Not sure where your second section came from (meant to reply to someone else, perhaps?) but I'll respond anyways.
Blue Shift, Opposing Force and Decay were made by Gearbox, a rather respected game company (they see a lot of work building off other games, doing the PC port of Halo (which was awesome) and finishing Duke Nukem Forever (less so); on their own they're famous for Brothers in Arms and Borderlands).
Opposing Force is easily on par with Half-Life - the puzzle elements and level design were weaker, but there was less Xen platforming. The shooting, if anything, was better than in Half-Life. The story kind of ties in to Half-Life 2, but there's debate about it (whether "Race X" are Combine soldiers, or some new faction). After Half-Life 3, there's a lot of fan clamor for an Opposing Force 2.
Blue Shift was OK. Not by any means a bad game, but it had some weird development - it was supposed to be just a little extra mission for the Mac port of Half-Life, but when the port got canned, it was "upgraded" into a full game, and it shows - it's the second shortest game in the Half-Life canon, after Lost Coast (a single-level tech demo). Only really good thing about it is that it had an HD model pack which helped make the game look less dated.
Decay was only officially released on the PS2, but there's a fan-made PC port. It tried to bring co-op to Half-Life, did not do too well at all. Still not a bad game per se, just not up to the standards of Half-Life.
I did that. Worked decently well except in my Statics class - somehow I got the International version instead of the US version, so all the problems were in meters and newtons and sensible units instead of inches and pounds. They kept each problem generally the same, but the numbers were all wrong (and not even just converted - the US student would see a 12-pound force on a 2-foot beam, while I would see a 400-newton force on a 3-meter beam).
Which would have been fine with me, except I was the only one working on those problems. Made homework a bit of a challenge (thankfully the professor let me get away with it, as long as I wrote what numbers my version of the book was using and I did the problem properly (thank you, Professor Khan!)).
Unless there's an advantage I don't see with Iran and North Korea strengthening ties.
It's called the "Slytherin Plan" - gather all your troublemakers and ne'er-do-wells and put them in one spot, so you always know where the next attack is coming from (pro-tip: it's coming from the hive of scum and villainy you just made by doing so).
That's probably what they're doing, to some extent. They've already said that their goal isn't a 1:1 remake of Half-Life (that's what Half-Life: Source is for after all), but that they're aiming to improve on the few places where Half-Life could use improvement.
Xen being the section most in need of improvement, I think they're fully justified in releasing right up to that section now, and finishing it later. It's even a decent point, story-wise, to cut out - if Half-Life were a TV episode, jumping into the portal to Xen would happen right at the 20-minute commercial break (the 10-minute commercial break being that part where he's captured and left to die by HECU).
Now, Xen does need to stay in, for story reasons, but they can definitely do all they can to improve on it. Less platforming would be nice.
Let's see... Battlefield 3 is Vista/7 only, the next Call of Duty is Vista/7 only, probably more than that on the way.
Main reason is that Microsoft isn't porting Direct3D 10 or 11 back to XP - you can only go up to D3D 9. As more games are tending to use D3D10/11, the burden of adding a D3D9 renderer just for XP support increases.
And while XP and 7 may have just reached equality among the general population, gamers have upgraded far quicker. Looking at the Steam Hardware Survey, about 70% run some version of Windows 7, 13% run XP, 10% run Vista, 5% run OS X, and the rest are either already on W8 (0.25%) or "Unknown". Main reason, I think, is the prevalence of systems with >4GB of memory. 64-bit XP may have existed, but it was very rare, and had poor driver support. Vista was the first to ship with real 64-bit support, and 7 tried to make 64-bit the "default", moving 32-bit to "legacy". So all those gamers with 8-32GB of memory are running either Vista or 7.
Consoles tie into this, but in a somewhat weird way. See, the Xbox 360 is sort of halfway between D3D9 and D3D10. So as long as the game has a port to that console (or *is* a port from that console), making it run in D3D9 isn't exceptionally difficult. But as soon as the next-gen consoles hit, D3D9 (and thus, XP gaming) are toast.
Little manufacturing secret: making a perfect cube (all angles 90 degrees) is nearly impossible to manufacture. It's easy to do near-cubes (91/89 degree trapezoids), but a perfect cube will not slide out of the mold, and requires extremely expensive technology to do. Every single other computer that looks like a cube will have a very shallow angle to it for those reasons. After all, why jack the price up a ludicrous amount for something you'll never really notice unless you regularly go around measuring angles on your things.
Jobs insisted on a perfect cube, which (from what I've read) only a single foundry in the United States could manufacture at the time.
"Apple's story is like 'Breaking Bad' in that I really don't care about either of them, and am tired of people always bringing them up and telling me I need to be watching it"
Seriously. Xcode refuses to install. And I can't seem to find just a plain compiler (like GCC) except the one "included" with Xcode, so I can't use any other IDE either (I'd prefer CodeBlocks, as it's what I use on Windows, and will use on Linux as soon as I find the time to install it).
