My favorite part of the entire email is this line:
I'd like to take that stupid X Box and crack that moron from MIT over the head with it.
Talk about really reinforcing her anti-violence message, eh? : ) If this is how quickly she snaps and resorts to violence... Judging by the temper tantrum she's throwing in that email, I'd say it gives you a pretty good indication of why her son's so screwed up. (If you can believe her.)
"Well spoken" my ass; if this woman actually gets her nursing degree, I pity the people whose lives she 'touches.'
- The company hasn't released the game yet, but wants to release a video of gameplay to the public. Current methods would require implementing a "save game as it goes" and then a "replay, in offline rendering mode at a steady frame rate, and record results" pass. Or, you could save it at reduced quality if you had video out on your computer and video in on another computer.. but that's just ridiculous, imo.
- Likewise, you have the game, and your friend hasn't purchased it yet, and lives too far away to just take a glance at it..
- You're having a graphical glitch in a game with your particular card that can't be easily illustrated with screenshots. Think how much easier it would be to just send a video clip than having to send a half-dozen screenshots and a wordy explanation, where they still might not believe you.
- You have a Radeon9700, he has a Geforce2. You want to show him how different Doom III looks on your card, as opposed to his card, in real time.
The reason I never took up the "sport" is two-fold; I don't have the money, and I don't like the fact that I have to bend over so much to see the danged things properly. (I slouch enough in front of a computer as it is.)
That having been said, I was a big fan of the computer versions of pinball when they first came out. I remember Epic Pinball as being a ton of fun, and I think there was another called Silver Ball Pinball? In any event, they were a real blast to play, and almost made me wish I had a table of my own. Almost.
The problem is that there is no actual end to the game. Sure, there's the goal of getting a higher score, but people today don't play something to perfect it; they play it to beat it! It's this change in the goal of the player that's got people buying video games that have stories, variety... RPGs like Final Fantasy.. rather than playing pinball, imo.
That having been said, my favorite game ever is actually Puyo Puyo, and I'm currently working to double my high score, so I don't exactly fit well into the RPG-lover category, even though I profess the teachings of it.. : ) So take this all with a huge, honkin grain of salt.
I figure all video gamers, though, will eventually end up at a point where the video games just aren't all that interesting anymore, and they'll want something that poses a good, repeatable challenge. In other words, I think we just need to wait for people to grow bored of these linear video games, and then pinball may end up making a comeback. (If the.. uh.. arcade owners want it to..) Either that, or people give up on arcade games, and go out and play a good 'ol game of softball.. : )
GM food-related patent problems can be a real bitch. I remember a story from a while back about a farmer who was sued for using GM seeds without permission and didn't know why... until it was revealed that a neighbouring farm was using the GM seeds, and those plants were cross-pollenating with his own.
Re:Nothing like a little Carmack...
on
Doom3 and OpenGL2.0
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· Score: 4, Informative
Quad-based geometry has to be converted back to triangles at some point for rendering anyways. Since this can be done two ways (quads don't have to be square, or even equilateral, but imagine a sandwich on texas toast; you can cut it top left to bottom right or top right to bottom left) geometry can look slightly different with different implementations. If the points don't exist on a plain, then the normal won't be correct either, which is another problem. (ie; What do you do if your quad's warped?)
Also, if your triangles don't map perfectly with the texture, you'll get tearing along the crease between the two triangles. To fix this, you have to subdivide the triangles further until it's no longer as noticeable. It's a real bother..
ARB_ path refers to what we're used to; multiple texture rendering stages, dot3 bump mapping and the like. Stuff that works on Geforce 2s, ATi Radeons, etc. These are standards agreed on by the OpenGL Architecture Review Board, usually extensions that will be promoted to being part of the standard in the next version of OpenGL.
The NV20 path is for Geforce 3 and up. A vertex program is NVidia terminology for vertex shader. Assuming the OpenGL version numbers reflect the DirectX ones, version 1.0 was a holdover from pre-release; it's missing a register that's required to do index/palette-based matrix skinning. 1.1 has this register. Other than that, there is no difference.
I disagree. Go back a few days, and check out the growing percentage of computers bought from "white box" shops. That tells me that people are starting to "get a clue," and I think we're going to see a lot less trust in "the big name" as a result. (Be it IBM, Dell, or HP.)
