There have been many games based on the various Quake engines -- at least as many, if not more so, than on the Unreal engine. You name Splinter Cell and Raven Shield, and I can name Jedi Knight 2, Return to Castle Wolfenstein - even Half-Life as various games based on a Quake engine. The list goes on and on for both sides...
I wasn't saying that games haven't been based off of the Quake engines. They certainly have (Hexen 2, Heretic 2, SiN, Anachronox, Daikatana, Solider of Fortune, Soldier of Fortune 2, FAKK 2, Alice, Jedi Knight 2, RTCW, etc). What I was trying to get at was that in the time spread between the first Unreal and the latest Unreal-based games (the engine being a direct evolution from the very first Unreal), Id has gone through two completely new engines (Q2, Q3) and is working on their third (D3). Duh, of course Id has a huge licensing program. That wasn't the point.
Err...Unreal was originally written as a software rendered engine. Glide happened to be close enough to how the Unreal engine worked (at the time) for Epic to quickly code in Glide support before they shipped.
Correct. The Unreal engine was also under development for some three or four years before it shipped. I was referring to the Unreal engine at the time of the Unreal I launch.
While UT2003 uses DirectX by default on Windows platforms, it does have an OpenGL renderer also. You can switch it to use OpenGL instead, and the Linux version (of course) uses OpenGL by default.
The Unreal engine, and more generally the guys at Epic (Tim Sweeney) operate under a different philosophy than the guys at Id. The unreal engine is quite modular. In fact, it was originally written focusing on GLIDE as the preferred rendering method. Today, DX is the preferred method, even though the current engine (even with all of its changes, which has surely included complete rewrites of components over the years) can trace itself all the way back to that GLIDE-inspired code.
Id, on the other hand, likes to start "from scratch". Between Unreal I and UT2K3/Unreal 2/Splinter Cell/Raven Shield/all of the other Unreal-based games out today, Id's gone through Quake 2, Quake 3, and is gearing up for Doom 3. Each one of those engines was different, and pretty much rewritten from the ground up each time (I'm sure there are some core components that theCarmack reuses, but essentially it's all new code).
Which approach is better? Depends. Epic's approach to incremental engine design lets third parties license their engine and benefit from on-going development, as well as getting the newer technology out there quicker. Id's approach caters to theCarmack's godlike abilities, and gives us something to look forward to with bated breath. The strength of theCarmack's code proves itself when the aging Q3 engine can still hold its own against the newest of Unreal-based games (for example, the upcoming Jedi Knight Academy game). I say let's keep 'em both.
Oh, and I'm pretty sure Unreal's audio engine is modular as well, supporting the proprietary Miles system, DirectSound, and probably also OpenAL. Same with the input engine (DirectInput, SDL).
People may say that OpenGL is lagging in progress but games like DOOM3 make me somewhat skeptical of these people. Long live Carmack.
TheCarmack is a god. There's nothing more to be said about that. What would be a better indicator of OpenGL health is if we were seeing more engines as impressive as Doom 3 being based on OpenGL. As it stands, the current Quake 3 engine and the upcoming Doom 3 engine are the only major OpenGL-based engines I can think of. And they were both done by theCarmack and crew.
And by the way, disposable diapers cause infertility in males (its the heat). Go with cloth.
I would sure hope that any male wearing diapers would not be worrying about infertility. Surely it's not permanent (heat kills sperm, but unless it's heat on the level of actually damaging the testicles it shouldn't damage the ability to create more sperm).
Nope, and it can't explain Kabuki Warriors either (well, perhaps the need for third-party launch titles can explain that one). But then, lots of things only work in theory. In practice, lots of things can happen. As well, I'm not sure Microsoft tests to make sure things are fun, just to make sure the game is reasonably playable and bug free. Even so, some games still slip through the cracks (like Ghost Recon, though I'd again lump that into the "need launch games, screw the quality" bucket, since it was an XBox Live launch title).
So if MS really feels this way, why are they so obstinate about the Xbox modding? Xbox's protection is highly analogous to the Paladium in the way it uses a secure platform. So it seems like I ought to be able to diable this at boot time. Okay in return I should expect that Xbox games and Xbox network should be inaccessible in a non-secure platform mode, but if we take steve balmer at his word then this should be an acceptable choice left to the user to make.
Huh? So for Paladium, you'll accept that some applications won't work in non-trusted mode and that trusted mode would be desirable for other applications, but you can't see the obvious parallel to XBox and XBox Live? If you want to mod your XBox, go ahead. That's not going to stop your non-online games from playing, but you can forget about XBox Live. You have the same choice -- mod your XBox/turn off DRM and lose XBox Live/some apps that require the trusted mode, or don't mod your XBox/turn DRM on and be able to run XBox Live/the previously mentioned apps.
However, you can't expect Microsoft to build in this kind of support directly. Believe what you will, but a good 75% (and almost certainly much more) of people who modify their game consoles do so because they want to pirate games (and even if they did have a more altruistic reason in the beginning, they end up pirating games anyway). Maybe XBox Live should be more lenient, and only disallow connections when a modchip is detected rather than blacklisting you for all time, but oh well. Just be more careful making sure you switch off your chip before logging in (alternatively, buy two XBoxes).
On the other hand one could draw a more troubling inference. MS is saying, we are going to lock out non-approved game vendors by using our secure computing platform as a club. This is not unreasonable if it just stopped at Xbox (since they dont have a monopoly on game boxes). But this may also be a the camel's nose in the tent for genertal computing: we're going to do the same with paladium to secure our software monopoly. We will just call it a choice-- a hobson's choice--to evade the monopoly problem.
