have gotten their games onto the Xbox Live Arcade, WiiWare and PSN would probably disagree.
Nintendo Developer Qualifications would disagree with you. Executive summary: People who have a day job outside the mainstream video game industry and develop video games part-time would find it hard to qualify.
One word: WiiWare. Plenty of indie games get put up their just like with the Xbox Live Arcade and the PSN has something similar.
The linux market is actually significantly larger than that.
Yeah, it was almost as if I was being overly hyperbolic for sarcastic purposes!
Some indy developers have reported thousands of sales. It's not millions, but thousands is several orders of magnitude larger than 15 sales per year.
Wow. Thousands of sales? Gee, that really is a sign that game companies should ignore the consoles for Linux. Hahaha, yeah right.
For a high quality commercial game, 25-100k per year wouldn't be an unreasonable estimate.
Wow you've convinced me. Bungie clearly should have thrown away 99% of their sales from that "poor little console" in order for them to instead port it to Linux!
First post:
any video game publisher
Second post:
any major video game maker
Yes, it was a clarification. Just because you can find some obscure studio with 5 sales to it's name that wants consoles to die doesn't mean EA, Vivendi, Activision/Blizzard, aka pretty much all the major players in the industry, want consoles to die considering how much money they generate for them.
What is every video game maker before it becomes major? It's indie, and indies as a whole tend not to qualify for console licenses. But besides:
There is no "qualification" for a console license. It's something you purchase. There are a number of indie publishers that have had and currently have licenses with Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft.
From the summary of Financial Issues May Force Changes On Games Industry [slashdot.org]: "the lack of console users 'meant developers there did not have to pay royalties to console makers.'"
Which does not translate to "We want consoles to no longer exist".
It's not just the video stack that is a complete mess. The Linux audio stack is a huge pile of cruft and crap too. Combine that with the lack of any standardization between libraries on any one Linux distro and it's not hard to see why they would just a locked-down and stable console platform over the unstable ecosystem of Linux distros.
It's not like linux doesn't run great on high end hardware or anything. So, don't worry about the poor little consoles for a moment and PORT to Linux!!
Yeah, clearly Bungie was stupid for targeting Halo 3 for that crappy 360 and selling 8 million copies in 3 months when they could have gone straight for the Linux gaming market and have garnered 15 sales in a year.
It still blows the pants off of the average desktop that most people are using to play games. This whole thing comparing gaming rigs to consoles neglects the fact that a gaming rig costs anywhere from 2 to 3 times as much as a console.
why can't games be ported to run natively in linux ?
Probably because most companies see little incentive to do so because they estimate a small amount of sales that won't make them a profit for the effort. The failing of Loki Games, despite the fact that it was mostly a self-inflicted implosion on Loki's part, probably doesn't help make a case to these companies to put out any effort.
is it / more / same / less difficult to port a game to linux than it is to port, say, PS3 to PC
More difficult in many cases from the experiences I've seen. There are some frameworks developed that help ease this, but for most of these companies developing against DirectX and it's video/audio APIs is usually far easier than trying to port something to the mess of the video/audio stack on Linux systems.
Essentially the console is dramatically underpowered versus contemporary PCs.
A tri-core 3.2ghz PowerPC powered Xbox360 is underpowered? Yeah, maybe compared to PCs that cost 10 times as much, but it's far more powerful than most desktops people are buying even today.
Why connect to some distance server for all that traffic when the overhead could be kept on the local LAN for strictly local gameplay?
You've apparently never played on Battle.net before. Battle.net has never worked this way. The people all directly connect to each other there is no remote server involved at all. There is no reason to expect this behavior to change.
Slashdot Mirror
That was meant to be "is true" not "is not true"
..and thats why the fastest encryption libraries are written in high level languages, right?
oh, erm.. encryption algorithms need the exact things you claim compilers are great at, yet the fastest encryption libraries are in hand-written assembler.
Because the GP claimed that there was no use for assembler at all? Oh wait, they didn't.
The fact is that this "compilers are better than humans" meme is complete bullshit and has always been bullshit. This fact can clearly be demonstrated by looking at the change logs of those compilers. For well over a decade this meme has been out there and for well over a decade there has been continual performance improvements to those compilers..
Yes, it is not true that the most well-optimized assembly code will beat the best compiler. But any good programmer has learned that rewriting all parts of a program in assembler does not always gain significant returns for your effort and in some cases these "optimizations" can actually have deleterious effects on the overall execution speed of the program. Not to mention the fact that there are numerous assembly language programmers that just flat out suck at coding in it and can in many cases produce slower code than that output from a compiler (have seen this in many cases). There is no guarantee that just cause you wrote it in assembly that it's going to be faster than a compiled C/C++ program.
What it all boils down to is that HLL's use an abstract machine that has nothing at all to do with the real world details of computing on a specific architecture, and that my friend is why hand written essembler will always win the performance war.
Yes, but in many cases that peformance gain is quite minimal compared to the extra effort put in to writing and debugging the asm.
That still doesn't show how that is an impressive feat. I would be more surprised if it couldn't play Quake than the fact that it can.
Even with pipelining updates from the compilers that help the look-ahead caches on the CPU, there's very few times that hand-coded assembler isn't going to be faster.
The GP never made that claim.
No software got popular with such a restrictive licence! Heaven forbid they give it away free for personal use, all the most popular OSs are free for all!
The only non-free OSes that have have actually been used by more than 5 people actually provided more features than "Can play a 13 year old game fast".
(I don't disagree with you that it might seem a pointless licence, depending on what their plans for it are, but I don't think this has much relevance to popularity.)