It's only a matter of time before people figure out just what percentage of the cost of their new box is the Microsoft tax, and they start pirating the OS.
Of course, this doesn't bode all that well for Linux, but then what does? As long as Windows is the primary gaming platform of x86, Linux will never become the dominant home OS. I mean, come on, the reason people upgrade their systems is for the games; which OS are you going to install on your new gaming platform? The one that allows you to play the latest Flight Simulator, or the one that doesn't even have drivers yet for your fancy new card?
Is that a codec limitation, though, or is it an encoder problem? This, of course, is the big question, because if it's just the encoder, that can always be improved.
Not really. My point is that they'll put the decryption in the hardware, so even if you do get a high-quality stream into the hardware, it won't play it.
Now what they're talking about would keep people from running in ring 0 without authorization, so that means that you can't install a device driver that isn't authorized. (Since all device drivers that aren't "dumb" run in ring 0.)
Of course, you can always hack around software, but what do you do if, like I mentioned, the decryption for audio/video streams is in the hardware?
Best case, people'll have hacked flashes for their cards to disable DRM. Even then, products go through so many versions and updates, and there are so many different companies with products, that it gets tough for the average consumer to disable 'em themselves. (Which could, in turn, make people decide to only buy from one vendor because that one's hacked. So we're essentially giving them a monopoly..)
Worst case, it's not flashable, and we're stuck having to brute-force the key for the next 20 years. Or solder a mod-chip onto our sound cards..
You can authorize each program yourself. It's just that your OS will complain that it isn't authenticated, or whatever, and ask you if you want to run it or not. I'm sure they'll leave an option to "allow all software to run without authentication;" it's only the Microsoft thing to do....
Digital media, on the other hand, that's something totally different. Microsoft will keep a firm grip on that stuff, through either requiring encryption keys to allow a piece of software to play a stream through an audio or video device, or by simply requiring that the stream sent to the devices be itself encrypted, or else the quality will be degraded to discourage replication.
As for hard drives, expect to see some sort of per-sector encryption being built in..
That's the problem, though. If linux is seen as a server-only solution for 90% of it's purchasers, then that means that hardware companies, faced with the prospect of selling specialized CPUs for linux, will start pricing them out of the consumer range. What happens when the CPU is no longer available easily to the average consumer?
In a somewhat unrelated area, I'm a programmer trying to break into the audio geek area as a hobby. Logistically, it should be really freaking simple to make a device which records audio directly to a harddrive, nowadays, in raw wave format. This is what I want so I can start sampling stuff. But instead, thanks to digital rights management, I can't get anything anywhere near what I want. My only options are either DAT tape recorders or (lossy) professional-model minidisc technology. (Professional by definition, only because it doesn't have copy-protection built into it.) Where are my cheap devices?
It's laws like these digital rights management laws that keep the average consumer out of areas he would otherwise dabble in as a hobby. I'm waiting for the day that Microsoft requires every binary I compile to have an encryption key, authorized by Microsoft, embedded into it, or else it won't run on anyone else's computer.
According to the information circling the net about the Parhelion, it should have vertex and pixel shaders. Vertex shader should be a DirectX 9.0 version, and the pixel shader should be 8.1 or a little better.
My guess is that they didn't want, or weren't authorized, to give Hard-OCP a copy of the board with DirectX 9.0, so they wouldn't be able to see all the neat things like displacement maps anyways. And I doubt they're writing any DirectX 8.0/8.1 drivers... so it wouldn't be useful to Hard-OCP anyways. I wouldn't sweat it.
Yoda as CG didn't pose a huge problem for me. What did pose a huge problem for me was that he was not Yoda at all, but rather a caricature of what he should have been. Examples:
- Yoda being diplomatic to Queen Amidala when she shows up for the first time. I don't know what, exactly, the line he said was, but it was lame, and didn't deserve screen time. What they should've done, instead, was have him hit on her.... Yeah, you heard me, hit on her. This is the same Yoda who stole Luke's flashlight, and couldn't help but tease him repeatedly when he first met him, after all..