That's nothing new. Console makers have been doing this for years. Microsoft is just following suit when they require developers to be licensed to publish XBox games. The licensing goes a lot farther than just saying, "Yes, you can publish a game for our platform." Microsoft does some minimum amount of testing (especially for Live games), which theoretically should help keep quality high. It doesn't always work out that way, but nobody's perfect. I think you're stretching things here too much, and you just come off sounding paranoid.
1. If you think that Blockbuster "has a great asortment of movies", then you know -zilch- about movies. What do you care if Independence Day is in widescreen or not?
Excuse me for not wearing turtlenecks and berets and actually ENJOYING a movie every now and then. Movies are no different from any other medium. I've read classics (just one example, obviously), but I also read for fun. As for why would I care if Independence Day is in widescreen, it's because I want to see the full story, even if there's little enough of that. Marvel comics may not compare to a Picasso, but is that justification for cropping the artist's work?
3. Wal-Mart is shit. The stuff they sell is shit. They cater to the lowest common denominator.
As I mentioned, what does it matter where you buy your underwear? Or are you that focused on the superficial that you do care? Hanes is Hanes, whether you pay $30 for them at Nordstrom's or $10 at Wal-Mart.
4. Wal-Mart, Blockbuster, and McDonald's are all giant mega-conglomerates of the worst kind. They all make Microsoft look like a kid's lemonade stand by comparison. But hey, if you like to suck at the corporate teat...
Call me a capitalistic pig-dog if you like, but I have absolutely no problem with large corporations. Good for them if they've been able to become successful. They provide employment for hundreds of thousands, if not millions. How is that a bad thing? (cue communist propaganda)
5. But you're right... not all of us can be pretentious. Only some of us.
You're welcome to it. I'd rather not play that game.
If you are a movie nut and like your quality I think that we can all agree that the worn-out copy at Blockbuster is not only overpriced but hopelessly shelved in the wrong places. Sign up for NetFlix or just buy the damn things.
Aside from a small identity theft issue (I got it all cleared up, and didn't have to pay anything -- now Blockbuster asks me for my ID as well as my Blockbuster card) and their persistence in buying fullscreen rather than widescreen movies, I've not had a problem with my local Blockbuster. As far as the movies being worn out, I've gotten movies in worse condition from Netflix than from Blockbuster, and while I can send the movie back to Netflix marked as "Damaged", I can drive back to Blockbuster quicker and get a different copy.
I am subscribed to Netflix, but sometimes I decide I want to see a movie and want instant gratification, rather than putting it in my Netflix queue, shuffling it around to the top, mailing back one or more movies that I currently have out (two days), and waiting for the new one to come (two days). Netflix is great for finding older movies or imports, but I go to Blockbuster to get the latest releases.
You don't know much about economics, do you? Low demand results in low price, not high price. It is when people want lots of something, such as those Tickle Me Elmos or Beanie Babies, that the price skyrockets.
I don't want to have to give another economics lecture, so I'll keep this brief. Supply slopes up (price on the Y axis, units on the X, as price increases more units can be produced). Demand slopes down (as price drops, more units are demanded). I was referring to plasma TVs which certainly are not in short supply. However, the price is high and so there is little demand. If plasma TVs were more compelling, the demand would increase and the suppliers could lower the price to sell more units. I would say plasma TVs are demand-limited. Not enough people want them to make it economical to drop the price for those who do buy. You referred to items that were clearly supply-limited. More people wanted them than there was supply to meet, and so those who were really interested were willing to pay more. Sometimes much more. They're different concepts, different models for different scenarios.
And just in case you wanted to bring up the fact that prices drop when people don't want something anymore (closeout sales, bargain bins), you need to realize that usually happens at the end of a product's life, not the beginning. You'll also notice that unless the product is complete crap (and sometimes not even then), reducing the price increases the demand for the product (ie, you sell of your remaining stock faster than if you had left the price high), once again showing that price falls as demand increases.
Finally, I'm ignoring factors such as cost of production. I said "help explain", which means this is only part of the price. Maybe plasma TVs can't feasibly drop below $5000 (guesstimate) because they cost too much to produce at the moment. However, even that is affected somewhat by supply and demand -- higher demand means more units can be sold, which means more units can be supplied, which usually translates into better economies of scale and cheaper production. As well, extra profits can be channeled into research and development, creating newer and cheaper ways of producing the technology, thus further reducing the costs of manufacturing and allowing the prices to drop even more, thus stimulating even more demand, and the cycle repeats. But all of this will not happen until and unless the demand for the product increases.
Yep, but when 4:3 screens are the standard, that's how the name is defined. "Fullscreen" movies would be better called "Pan and Scan", but unfortunately the masses don't know what that means. They just know that they have a square (as far as they can tell) TV and that movies labelled "Fullscreen" fill the full screen.
Here's a tip for ya: Don't go to Blockbuster. Renting movies at Blockbuster is like clothes shopping at Wal-Mart or eating at McDonald's.
Where, then, should I go when I need a quick movie fix? If I don't feel like waiting several days for the Netflix mailers to arrive, or even longer if the movie is popular, what do I do? There's Blockbuster, with a great assortment of movies, though I do have to comb pretty carefully now to be sure I'm getting what I want, and there's... not much more. I used to love Hollywood Video, but there's not one conveniently close to me. I don't want to go miles out of the way just to rent a movie.