Actually it does. Since this is clearly not a commercially viable OS the only segment of the population that might possibly use it would be tinkerers in the FOSS crowd, but they are going to be turned off by the license. There is really no viable reason to run the OS if you aren't allowed to tinker with the source code.
Exactly. Pretty much any computer made from 2000 onward can play quake with no hiccups.
No, the process you describe is referred to as disassembling. Decompiling has a connotation of going from the compiled asm code in an executable back to the original source code in a higher level language.
Menuet64 Copyright (c) 2005-2009 Ville Turjanmaa
1) Free for personal and educational use.
2) Contact menuetos.net for commercial use.
3) Redistribution, reverse engineering, disassembly or decompilation prohibited without permission from the copyright holders.
Probably won't gain much steam with a license like that. Enjoy your obscurity and 3 users.
Fine, then develop your games for the Xbox Live Arcade, as I already mentioned, that only requires you to buy a membership to the XNA Creators Club.
I agree. Why learn the languages that 60% of all new code is written in when you can learn the latest niche language that barely accounts for .3% of all new code written and will probably be forgotten when Twitter rewrites itself in the newest and greatest flavor of the month in a couple of years. Clearly the GP is the stupid one in this.
Source: http://www.tiobe.com/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html
My hypothesis: In general, major players want consoles to live, and minor players want consoles to die.
I would disagree with that too. The numerous indie developers that have gotten their games onto the Xbox Live Arcade, WiiWare and PSN would probably disagree.
Nintendo Developer Qualifications would disagree with you. Executive summary: People who have a day job outside the mainstream video game industry and develop video games part-time would find it hard to qualify.
One word: WiiWare. Plenty of indie games get put up their just like with the Xbox Live Arcade and the PSN has something similar.
The linux market is actually significantly larger than that.
Yeah, it was almost as if I was being overly hyperbolic for sarcastic purposes!
Some indy developers have reported thousands of sales. It's not millions, but thousands is several orders of magnitude larger than 15 sales per year.
Wow. Thousands of sales? Gee, that really is a sign that game companies should ignore the consoles for Linux. Hahaha, yeah right.
For a high quality commercial game, 25-100k per year wouldn't be an unreasonable estimate.
Wow you've convinced me. Bungie clearly should have thrown away 99% of their sales from that "poor little console" in order for them to instead port it to Linux!
First post: any video game publisher Second post: any major video game maker
Yes, it was a clarification. Just because you can find some obscure studio with 5 sales to it's name that wants consoles to die doesn't mean EA, Vivendi, Activision/Blizzard, aka pretty much all the major players in the industry, want consoles to die considering how much money they generate for them.
What is every video game maker before it becomes major? It's indie, and indies as a whole tend not to qualify for console licenses. But besides:
There is no "qualification" for a console license. It's something you purchase. There are a number of indie publishers that have had and currently have licenses with Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft.
From the summary of Financial Issues May Force Changes On Games Industry [slashdot.org]: "the lack of console users 'meant developers there did not have to pay royalties to console makers.'"
Which does not translate to "We want consoles to no longer exist".
Platform(s): Dreamcast, Linux, Mac OS, Mac OS X, PlayStation 2, Windows
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unreal_Tournament
Nothing in either of those posts show that any major video game maker wants consoles to die.
It's not just the video stack that is a complete mess. The Linux audio stack is a huge pile of cruft and crap too. Combine that with the lack of any standardization between libraries on any one Linux distro and it's not hard to see why they would just a locked-down and stable console platform over the unstable ecosystem of Linux distros.
It's not like linux doesn't run great on high end hardware or anything. So, don't worry about the poor little consoles for a moment and PORT to Linux!!
Yeah, clearly Bungie was stupid for targeting Halo 3 for that crappy 360 and selling 8 million copies in 3 months when they could have gone straight for the Linux gaming market and have garnered 15 sales in a year.
It still blows the pants off of the average desktop that most people are using to play games. This whole thing comparing gaming rigs to consoles neglects the fact that a gaming rig costs anywhere from 2 to 3 times as much as a console.
It does not, nor has it ever meant "Personal Computer with Microsoft Windows Operating System installed".
You must be 2 years old then. Apple has been using a decades plus old campaign that says exactly that.
The big flaw in all this is an assumption that any video game publisher wants consoles to be killed.
why can't games be ported to run natively in linux ?
Probably because most companies see little incentive to do so because they estimate a small amount of sales that won't make them a profit for the effort. The failing of Loki Games, despite the fact that it was mostly a self-inflicted implosion on Loki's part, probably doesn't help make a case to these companies to put out any effort.
is it / more / same / less difficult to port a game to linux than it is to port, say, PS3 to PC
More difficult in many cases from the experiences I've seen. There are some frameworks developed that help ease this, but for most of these companies developing against DirectX and it's video/audio APIs is usually far easier than trying to port something to the mess of the video/audio stack on Linux systems.
Essentially the console is dramatically underpowered versus contemporary PCs.
A tri-core 3.2ghz PowerPC powered Xbox360 is underpowered? Yeah, maybe compared to PCs that cost 10 times as much, but it's far more powerful than most desktops people are buying even today.
Or are you astroturfing?
Oh heaven forbid anyone thinks something different than the slashdot groupthink! You clearly must be an astroturfer!
Why connect to some distance server for all that traffic when the overhead could be kept on the local LAN for strictly local gameplay?
You've apparently never played on Battle.net before. Battle.net has never worked this way. The people all directly connect to each other there is no remote server involved at all. There is no reason to expect this behavior to change.
Who's to say that anyone en masse would have bought their software even if Microsoft hadn't done this?