- the scene with Yoda and the little kids was insanely embarrassing. It had one purpose, and one purpose only; to relate to the audience that Obiwan got permission from Yoda to visit the cloner's planet. Such a minor bureaucratic factoid, and Lucas decides to make it the focal point for a CG Yoda scene. But the worst part is he's taking that time from somewhere else; at the same time, Jedi council gets thirty seconds to voice their concerns about how a clone army was able to be ordered and built right under their noses. This is, of course, where they could've given Sammy J some decent lines, added some meat to the story or something, but no... Lucas, though Yoda, has to tell us how smart kids are. bleh.
- Yoda's fight scene sucked. This is definitely not the same Yoda that we see later on in eps. 5&6. Sure, he hops around in the later movies, but seriously... athletic prowess is not Yoda's strong suit. He's strong with the force, he's small, and he is cool. His lightsaber shouldn't've had to blur once; he should've just been able to stand there and defend against attacks like a kendo master. Dooku attacks, and Yoda blocks, barely moving his saber to knock the blow aside before returning to a waiting position. Honestly, though, I wouldn't've minded a "traditional" lightsaber fight--as long as it had been a real one. Not a CG cop-out, where they just have Dooku swinging his sabre around, and CG Yoda doing twirls in front of him. (If it's a blur on the screen, it ain't worth watching, already. There may as well be mayo on the projector lens.) I wanted Yoda to have an actual fighting style, some sort of strategy... Instead, what we got made him look sloppy.
- Yoda's "average" expression, and the rest of the jedi council's' too, never changed once through the entire movie. The least they could've done is start out optimistic, become determined, then become hardened or resolved or something. Instead, they're emotionless through the whole thing. (Excepting the lacky jedis who showed up for the big battle scene at the end... seriously, having a jedi do a "come on, make my day" kind of motion is not cool.) For an idea of what I'm talking about, watch Empire again. Doesn't Yoda seem a lot more cheerful when he's happy, and doesn't he seem a lot more brooding when he's serious?
I could add how none of the live-action characters ever actually focussed their eyes on CG characters properly... or how lame the changeling gal was... but I think I've ragged on this piece of crap enough for one day. Bleh.
It's true that we do have 256 characters to play with these days, for variable names, but class names are a bit different. One shouldn't forget that if you're combining these in any way, using templates, then your variable length can double or triple quite easily.
I'm currently using some code at work that consistently draws errors from the compiler because the code was written with long class names, and makes intense use of the stl. Visual C++ chokes on it occasionally, but the real bugger is that it's a pain to figure out what's actually going on during debugging whenever your variable types scroll across the screen a couple of times.
Your suggestion concerning loop variable names is good, but I would suggest an exception to that rule. If the loop is smaller than six statements, then don't bother naming it something special; i is good enough. It can actually be more confusing at times to name it something else.
Okay, I agree with you, eliminating redundant parts would be cool, but where do you draw the line? I mean, #defines will only get you so far. Are you suggesting that one attempt to restrict themself to languages that map more easily to one another? Or are you instead suggesting a more obtuse approach, like writing an interpreter in each language, and then using that to run an inlined copy of the actual program? (The inlined program being written in yet another language, of course.)
My point? Just because you've seen the slight of hand behind the magic doesn't make the feat any less impressive. I mean seriously, how'd you expect him to accomplish this? : )
I have an 8500 too, and I must agree that the drivers are a tad flaky. (I've had several "spontaneous" reboots so far, though they've been fairly far between.) Just a few observations about this card and it's drivers..
- 2D transparency of windows and stuff in 2K and XP is done using the 3D acceleration parts of the card. Sometimes, after running software that makes rather heavy use of pixel shaders, I'll end up with anything transparent suddenly being mono-color. I suspect they had a state-saving problem in that particular version of the drivers... suffice it to say, the latest driver version fixes this issue.
- As a developer, I've been using this card to write vertex and pixel shaders, and let me tell you, this thing does not react well to incorrect values. As an example, I once accidentally fed a mangled pixel shader pointer value to the SetPixelShader call in DirectX, and the following render call I made caused the computer to reboot. Ditto happens if you specify an incorrect specification for vertex information. It's a shame they don't check for obvious errors like this, something nVidia does. (Although I should point out that part of me is extremely thankful that the card does react badly to these problems. Otherwise, I probably never would've discovered the problem in the first place.)