And what's wrong with clothes shopping at Wal-Mart? Does it really matter where you buy your underwear or socks? Sure, you probably won't buy anything more than a T-shirt or two otherwise, but underwear and socks are important too. And McDonald's is a great place to grab a quick bite when you're on the run. Is it good for you? Probably not. Are there better places? Most assuredly. But McD's is quick, and it's convenient, and so long as you don't eat there every single day it's not going to kill you.
But then, I guess we can't all be pretentious, can we?
I just rented that movie also. IIRC, it was a double-sided DVD, one side with pan-scan and the other with widescreen.
Well, the one I got was single-sided. You probably are thinking of something else. I haven't seen new releases on double-sided DVDs for quite some time. At least not from Blockbuster. It's been a while since I've purchased a DVD, so the retail channel DVDs may be different.
I'm glad Microsoft was smart enough to put in HD and widescreen formats built into the X-Box. Once you go widescreen Halo, there's no going back.
Except that Halo is a 4:3 game, not 16:9. Sure, you can display it in fullscreen mode on a wide TV, but that's just stretching things horizontally. The XBox supports 480p (4:3 and 16:9), 720p, and 1080i (only 16:9 for both of those, IIRC), but only if the developers choose to support them in their game. 480p 4:3 generally comes for free. 480p 16:9 may have some effect on your textures or HUD. 720p and 1080i generally need you to rethink your engine design.
That said, Halo2 is supposed to support 480p 16:9 and 720p, so you will eventually be able to experience a Halo game in widescreen glory. Just not now.
There are a few widescreen games out there, though. Hitman2 (480i 16:9, not 480p), Sega GT 2002, Tony Hawk 4 (and possibly 3? 720p, 480p 16:9), Amped, and more. Check out this thread for an ongoing list.
This means that quite a lot of your $10,000 TV is not being used when watching regular broadcast tv.
That may suck if you paid $10,000 for your TV, but when you can get good widescreen RPTVs for under $2000, it's not so bad. Modern TVs have ways of combatting the burn-in you'll see from the 4:3 sidebars (mine has grey sidebars, to at least get even burn of the phosphors since the problem with black bars is underburn rather than overburn of the phosphors, and it shifts the position of the 4:3 box to try to minimize burn-in from the bar edges). As well, you can change your format to fullscreen and learn to live with slightly fatter/shorter people and objects, or some TVs even come with a second stretch mode that stretches the edges more than the center. It can make for a fisheye view on some shows, but it's not too bad on most shows. Since most shows have all of the action in the center of the screen, that's the least-distorted part of the picture.
So, other than burn-in, what issues do you have with not using the full width of your TV? Plasma screens are very prone to burn-in, though, so aside from movie or strictly 16x9 HDTV viewing, they're pretty worthless (which would also help explain why the price is still so high -- their utility is limited, so demand is low and price stays high).
I rented the Bourne Identity last week, and imagine my surprise when I got it home and realized it was the Pan&Scan version. Now, there's a reason why I have a widescreen TV -- I like widescreen. I don't want to spend $4.50 on a movie rental and then lose half of the image. This wouldn't be so bad if the DVD display case said in prominent lettering "Fullscreen Version" or "NOT Widescreen", but it said nothing. Since it didn't explicitly say it was the fullscreen version, I just naively assumed that DVD == Widescreen unless otherwise specified. I won't be fooled again. I guess I'll stick with Netflix from now on.
Re:I question the demographics...
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Hi-Tech Weed-Killer
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Around here (midwestern USA), the farmers are reluctant to try even the most basic of new things (no-till farming, organics, etc). I'm having a hard time imagining any of the farmers that I know shelling out a couple of grand on a robot with a camera, to run up & down the fields.
You must not be very in touch with your local farming community. Most farmers are quite willing to try new things. For example, my own father (independent Midwest family farmer, works some 2000 acres with my older brother) has been doing no-till for over a decade. He's also invested heavily in equipment and software for mapping out yields for each field, and more. However, you have to realize that farming is a business. Everything is about the bottom-line. As such, there's no more money to be made in organic farming (less money, actually), so it's not something he does. Leave that to the hippies and the yuppies that don't mind paying $5.00 for a pint of milk.
Then again, if they can show how the cost is offset by gains in yields, then it just might get some use.
This sounds more like a labor-saving device than a yield-increasing device. As such, I doubt you'll be able to show an increase in yield, and certainly not one significant enough to justify this technology. Instead, you should be looking at savings in wages. If the cost (purchase cost plus any ongoing maintenance costs times the expected number of units needed) is less than what it would take to pay minimum wage to some amount of local kids for a few weeks of summer work over the expected lifespan of the robot, then maybe it would be worth doing. On the other hand, it's probably a better idea to just continue hiring kids to walk the fields. Everybody wins -- the kids get money, excercise, and a nice tan, while the farmer gets cheap labor and clear fields, and the community gets something for teenagers to do during the lazy summer days rather than get in trouble. And if you do it right (ie, use hooks to cut out the weeds, rather than herbicide sprays), you won't even damage the environment by introducing herbicides to the food or the ground water. (can you tell I spent most of my summers from around age 8 to age 15 walking fields for my dad?)
Another concern is battery life - just how far is this thing going to go on a charge? 1 mile? That'll cover 4 rows...then what?