It probably has something to do with me being a few versions "behind" and not willing to shell out $$$ for an official developer's license, but guess what? I can install Visual Studio or GCC on my old XP machine and start coding, no license required.
While the Mac may be a somewhat-attractive option as a desktop, and it even has all the trappings of a good developer's workstation, it downright SUCKS for coding. So I'm not even going to consider coding on their dumbed-down tablet OS until I can get a freaking compiler for their so-called "full-power" desktop OS.
AMD puts their APUs on the actual CPU die as well - they just dedicate much more space to them than Intel (and also use an existing GPU core design).
He's talking about what the Xbox and PS3 and Wii do - they have the GPU die on a separate package, but it's mounted straight on the motherboard rather than in an addon card.
Except gamers are already used to having an integrated GPU that goes to waste.
Myself, I have an Intel HD in my CPU, which is currently never used because I've got a whopping GeForce 660M next to it*. Several of my other computers, even desktops, have integrated graphics that are completely wasted.
What would be useful is if you could SLI/CF (or whatever Intel wants to call it) the integrated GPU with the discrete. I've been told the AMD Fusion CPU/GPU chips can CrossFire with a discrete Radeon, although I've not tested it myself.
AMD is also very vulnerable right now. They're dead in the water on the desktop, and not doing too well on the small server front. Meanwhile they're starting to slip against nVidia - they haven't failed, not yet, but they're beginning to. Their last holdouts are mass number-crunching (which Bulldozer is actually good at, it seems) and their CPU-with-powerful-integrated-graphics Fusion "APUs". If Intel can take down Fusion, and help nVidia take down Radeon, then AMD is left as a bit player in the CPU market, occupying a small niche like VIA, Sun and IBM.
* When I ever get around to installing Linux on this thing, I may end up using the Intel GPU instead, simply because the drivers are better (and any task I'm doing in Linux won't be graphically-intensive enough to need the massive power-hog discrete card).
By "full-size card" I meant "full-size die". I have a tendency to use "video card" for things that aren't actually cards - it's easier to say than "GPU", and makes it more clear that I'm referring to the actual processor plus any attached memory.
Logically, though, it would be either on the motherboard, or worst-case attached as an MXM card.
However, I would like to see Intel try to crack into the consumer graphics card market again. And once they have the chip die designed, it's not particularly difficult to put it on a PCIe card and sell it as a separate product.
When I was dealing with some extremely shitty, slow service from Asus, I threatened to destroy their entire country. Didn't get a second glance - they seemed more worried about my "spread bad reviews on them all over the place" threat.
A gaming box with *current* Intel hardware would suck. But that's primarily because the current Intel "GPUs" are integrated onto the CPU die, and are only "good enough" .
I wonder how well Intel's performance would scale up. If they took their basic design, and used 600-1600 render cores instead of 6-16. I mean, a top-of-the-line card from nVidia or AMD has *thousands* of cores spread between two dies, while Intel is cramming a dozen cores into whatever space is left on the CPU die. Let them put out a full-size card, put a few gigs of dedicated memory and cache on it, and see what happens. We won't know for sure until it's tried, but rendering tends to be a pretty scalable problem.
If Intel *does* do that, they would be a likely candidate for the hypothesized SteamBox console, since they seem to be working *very* closely with Valve.
Except on the 360, you can use that 512MB however you want. If you only need a tiny amount for the CPU but want massive textures, go for it. If you need to keep track of millions of objects on the CPU and are willing to downres the textures and meshes to do so, go for it.
Skyrim is likely a case of the latter. They need to keep track of an absurd number of objects and NPCs, and they probably did that on the Xbox by aggressively purging cached assets to free up GPU memory for the CPU. It might stutter occasionally if it needs to reload several textures and meshes, but it will generally run smoothly. But they can't do that on the PS3, so they have to either find a way to trim down the RAM usage, or just give up.
Bethesda sucks at removing bugs. We know this, we've known this ever since what, Morrowind? Maybe even earlier.
But that doesn't mean their programmers are incompetent. Their problem, rather, is twofold:
1) They give level designers access to a fairly powerful scripting language (it's no UnrealScript, but it's more code-like than most others). All those quests with broken "coding"? All those items with broken effects? Those are the natural result of giving a programming task to a non-programmer.
2) A focus on quantity over quality. They downright *brag* about quests being made by one guy in a few days. That may be the only way to produce the amount of content they need, but it's hardly conducive to reliable, well-tested content.
Those bugs may be infuriating and numerous (the Unofficial Oblivion Patch fixed roughly 7000 bugs back when I used it), but they're not the kind of bugs that would prevent them from getting the game to run. Their actual engine coders seem pretty competent.
My own suspicion is that it's just a RAM issue. The PS3 has a whopping 256 megabytes of main memory, plus another 256 for video data (textures and meshes). The 360 at least has a 512MB chunk shared flexibly between both - a game that needs a lot of RAM like Skyrim can sacrifice some texture resolution to free some up for the CPU. And of course on the PC it's not a problem, since even the weakest gaming PC has 4GB plus another gig or two in the graphics card.