- The OpenGL texture-loading-into-memory issue---which I really don't know much about--is not yet fixed in an official driver release, as I understand it. So most people will still be experiencing the texture memory chug in Quake III, which appears to be part of what this review is based on. I'm not sure if the other tests are OpenGL or DirectX, but maybe this'll shine a little light on why there's a bit of that discrepancy. (Was the texture shuffle thing an issue in DirectX too? Anyone know?)
- Windowed 3D rendered contexts that are rendering slow can end up feeling like they're lagging by a bit. Compared to a Geforce3, it can seem like the Radeon8500 is a slow mule, but I think it's just from being triple-buffered instead of double-buffered. (Incidentally, this might also be responsible for another issue I've seen crop up while moving from a Geforce3 to a Radeon8500; the base memory footprint, graphics memory-wise, tends to be larger on the Radeon8500. This is more of a feeling than a documented fact, but I suspect that when you're working on a Radeon8500, you actually have less texture memory to play with than on a Geforce3.. even when they both have the same on-card memory and AGP aperature sizes. I think this would actually make for an interesting comparison sometime, if someone would actually make a benchmark that compared the amount of stuffs you can stuff into each of these cards.)
All in all, I'm happy with my purchase. This is probably the most stable set of drivers I have seen come out of ATi ever. Granted, I'm not running multihead, so I don't know how much added complexity that throws into the equation, but.. hey, it works, and a hundred times better than the Rage Pro and Rage 128 drivers did. For instance, this one calculates clipped vertex coordinates correctly, something the Rage Pro had issues with in OpenGL. And I had an issue that bugged me about the Rage 128 too, but I seem to've forgotten it.. : )
Still, I have one issue that's been bugging the daylights out of me with the Radeon8500, more because I can't logically figure out why it would be happening rather than because it's annoying. I've been playing this old game called Oni, and while it runs faster than ever with the new card, and looks simply amazing, I've begun to notice that.. well.. the texture coordinates on the level geometry actually jump around ever so slightly. It's really quite bizarre to watch... : )
I find that, of all things, listening to cheesey pop music, or something with a good beat helps me function through the day... though I should point out that the main and major component that gets me in the zone is headphones. Get yourself a good pair of high-quality headphones, and only wear them while you work. Pump something through them that'll keep you awake, and the blood pumping, preferably something either without lyrics (Crystal Method, maybe Moby) or with really stupid, cheesey lyrics that you've heard over and over again already. (I prefer Aqua myself.) If a slow song comes on, take a break! Just the fact that the song has come on will have already altered your mood, so take the break while you can. (Unless, of course, you're really in the zone, in which case you won't care and you'll just skip ahead..)
I should point out that if you're using winamp, you really need to get one of those hotkey plugins so that your windows-c is mapped to pause and windows-b is mapped to skip ahead. Otherwise, you'll spend too much time when skipping the slow tunes, and it'll knock you outta the zone. (Besides being helpful in skipping songs, it'll also help if you're too deep into the zone, and really need to think about something.)
Last thing I'll mention; water. Make sure you have water nearby, and you're drinking it. Besides it being healthy for you, keeping you dehydrated, and keeping you from drinking caffiene, (which despite what most people'll tell you, will actually drain you of energy and shorten your zonage) it'll also force you to take regular breaks (to use the washroom) that won't affect your zoneage! (I have discovered that this is perhaps one of the few ways to force oneself to take regular breaks that doesn't continuously break my zoneage. As amusing and silly as it may sound, I highly recommend it. : )
So anyways, to summarize, my tips: - good high-quality headphones - up-beat music (not too up beat, though; avoid raver stuff that messes with your aural depth perception; it'll just distract you..) - good winamp plugin for hotkeys - water!
Oh yeah.. and I find that being in a bad posture helps too. But I'm not gonna recommend that to anyone; I'm already experiencing the negative effects of that one, so..
Don't get too comfortable with that extra functionality like storyboard capturing. ATi has a reputation for "disabling" such features with later driver updates.
Um, PCI's reaching the end of it's run too, bud. (64-bit PCI's just around the corner.) So unless you're planning on getting a USB or Firewire capture card anytime soon..
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Are there any real discussion shows left, outside of PBS or NPR.
I highly recommend The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Seriously.
My favorite part of the entire email is this line:
I'd like to take that stupid X Box and crack that moron from MIT over the head with it.