If they're serious about this technology, it won't be battery driven. It'll be driven by diesel, and probably will be expanded to cover multiple rows at a time. Also, you can't really convert miles into rows. Depending on the geometry of the field, one mile could be two rows, or it could be twenty.
I do see one potential problem with the technology, though. Since it uses video recognition to determine what's bad and what's not, what happens when a plant is only bad in a certain scenario? For example, corn in a soybean field is considered a weed. This robot should kill it, or the robot will be worthless. However, corn in a corn field is not a weed. If the robot somehow determines that the cornfield is actually a bean field, there goes your entire yield.
You should try the Freespaceseries of games. They're getting a little long in the tooth these days, but they work perfectly well under Win2K and XP. As well, they really take up the slack where Wing Commander III dropped the ball -- screw the FMV, Mark Hamill, 5 minutes of gameplay for 30 minutes of movie crap. The Freespace series has a decent story (not groundbreaking, but still good for what it is) but more importantly great action and lots of it. You won't spend your gaming time watching poorly acted or rendered video sequences. You'll spend it in the cockpit of your fighter, blowing away aliens and fighting massive capital ships.
Of course, the Freespace games are a couple years old now, and it'll probably be pretty difficult to find them in stores. Your best bet is to hit EBay and see what you can find.
When the parts are mated, the trapped air pockets create voids. Not a good idea. Always put a small dab in the center of the die and set the heatsink on it. Apply pressure and lock into place. The blob flattens out forcing all air out ahead of the grease. This prevents hotspots that lead to die failure.
I'm going to have to disagree with this. First off, let's remember that thermal greases and pastes are malleable. Even if the spreading of the grease causes some hills and valleys, the ridges will flatten down into the valleys when the heatsink is applied. If you end up with trapped air pockets between the cpu and the sink after applying grease, you've got a problem -- your grease is stiff to the point where it won't flatten out (buy newer/better compound), you didn't apply enough grease (applying too much is just as bad, but for different reasons), or your sink doesn't have enough pressure to create good contact with the CPU die whether or not you have grease in place.
The point of pre-spreading the grease is to make sure that you have enough to cover the die with a thin film, and not too much. If you just put a small blob on the die and let the heatsink spread it via pressure, you're either going to end up with way too much grease or not enough. If you don't check how the grease spread, you're not going to know whether you got sufficient application without overdoing it. But as you mentioned, checking means cleaning it up and doing it over again so that you get into a cycle where you basically practice several times until you're sure you know exactly how much grease you need to drop to ensure proper application. That seems like a waste of time and grease (and money, if you use the more expensive compounds).
Re:Two words... Funny story related to this
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AMD: No Grease For You!
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· Score: 5, Informative
Anyways, we decided to return the cpu, covered in grease, back to the local fry's
If the CPU was so covered in grease, it's no wonder it ran hot. Thermal grease is meant to be used very sparingly. You want a very thin layer, just enough to fill the microscopic crevices on the CPU and heatsink mating surfaces (if the surface of the heatsink has larger-than-microscopic grooves, it's time to get out the sand paper and lap the base to a shiny finish). As good of a thermal conductor as thermal grease may be, it's terrible in comparison to a direct metal-on-metal connection. If you see a lot of grease squeeze out when you apply the heatsink, you've got too much. What you want to do is apply a thin bead of grease to one end of the CPU die, and spread it thinly across using a credit card or other device (driver's license, heavy piece of paper, etc).
If your thermal grease is applied correctly, it will come off of the CPU with little problem. A cotton swab and a dab of rubbing alcohol should be more than enough. If you have to scrub, you had too much grease to begin with.
There are still major differences between versions of the Unreal engine, enough so that while UT2k3 shipped with Linux support, it's unlikely that Unreal2 will ever run native on Linux. I don't know what those differences are, exactly, but that's the word from icculus on the ut2k3 Linux mailing list.
That would be because, like almost all licensees of any engine, Legend had free reign to add features to the engine. They also get to choose what platforms they support. I find it highly unlikely that Legend would add anything that was truly Windows-specific. More likely, they decided (by company policy or arbitrary decision) that creating and supporting a Linux client was out of scope. Perhaps they added DirectX-specific features and didn't support other renderers, but since the Unreal engine has a history of supporting modular rendering engines (it was originally designed for GLIDE and software, with OpenGL and DirectX added later), I find it unlikely that it would be impossible to implement (or fake) such features in a different renderer.
UT2K3 was essentially from Epic (well, mostly DE, but with Epic oversight and support, and DE works very closely with Epic), so since Epic supports Linux, UT2K3 should support Linux as well. The same situation will arise with any other Unreal-based game. Ubi Soft's Raven Shield and Splinter Cell will only support Linux if Ubi Soft chooses to support Linux, regardless of the underlying engine's support for Linux. Same for Ion Storm (what's left of them, anyway) and the upcoming Deus Ex 2: The Invisible War, and any other Unreal-based games (historical example -- Wheel of Time never supported Linux, even though it was based on a build only slightly older than Unreal Tournament, and could easily accept patches from the UT codebase that would allow it to support Linux).
I think my point is still valid that Epic and Id take different approaches towards engine licensing, thus making it difficult to compare apples to apples. You'll often see games based on newer Unreal technology from licensees before you see a showcase game from Epic, but you'll never see licensee games based on new Id technology until after Id has released their own game/tech demo. This could change, especially if Id decides to move towards the infrastructure-provider path in the future, but theCarmack and gang seem to enjoy making games as well as making engines. At the very least, Id's tech demos (Q3A) make a good base for enthusiasts to modify without having to sink real money into engine licenses.