Talk about really reinforcing her anti-violence message, eh? : ) If this is how quickly she snaps and resorts to violence... Judging by the temper tantrum she's throwing in that email, I'd say it gives you a pretty good indication of why her son's so screwed up. (If you can believe her.)
"Well spoken" my ass; if this woman actually gets her nursing degree, I pity the people whose lives she 'touches.'
I can think of several reasons:
- The company hasn't released the game yet, but wants to release a video of gameplay to the public. Current methods would require implementing a "save game as it goes" and then a "replay, in offline rendering mode at a steady frame rate, and record results" pass. Or, you could save it at reduced quality if you had video out on your computer and video in on another computer.. but that's just ridiculous, imo.
- Likewise, you have the game, and your friend hasn't purchased it yet, and lives too far away to just take a glance at it..
- You're having a graphical glitch in a game with your particular card that can't be easily illustrated with screenshots. Think how much easier it would be to just send a video clip than having to send a half-dozen screenshots and a wordy explanation, where they still might not believe you.
- You have a Radeon9700, he has a Geforce2. You want to show him how different Doom III looks on your card, as opposed to his card, in real time.
Etc..
The reason I never took up the "sport" is two-fold; I don't have the money, and I don't like the fact that I have to bend over so much to see the danged things properly. (I slouch enough in front of a computer as it is.)
That having been said, I was a big fan of the computer versions of pinball when they first came out. I remember Epic Pinball as being a ton of fun, and I think there was another called Silver Ball Pinball? In any event, they were a real blast to play, and almost made me wish I had a table of my own. Almost.
The problem is that there is no actual end to the game. Sure, there's the goal of getting a higher score, but people today don't play something to perfect it; they play it to beat it! It's this change in the goal of the player that's got people buying video games that have stories, variety... RPGs like Final Fantasy.. rather than playing pinball, imo.
That having been said, my favorite game ever is actually Puyo Puyo, and I'm currently working to double my high score, so I don't exactly fit well into the RPG-lover category, even though I profess the teachings of it.. : ) So take this all with a huge, honkin grain of salt.
I figure all video gamers, though, will eventually end up at a point where the video games just aren't all that interesting anymore, and they'll want something that poses a good, repeatable challenge. In other words, I think we just need to wait for people to grow bored of these linear video games, and then pinball may end up making a comeback. (If the.. uh.. arcade owners want it to..) Either that, or people give up on arcade games, and go out and play a good 'ol game of softball.. : )
GM food-related patent problems can be a real bitch. I remember a story from a while back about a farmer who was sued for using GM seeds without permission and didn't know why... until it was revealed that a neighbouring farm was using the GM seeds, and those plants were cross-pollenating with his own.
Anyone have prior art? ;)
Quad-based geometry has to be converted back to triangles at some point for rendering anyways. Since this can be done two ways (quads don't have to be square, or even equilateral, but imagine a sandwich on texas toast; you can cut it top left to bottom right or top right to bottom left) geometry can look slightly different with different implementations. If the points don't exist on a plain, then the normal won't be correct either, which is another problem. (ie; What do you do if your quad's warped?)
Also, if your triangles don't map perfectly with the texture, you'll get tearing along the crease between the two triangles. To fix this, you have to subdivide the triangles further until it's no longer as noticeable. It's a real bother..
ARB_ path refers to what we're used to; multiple texture rendering stages, dot3 bump mapping and the like. Stuff that works on Geforce 2s, ATi Radeons, etc. These are standards agreed on by the OpenGL Architecture Review Board, usually extensions that will be promoted to being part of the standard in the next version of OpenGL.
The NV20 path is for Geforce 3 and up. A vertex program is NVidia terminology for vertex shader. Assuming the OpenGL version numbers reflect the DirectX ones, version 1.0 was a holdover from pre-release; it's missing a register that's required to do index/palette-based matrix skinning. 1.1 has this register. Other than that, there is no difference.
I disagree. Go back a few days, and check out the growing percentage of computers bought from "white box" shops. That tells me that people are starting to "get a clue," and I think we're going to see a lot less trust in "the big name" as a result. (Be it IBM, Dell, or HP.)
It's only a matter of time before people figure out just what percentage of the cost of their new box is the Microsoft tax, and they start pirating the OS.
Of course, this doesn't bode all that well for Linux, but then what does? As long as Windows is the primary gaming platform of x86, Linux will never become the dominant home OS. I mean, come on, the reason people upgrade their systems is for the games; which OS are you going to install on your new gaming platform? The one that allows you to play the latest Flight Simulator, or the one that doesn't even have drivers yet for your fancy new card?
Is that a codec limitation, though, or is it an encoder problem? This, of course, is the big question, because if it's just the encoder, that can always be improved.
Not really. My point is that they'll put the decryption in the hardware, so even if you do get a high-quality stream into the hardware, it won't play it.
Now what they're talking about would keep people from running in ring 0 without authorization, so that means that you can't install a device driver that isn't authorized. (Since all device drivers that aren't "dumb" run in ring 0.)
Of course, you can always hack around software, but what do you do if, like I mentioned, the decryption for audio/video streams is in the hardware?
Best case, people'll have hacked flashes for their cards to disable DRM. Even then, products go through so many versions and updates, and there are so many different companies with products, that it gets tough for the average consumer to disable 'em themselves. (Which could, in turn, make people decide to only buy from one vendor because that one's hacked. So we're essentially giving them a monopoly..)
Worst case, it's not flashable, and we're stuck having to brute-force the key for the next 20 years. Or solder a mod-chip onto our sound cards..
Either way, it stinks.
Agreed. I'm planning on buying his previous album, but this one.... uh, no.
You can authorize each program yourself. It's just that your OS will complain that it isn't authenticated, or whatever, and ask you if you want to run it or not. I'm sure they'll leave an option to "allow all software to run without authentication;" it's only the Microsoft thing to do....
Digital media, on the other hand, that's something totally different. Microsoft will keep a firm grip on that stuff, through either requiring encryption keys to allow a piece of software to play a stream through an audio or video device, or by simply requiring that the stream sent to the devices be itself encrypted, or else the quality will be degraded to discourage replication.
As for hard drives, expect to see some sort of per-sector encryption being built in..
(This is all worse-case scenario, of course.)
That's the problem, though. If linux is seen as a server-only solution for 90% of it's purchasers, then that means that hardware companies, faced with the prospect of selling specialized CPUs for linux, will start pricing them out of the consumer range. What happens when the CPU is no longer available easily to the average consumer?
In a somewhat unrelated area, I'm a programmer trying to break into the audio geek area as a hobby. Logistically, it should be really freaking simple to make a device which records audio directly to a harddrive, nowadays, in raw wave format. This is what I want so I can start sampling stuff. But instead, thanks to digital rights management, I can't get anything anywhere near what I want. My only options are either DAT tape recorders or (lossy) professional-model minidisc technology. (Professional by definition, only because it doesn't have copy-protection built into it.) Where are my cheap devices?
It's laws like these digital rights management laws that keep the average consumer out of areas he would otherwise dabble in as a hobby. I'm waiting for the day that Microsoft requires every binary I compile to have an encryption key, authorized by Microsoft, embedded into it, or else it won't run on anyone else's computer.
Media companies make me sick.
Agreed.
According to the information circling the net about the Parhelion, it should have vertex and pixel shaders. Vertex shader should be a DirectX 9.0 version, and the pixel shader should be 8.1 or a little better.
My guess is that they didn't want, or weren't authorized, to give Hard-OCP a copy of the board with DirectX 9.0, so they wouldn't be able to see all the neat things like displacement maps anyways. And I doubt they're writing any DirectX 8.0/8.1 drivers... so it wouldn't be useful to Hard-OCP anyways. I wouldn't sweat it.
I agree; the CG fruit was downright horrible.
... Yeah, you heard me, hit on her. This is the same Yoda who stole Luke's flashlight, and couldn't help but tease him repeatedly when he first met him, after all..
Yoda as CG didn't pose a huge problem for me. What did pose a huge problem for me was that he was not Yoda at all, but rather a caricature of what he should have been. Examples:
- Yoda being diplomatic to Queen Amidala when she shows up for the first time. I don't know what, exactly, the line he said was, but it was lame, and didn't deserve screen time. What they should've done, instead, was have him hit on her.