I believe that America's Army, Splinter Cell, Unreal Tournament 2 and Unreal Championship were all built on the Unreal 2 engine. Unreal 2 was not released for months after the other games were.
You just outlined the fundamental difference between Epic and Id. After the first Unreal, Epic focused on building their Unreal Engine Technology and little more. The current Unreal 2 engine is still ultimately the original Unreal engine. Epic sells licenses for their engine to developers (Legend, Digital Extreme, Ion Storm, etc), and then gives those licensess access to technology updates as they build and test them. In other words, the Wheel of Time game was based on the same engine as Unreal and Unreal Tournament, even though it was released after Unreal and before Unreal Tournament. Id, on the other hand, focuses on one engine at a time, builds a game (read: tech demo) out of the engine, then sells licenses. If you license the Quake 2 engine, you're not going to get technology from the Quake 3 engine. And even if you did, the two engines are completely different so you'd have a lot of work to do to incorporate the new technology. Id still thinks of themselves as a game development house, and so you see Doom 3 being developed in-house. Epic, on the other hand, has transitioned to the role of technology provider. Their whole goal is to provide the engine for others to make games, which is why Legend was responsible for Unreal 2.
Metroid Prime (GameCube) has shown me what a modern-day Half-Life should be.
Boring, with a shitty control scheme? I'm sorry, but no. Metroid Prime was decent for what it was -- a Metroid game, which means lots of exploring and adventure, with a good dose of action thrown in. Metroid Prime made it clear that action is secondary, since the control scheme made it horrendously difficult to fight well (yes, the lock-on stuff made it not so bad, but that's not good enough for a shooter). Half-Life was and is a shooter. If anything, a better comparison would be between Halo and Half-Life. At least the genres are the same, with the same focus on single-player story telling while still enabling some kick-ass multiplayer gaming.
You're correct that HL2 has its work cut out for it. The past few years have given us several good story-oriented single-player shooters, like the afore-mentioned Halo, Max Payne, and even the Red Faction series to some extent. And that's ignoring other genres like tactical shooters (the R6 and SWAT series) and FPRPGs like Deus Ex.
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I wasn't saying that games haven't been based off of the Quake engines. They certainly have (Hexen 2, Heretic 2, SiN, Anachronox, Daikatana, Solider of Fortune, Soldier of Fortune 2, FAKK 2, Alice, Jedi Knight 2, RTCW, etc). What I was trying to get at was that in the time spread between the first Unreal and the latest Unreal-based games (the engine being a direct evolution from the very first Unreal), Id has gone through two completely new engines (Q2, Q3) and is working on their third (D3). Duh, of course Id has a huge licensing program. That wasn't the point.
Correct. The Unreal engine was also under development for some three or four years before it shipped. I was referring to the Unreal engine at the time of the Unreal I launch.
The Unreal engine, and more generally the guys at Epic (Tim Sweeney) operate under a different philosophy than the guys at Id. The unreal engine is quite modular. In fact, it was originally written focusing on GLIDE as the preferred rendering method. Today, DX is the preferred method, even though the current engine (even with all of its changes, which has surely included complete rewrites of components over the years) can trace itself all the way back to that GLIDE-inspired code.
Id, on the other hand, likes to start "from scratch". Between Unreal I and UT2K3/Unreal 2/Splinter Cell/Raven Shield/all of the other Unreal-based games out today, Id's gone through Quake 2, Quake 3, and is gearing up for Doom 3. Each one of those engines was different, and pretty much rewritten from the ground up each time (I'm sure there are some core components that theCarmack reuses, but essentially it's all new code).
Which approach is better? Depends. Epic's approach to incremental engine design lets third parties license their engine and benefit from on-going development, as well as getting the newer technology out there quicker. Id's approach caters to theCarmack's godlike abilities, and gives us something to look forward to with bated breath. The strength of theCarmack's code proves itself when the aging Q3 engine can still hold its own against the newest of Unreal-based games (for example, the upcoming Jedi Knight Academy game). I say let's keep 'em both.
Oh, and I'm pretty sure Unreal's audio engine is modular as well, supporting the proprietary Miles system, DirectSound, and probably also OpenAL. Same with the input engine (DirectInput, SDL).
TheCarmack is a god. There's nothing more to be said about that. What would be a better indicator of OpenGL health is if we were seeing more engines as impressive as Doom 3 being based on OpenGL. As it stands, the current Quake 3 engine and the upcoming Doom 3 engine are the only major OpenGL-based engines I can think of. And they were both done by theCarmack and crew.
I would sure hope that any male wearing diapers would not be worrying about infertility. Surely it's not permanent (heat kills sperm, but unless it's heat on the level of actually damaging the testicles it shouldn't damage the ability to create more sperm).
Nope, and it can't explain Kabuki Warriors either (well, perhaps the need for third-party launch titles can explain that one). But then, lots of things only work in theory. In practice, lots of things can happen. As well, I'm not sure Microsoft tests to make sure things are fun, just to make sure the game is reasonably playable and bug free. Even so, some games still slip through the cracks (like Ghost Recon, though I'd again lump that into the "need launch games, screw the quality" bucket, since it was an XBox Live launch title).
Huh? So for Paladium, you'll accept that some applications won't work in non-trusted mode and that trusted mode would be desirable for other applications, but you can't see the obvious parallel to XBox and XBox Live? If you want to mod your XBox, go ahead. That's not going to stop your non-online games from playing, but you can forget about XBox Live. You have the same choice -- mod your XBox/turn off DRM and lose XBox Live/some apps that require the trusted mode, or don't mod your XBox/turn DRM on and be able to run XBox Live/the previously mentioned apps.