- the scene with Yoda and the little kids was insanely embarrassing. It had one purpose, and one purpose only; to relate to the audience that Obiwan got permission from Yoda to visit the cloner's planet. Such a minor bureaucratic factoid, and Lucas decides to make it the focal point for a CG Yoda scene. But the worst part is he's taking that time from somewhere else; at the same time, Jedi council gets thirty seconds to voice their concerns about how a clone army was able to be ordered and built right under their noses. This is, of course, where they could've given Sammy J some decent lines, added some meat to the story or something, but no... Lucas, though Yoda, has to tell us how smart kids are. bleh.
- Yoda's fight scene sucked. This is definitely not the same Yoda that we see later on in eps. 5&6. Sure, he hops around in the later movies, but seriously... athletic prowess is not Yoda's strong suit. He's strong with the force, he's small, and he is cool. His lightsaber shouldn't've had to blur once; he should've just been able to stand there and defend against attacks like a kendo master. Dooku attacks, and Yoda blocks, barely moving his saber to knock the blow aside before returning to a waiting position. Honestly, though, I wouldn't've minded a "traditional" lightsaber fight--as long as it had been a real one. Not a CG cop-out, where they just have Dooku swinging his sabre around, and CG Yoda doing twirls in front of him. (If it's a blur on the screen, it ain't worth watching, already. There may as well be mayo on the projector lens.) I wanted Yoda to have an actual fighting style, some sort of strategy... Instead, what we got made him look sloppy.
- Yoda's "average" expression, and the rest of the jedi council's' too, never changed once through the entire movie. The least they could've done is start out optimistic, become determined, then become hardened or resolved or something. Instead, they're emotionless through the whole thing. (Excepting the lacky jedis who showed up for the big battle scene at the end... seriously, having a jedi do a "come on, make my day" kind of motion is not cool.) For an idea of what I'm talking about, watch Empire again. Doesn't Yoda seem a lot more cheerful when he's happy, and doesn't he seem a lot more brooding when he's serious?
I could add how none of the live-action characters ever actually focussed their eyes on CG characters properly... or how lame the changeling gal was... but I think I've ragged on this piece of crap enough for one day. Bleh.
See Tom Cruise movie coming out later this summer..
It's true that we do have 256 characters to play with these days, for variable names, but class names are a bit different. One shouldn't forget that if you're combining these in any way, using templates, then your variable length can double or triple quite easily.
I'm currently using some code at work that consistently draws errors from the compiler because the code was written with long class names, and makes intense use of the stl. Visual C++ chokes on it occasionally, but the real bugger is that it's a pain to figure out what's actually going on during debugging whenever your variable types scroll across the screen a couple of times.
Your suggestion concerning loop variable names is good, but I would suggest an exception to that rule. If the loop is smaller than six statements, then don't bother naming it something special; i is good enough. It can actually be more confusing at times to name it something else.
They're good for sniffing, too.
(I learned that from a Dilbert episode..)
Okay, I agree with you, eliminating redundant parts would be cool, but where do you draw the line? I mean, #defines will only get you so far. Are you suggesting that one attempt to restrict themself to languages that map more easily to one another? Or are you instead suggesting a more obtuse approach, like writing an interpreter in each language, and then using that to run an inlined copy of the actual program? (The inlined program being written in yet another language, of course.)
My point? Just because you've seen the slight of hand behind the magic doesn't make the feat any less impressive. I mean seriously, how'd you expect him to accomplish this? : )
I have an 8500 too, and I must agree that the drivers are a tad flaky. (I've had several "spontaneous" reboots so far, though they've been fairly far between.) Just a few observations about this card and it's drivers..
- 2D transparency of windows and stuff in 2K and XP is done using the 3D acceleration parts of the card. Sometimes, after running software that makes rather heavy use of pixel shaders, I'll end up with anything transparent suddenly being mono-color. I suspect they had a state-saving problem in that particular version of the drivers... suffice it to say, the latest driver version fixes this issue.
- As a developer, I've been using this card to write vertex and pixel shaders, and let me tell you, this thing does not react well to incorrect values. As an example, I once accidentally fed a mangled pixel shader pointer value to the SetPixelShader call in DirectX, and the following render call I made caused the computer to reboot. Ditto happens if you specify an incorrect specification for vertex information. It's a shame they don't check for obvious errors like this, something nVidia does. (Although I should point out that part of me is extremely thankful that the card does react badly to these problems. Otherwise, I probably never would've discovered the problem in the first place.)
- The OpenGL texture-loading-into-memory issue---which I really don't know much about--is not yet fixed in an official driver release, as I understand it. So most people will still be experiencing the texture memory chug in Quake III, which appears to be part of what this review is based on. I'm not sure if the other tests are OpenGL or DirectX, but maybe this'll shine a little light on why there's a bit of that discrepancy. (Was the texture shuffle thing an issue in DirectX too? Anyone know?)
- Windowed 3D rendered contexts that are rendering slow can end up feeling like they're lagging by a bit. Compared to a Geforce3, it can seem like the Radeon8500 is a slow mule, but I think it's just from being triple-buffered instead of double-buffered. (Incidentally, this might also be responsible for another issue I've seen crop up while moving from a Geforce3 to a Radeon8500; the base memory footprint, graphics memory-wise, tends to be larger on the Radeon8500. This is more of a feeling than a documented fact, but I suspect that when you're working on a Radeon8500, you actually have less texture memory to play with than on a Geforce3.. even when they both have the same on-card memory and AGP aperature sizes. I think this would actually make for an interesting comparison sometime, if someone would actually make a benchmark that compared the amount of stuffs you can stuff into each of these cards.)
All in all, I'm happy with my purchase. This is probably the most stable set of drivers I have seen come out of ATi ever. Granted, I'm not running multihead, so I don't know how much added complexity that throws into the equation, but.. hey, it works, and a hundred times better than the Rage Pro and Rage 128 drivers did. For instance, this one calculates clipped vertex coordinates correctly, something the Rage Pro had issues with in OpenGL. And I had an issue that bugged me about the Rage 128 too, but I seem to've forgotten it.. : )
Still, I have one issue that's been bugging the daylights out of me with the Radeon8500, more because I can't logically figure out why it would be happening rather than because it's annoying. I've been playing this old game called Oni, and while it runs faster than ever with the new card, and looks simply amazing, I've begun to notice that.. well.. the texture coordinates on the level geometry actually jump around ever so slightly. It's really quite bizarre to watch... : )
I find that, of all things, listening to cheesey pop music, or something with a good beat helps me function through the day... though I should point out that the main and major component that gets me in the zone is headphones. Get yourself a good pair of high-quality headphones, and only wear them while you work. Pump something through them that'll keep you awake, and the blood pumping, preferably something either without lyrics (Crystal Method, maybe Moby) or with really stupid, cheesey lyrics that you've heard over and over again already. (I prefer Aqua myself.) If a slow song comes on, take a break! Just the fact that the song has come on will have already altered your mood, so take the break while you can. (Unless, of course, you're really in the zone, in which case you won't care and you'll just skip ahead..)
I should point out that if you're using winamp, you really need to get one of those hotkey plugins so that your windows-c is mapped to pause and windows-b is mapped to skip ahead. Otherwise, you'll spend too much time when skipping the slow tunes, and it'll knock you outta the zone. (Besides being helpful in skipping songs, it'll also help if you're too deep into the zone, and really need to think about something.)
Last thing I'll mention; water. Make sure you have water nearby, and you're drinking it. Besides it being healthy for you, keeping you dehydrated, and keeping you from drinking caffiene, (which despite what most people'll tell you, will actually drain you of energy and shorten your zonage) it'll also force you to take regular breaks (to use the washroom) that won't affect your zoneage! (I have discovered that this is perhaps one of the few ways to force oneself to take regular breaks that doesn't continuously break my zoneage. As amusing and silly as it may sound, I highly recommend it. : )
So anyways, to summarize, my tips:
- good high-quality headphones
- up-beat music (not too up beat, though; avoid raver stuff that messes with your aural depth perception; it'll just distract you..)
- good winamp plugin for hotkeys
- water!
Oh yeah.. and I find that being in a bad posture helps too. But I'm not gonna recommend that to anyone; I'm already experiencing the negative effects of that one, so..
Don't get too comfortable with that extra functionality like storyboard capturing. ATi has a reputation for "disabling" such features with later driver updates.
Um, PCI's reaching the end of it's run too, bud. (64-bit PCI's just around the corner.) So unless you're planning on getting a USB or Firewire capture card anytime soon..
Um, if you check out their webpage, they've already used that joke. : P