However, you can't expect Microsoft to build in this kind of support directly. Believe what you will, but a good 75% (and almost certainly much more) of people who modify their game consoles do so because they want to pirate games (and even if they did have a more altruistic reason in the beginning, they end up pirating games anyway). Maybe XBox Live should be more lenient, and only disallow connections when a modchip is detected rather than blacklisting you for all time, but oh well. Just be more careful making sure you switch off your chip before logging in (alternatively, buy two XBoxes).
That's nothing new. Console makers have been doing this for years. Microsoft is just following suit when they require developers to be licensed to publish XBox games. The licensing goes a lot farther than just saying, "Yes, you can publish a game for our platform." Microsoft does some minimum amount of testing (especially for Live games), which theoretically should help keep quality high. It doesn't always work out that way, but nobody's perfect. I think you're stretching things here too much, and you just come off sounding paranoid.
Excuse me for not wearing turtlenecks and berets and actually ENJOYING a movie every now and then. Movies are no different from any other medium. I've read classics (just one example, obviously), but I also read for fun. As for why would I care if Independence Day is in widescreen, it's because I want to see the full story, even if there's little enough of that. Marvel comics may not compare to a Picasso, but is that justification for cropping the artist's work?
As I mentioned, what does it matter where you buy your underwear? Or are you that focused on the superficial that you do care? Hanes is Hanes, whether you pay $30 for them at Nordstrom's or $10 at Wal-Mart.
Call me a capitalistic pig-dog if you like, but I have absolutely no problem with large corporations. Good for them if they've been able to become successful. They provide employment for hundreds of thousands, if not millions. How is that a bad thing? (cue communist propaganda)
You're welcome to it. I'd rather not play that game.
Aside from a small identity theft issue (I got it all cleared up, and didn't have to pay anything -- now Blockbuster asks me for my ID as well as my Blockbuster card) and their persistence in buying fullscreen rather than widescreen movies, I've not had a problem with my local Blockbuster. As far as the movies being worn out, I've gotten movies in worse condition from Netflix than from Blockbuster, and while I can send the movie back to Netflix marked as "Damaged", I can drive back to Blockbuster quicker and get a different copy.
I am subscribed to Netflix, but sometimes I decide I want to see a movie and want instant gratification, rather than putting it in my Netflix queue, shuffling it around to the top, mailing back one or more movies that I currently have out (two days), and waiting for the new one to come (two days). Netflix is great for finding older movies or imports, but I go to Blockbuster to get the latest releases.
Bob the Angry Flower loves you!
Not "eb", but "ebb". "To fall away or back; decline or recede." Ebb.
I don't want to have to give another economics lecture, so I'll keep this brief. Supply slopes up (price on the Y axis, units on the X, as price increases more units can be produced). Demand slopes down (as price drops, more units are demanded). I was referring to plasma TVs which certainly are not in short supply. However, the price is high and so there is little demand. If plasma TVs were more compelling, the demand would increase and the suppliers could lower the price to sell more units. I would say plasma TVs are demand-limited. Not enough people want them to make it economical to drop the price for those who do buy. You referred to items that were clearly supply-limited. More people wanted them than there was supply to meet, and so those who were really interested were willing to pay more. Sometimes much more. They're different concepts, different models for different scenarios.
And just in case you wanted to bring up the fact that prices drop when people don't want something anymore (closeout sales, bargain bins), you need to realize that usually happens at the end of a product's life, not the beginning. You'll also notice that unless the product is complete crap (and sometimes not even then), reducing the price increases the demand for the product (ie, you sell of your remaining stock faster than if you had left the price high), once again showing that price falls as demand increases.
Finally, I'm ignoring factors such as cost of production. I said "help explain", which means this is only part of the price. Maybe plasma TVs can't feasibly drop below $5000 (guesstimate) because they cost too much to produce at the moment. However, even that is affected somewhat by supply and demand -- higher demand means more units can be sold, which means more units can be supplied, which usually translates into better economies of scale and cheaper production. As well, extra profits can be channeled into research and development, creating newer and cheaper ways of producing the technology, thus further reducing the costs of manufacturing and allowing the prices to drop even more, thus stimulating even more demand, and the cycle repeats. But all of this will not happen until and unless the demand for the product increases.
Yep, but when 4:3 screens are the standard, that's how the name is defined. "Fullscreen" movies would be better called "Pan and Scan", but unfortunately the masses don't know what that means. They just know that they have a square (as far as they can tell) TV and that movies labelled "Fullscreen" fill the full screen.
Where, then, should I go when I need a quick movie fix? If I don't feel like waiting several days for the Netflix mailers to arrive, or even longer if the movie is popular, what do I do? There's Blockbuster, with a great assortment of movies, though I do have to comb pretty carefully now to be sure I'm getting what I want, and there's ... not much more. I used to love Hollywood Video, but there's not one conveniently close to me. I don't want to go miles out of the way just to rent a movie.
And what's wrong with clothes shopping at Wal-Mart? Does it really matter where you buy your underwear or socks? Sure, you probably won't buy anything more than a T-shirt or two otherwise, but underwear and socks are important too. And McDonald's is a great place to grab a quick bite when you're on the run. Is it good for you? Probably not. Are there better places? Most assuredly. But McD's is quick, and it's convenient, and so long as you don't eat there every single day it's not going to kill you.
But then, I guess we can't all be pretentious, can we?
Well, the one I got was single-sided. You probably are thinking of something else. I haven't seen new releases on double-sided DVDs for quite some time. At least not from Blockbuster. It's been a while since I've purchased a DVD, so the retail channel DVDs may be different.
Except that Halo is a 4:3 game, not 16:9. Sure, you can display it in fullscreen mode on a wide TV, but that's just stretching things horizontally. The XBox supports 480p (4:3 and 16:9), 720p, and 1080i (only 16:9 for both of those, IIRC), but only if the developers choose to support them in their game. 480p 4:3 generally comes for free. 480p 16:9 may have some effect on your textures or HUD. 720p and 1080i generally need you to rethink your engine design.
That said, Halo2 is supposed to support 480p 16:9 and 720p, so you will eventually be able to experience a Halo game in widescreen glory. Just not now.
There are a few widescreen games out there, though. Hitman2 (480i 16:9, not 480p), Sega GT 2002, Tony Hawk 4 (and possibly 3? 720p, 480p 16:9), Amped, and more. Check out this thread for an ongoing list.
That may suck if you paid $10,000 for your TV, but when you can get good widescreen RPTVs for under $2000, it's not so bad. Modern TVs have ways of combatting the burn-in you'll see from the 4:3 sidebars (mine has grey sidebars, to at least get even burn of the phosphors since the problem with black bars is underburn rather than overburn of the phosphors, and it shifts the position of the 4:3 box to try to minimize burn-in from the bar edges). As well, you can change your format to fullscreen and learn to live with slightly fatter/shorter people and objects, or some TVs even come with a second stretch mode that stretches the edges more than the center. It can make for a fisheye view on some shows, but it's not too bad on most shows. Since most shows have all of the action in the center of the screen, that's the least-distorted part of the picture.
So, other than burn-in, what issues do you have with not using the full width of your TV? Plasma screens are very prone to burn-in, though, so aside from movie or strictly 16x9 HDTV viewing, they're pretty worthless (which would also help explain why the price is still so high -- their utility is limited, so demand is low and price stays high).
I rented the Bourne Identity last week, and imagine my surprise when I got it home and realized it was the Pan&Scan version. Now, there's a reason why I have a widescreen TV -- I like widescreen. I don't want to spend $4.50 on a movie rental and then lose half of the image. This wouldn't be so bad if the DVD display case said in prominent lettering "Fullscreen Version" or "NOT Widescreen", but it said nothing. Since it didn't explicitly say it was the fullscreen version, I just naively assumed that DVD == Widescreen unless otherwise specified. I won't be fooled again. I guess I'll stick with Netflix from now on.
You must not be very in touch with your local farming community. Most farmers are quite willing to try new things. For example, my own father (independent Midwest family farmer, works some 2000 acres with my older brother) has been doing no-till for over a decade. He's also invested heavily in equipment and software for mapping out yields for each field, and more. However, you have to realize that farming is a business. Everything is about the bottom-line. As such, there's no more money to be made in organic farming (less money, actually), so it's not something he does. Leave that to the hippies and the yuppies that don't mind paying $5.00 for a pint of milk.
This sounds more like a labor-saving device than a yield-increasing device. As such, I doubt you'll be able to show an increase in yield, and certainly not one significant enough to justify this technology. Instead, you should be looking at savings in wages. If the cost (purchase cost plus any ongoing maintenance costs times the expected number of units needed) is less than what it would take to pay minimum wage to some amount of local kids for a few weeks of summer work over the expected lifespan of the robot, then maybe it would be worth doing. On the other hand, it's probably a better idea to just continue hiring kids to walk the fields. Everybody wins -- the kids get money, excercise, and a nice tan, while the farmer gets cheap labor and clear fields, and the community gets something for teenagers to do during the lazy summer days rather than get in trouble. And if you do it right (ie, use hooks to cut out the weeds, rather than herbicide sprays), you won't even damage the environment by introducing herbicides to the food or the ground water. (can you tell I spent most of my summers from around age 8 to age 15 walking fields for my dad?)
If they're serious about this technology, it won't be battery driven. It'll be driven by diesel, and probably will be expanded to cover multiple rows at a time. Also, you can't really convert miles into rows. Depending on the geometry of the field, one mile could be two rows, or it could be twenty.
I do see one potential problem with the technology, though. Since it uses video recognition to determine what's bad and what's not, what happens when a plant is only bad in a certain scenario? For example, corn in a soybean field is considered a weed. This robot should kill it, or the robot will be worthless. However, corn in a corn field is not a weed. If the robot somehow determines that the cornfield is actually a bean field, there goes your entire yield.
You should try the Freespace series of games. They're getting a little long in the tooth these days, but they work perfectly well under Win2K and XP. As well, they really take up the slack where Wing Commander III dropped the ball -- screw the FMV, Mark Hamill, 5 minutes of gameplay for 30 minutes of movie crap. The Freespace series has a decent story (not groundbreaking, but still good for what it is) but more importantly great action and lots of it. You won't spend your gaming time watching poorly acted or rendered video sequences. You'll spend it in the cockpit of your fighter, blowing away aliens and fighting massive capital ships.
Of course, the Freespace games are a couple years old now, and it'll probably be pretty difficult to find them in stores. Your best bet is to hit EBay and see what you can find.
I'm going to have to disagree with this. First off, let's remember that thermal greases and pastes are malleable. Even if the spreading of the grease causes some hills and valleys, the ridges will flatten down into the valleys when the heatsink is applied. If you end up with trapped air pockets between the cpu and the sink after applying grease, you've got a problem -- your grease is stiff to the point where it won't flatten out (buy newer/better compound), you didn't apply enough grease (applying too much is just as bad, but for different reasons), or your sink doesn't have enough pressure to create good contact with the CPU die whether or not you have grease in place.
The point of pre-spreading the grease is to make sure that you have enough to cover the die with a thin film, and not too much. If you just put a small blob on the die and let the heatsink spread it via pressure, you're either going to end up with way too much grease or not enough. If you don't check how the grease spread, you're not going to know whether you got sufficient application without overdoing it. But as you mentioned, checking means cleaning it up and doing it over again so that you get into a cycle where you basically practice several times until you're sure you know exactly how much grease you need to drop to ensure proper application. That seems like a waste of time and grease (and money, if you use the more expensive compounds).
If the CPU was so covered in grease, it's no wonder it ran hot. Thermal grease is meant to be used very sparingly. You want a very thin layer, just enough to fill the microscopic crevices on the CPU and heatsink mating surfaces (if the surface of the heatsink has larger-than-microscopic grooves, it's time to get out the sand paper and lap the base to a shiny finish). As good of a thermal conductor as thermal grease may be, it's terrible in comparison to a direct metal-on-metal connection. If you see a lot of grease squeeze out when you apply the heatsink, you've got too much. What you want to do is apply a thin bead of grease to one end of the CPU die, and spread it thinly across using a credit card or other device (driver's license, heavy piece of paper, etc).
If your thermal grease is applied correctly, it will come off of the CPU with little problem. A cotton swab and a dab of rubbing alcohol should be more than enough. If you have to scrub, you had too much grease to begin with.
That would be because, like almost all licensees of any engine, Legend had free reign to add features to the engine. They also get to choose what platforms they support. I find it highly unlikely that Legend would add anything that was truly Windows-specific. More likely, they decided (by company policy or arbitrary decision) that creating and supporting a Linux client was out of scope. Perhaps they added DirectX-specific features and didn't support other renderers, but since the Unreal engine has a history of supporting modular rendering engines (it was originally designed for GLIDE and software, with OpenGL and DirectX added later), I find it unlikely that it would be impossible to implement (or fake) such features in a different renderer.
UT2K3 was essentially from Epic (well, mostly DE, but with Epic oversight and support, and DE works very closely with Epic), so since Epic supports Linux, UT2K3 should support Linux as well. The same situation will arise with any other Unreal-based game. Ubi Soft's Raven Shield and Splinter Cell will only support Linux if Ubi Soft chooses to support Linux, regardless of the underlying engine's support for Linux. Same for Ion Storm (what's left of them, anyway) and the upcoming Deus Ex 2: The Invisible War, and any other Unreal-based games (historical example -- Wheel of Time never supported Linux, even though it was based on a build only slightly older than Unreal Tournament, and could easily accept patches from the UT codebase that would allow it to support Linux).
I think my point is still valid that Epic and Id take different approaches towards engine licensing, thus making it difficult to compare apples to apples. You'll often see games based on newer Unreal technology from licensees before you see a showcase game from Epic, but you'll never see licensee games based on new Id technology until after Id has released their own game/tech demo. This could change, especially if Id decides to move towards the infrastructure-provider path in the future, but theCarmack and gang seem to enjoy making games as well as making engines. At the very least, Id's tech demos (Q3A) make a good base for enthusiasts to modify without having to sink real money into engine licenses.
You just outlined the fundamental difference between Epic and Id. After the first Unreal, Epic focused on building their Unreal Engine Technology and little more. The current Unreal 2 engine is still ultimately the original Unreal engine. Epic sells licenses for their engine to developers (Legend, Digital Extreme, Ion Storm, etc), and then gives those licensess access to technology updates as they build and test them. In other words, the Wheel of Time game was based on the same engine as Unreal and Unreal Tournament, even though it was released after Unreal and before Unreal Tournament. Id, on the other hand, focuses on one engine at a time, builds a game (read: tech demo) out of the engine, then sells licenses. If you license the Quake 2 engine, you're not going to get technology from the Quake 3 engine. And even if you did, the two engines are completely different so you'd have a lot of work to do to incorporate the new technology. Id still thinks of themselves as a game development house, and so you see Doom 3 being developed in-house. Epic, on the other hand, has transitioned to the role of technology provider. Their whole goal is to provide the engine for others to make games, which is why Legend was responsible for Unreal 2.
Boring, with a shitty control scheme? I'm sorry, but no. Metroid Prime was decent for what it was -- a Metroid game, which means lots of exploring and adventure, with a good dose of action thrown in. Metroid Prime made it clear that action is secondary, since the control scheme made it horrendously difficult to fight well (yes, the lock-on stuff made it not so bad, but that's not good enough for a shooter). Half-Life was and is a shooter. If anything, a better comparison would be between Halo and Half-Life. At least the genres are the same, with the same focus on single-player story telling while still enabling some kick-ass multiplayer gaming.
You're correct that HL2 has its work cut out for it. The past few years have given us several good story-oriented single-player shooters, like the afore-mentioned Halo, Max Payne, and even the Red Faction series to some extent. And that's ignoring other genres like tactical shooters (the R6 and SWAT series) and FPRPGs like Deus Ex.