I'll end by noting two things: 1) Bethesda seems to slowly be getting better at quality. Oblivion had bugs everywhere, Fallout 3 had fewer, and Skyrim had only one bug that I actually encountered.
Depends on how you look at it. 76 L(1914) are only worth 1 L(2005), so in that sense it is worth less. But 1 L(1914) would buy you far more than 1 L(2005), so in that sense it is worth more.
According to this, sixpence translates to 2.5p, or 0.025L (not even going to try using the right character,/. will eat it). And according to this PDF, the Pound was worth roughly 76 times more in 2005 (the year it was written) than it was in 1914. So it comes out to be about 2L, or about US$3.
A good Windows admin will "work around" the Windows-ism of it all and use the more UNIX-y features of it (they won't think of it that way, but they will). See how they are at whipping up quick VB or PowerShell scripts to do some little task (the same way you would whip up a Perl or Bash script). Check their problem-diagnosis skills - give them a hypothetical scenario (some weird proprietary service isn't starting at boot) and keep throwing up obstacles ("Guy: Well, I would check the services panel, make sure it was set to start automatically"; "You: Alright, you check that, and it is set to, but it's marked as 'stopped' and halts as soon as you try to start it"). Eventually he'll give up and say "there's obviously something wrong that's beyond my ability to fix, I would have to contact their support people", but see how many things he can think of to check. If he can think of a lot of ways something can go wrong, he likely has both experience and wisdom (unless he's rattling off bullshit, of course).
Another thing to look at is his WindowsUNIX skills. I'm working on a project now that involves getting applications running on both to work with each other, and that's not easy. Having a Windows guy who can grok Unix-speak would definitely be a plus for you.
Except a modern GPU is basically a coprocessor that, 99% of the time, is used to run a library that primarily does graphics. Rendering, shading, transformation, those are now all done "in software". The only things still done "in hardware" are texture lookups and video output (turning an int[4][1080][1920] into a DVI or HDMI or VGA or whatever signal.
They're also a pretty high-volume market, so you get them much cheaper than you would a custom-built coprocessor or even FPGA, and they're *probably* better-designed than the one you would make, as they have entire teams of professionals working on them.
Also, both nVidia and AMD already make "compute-only" cards - nVidia under the brand "Tesla", AMD under the brand "FireStream".
Slashdot Mirror
Not sure where your second section came from (meant to reply to someone else, perhaps?) but I'll respond anyways.
Blue Shift, Opposing Force and Decay were made by Gearbox, a rather respected game company (they see a lot of work building off other games, doing the PC port of Halo (which was awesome) and finishing Duke Nukem Forever (less so); on their own they're famous for Brothers in Arms and Borderlands).
Opposing Force is easily on par with Half-Life - the puzzle elements and level design were weaker, but there was less Xen platforming. The shooting, if anything, was better than in Half-Life. The story kind of ties in to Half-Life 2, but there's debate about it (whether "Race X" are Combine soldiers, or some new faction). After Half-Life 3, there's a lot of fan clamor for an Opposing Force 2.
Blue Shift was OK. Not by any means a bad game, but it had some weird development - it was supposed to be just a little extra mission for the Mac port of Half-Life, but when the port got canned, it was "upgraded" into a full game, and it shows - it's the second shortest game in the Half-Life canon, after Lost Coast (a single-level tech demo). Only really good thing about it is that it had an HD model pack which helped make the game look less dated.
Decay was only officially released on the PS2, but there's a fan-made PC port. It tried to bring co-op to Half-Life, did not do too well at all. Still not a bad game per se, just not up to the standards of Half-Life.
I did that. Worked decently well except in my Statics class - somehow I got the International version instead of the US version, so all the problems were in meters and newtons and sensible units instead of inches and pounds. They kept each problem generally the same, but the numbers were all wrong (and not even just converted - the US student would see a 12-pound force on a 2-foot beam, while I would see a 400-newton force on a 3-meter beam).
Which would have been fine with me, except I was the only one working on those problems. Made homework a bit of a challenge (thankfully the professor let me get away with it, as long as I wrote what numbers my version of the book was using and I did the problem properly (thank you, Professor Khan!)).
Unless there's an advantage I don't see with Iran and North Korea strengthening ties.
It's called the "Slytherin Plan" - gather all your troublemakers and ne'er-do-wells and put them in one spot, so you always know where the next attack is coming from (pro-tip: it's coming from the hive of scum and villainy you just made by doing so).
That's probably what they're doing, to some extent. They've already said that their goal isn't a 1:1 remake of Half-Life (that's what Half-Life: Source is for after all), but that they're aiming to improve on the few places where Half-Life could use improvement.
Xen being the section most in need of improvement, I think they're fully justified in releasing right up to that section now, and finishing it later. It's even a decent point, story-wise, to cut out - if Half-Life were a TV episode, jumping into the portal to Xen would happen right at the 20-minute commercial break (the 10-minute commercial break being that part where he's captured and left to die by HECU).
Now, Xen does need to stay in, for story reasons, but they can definitely do all they can to improve on it. Less platforming would be nice.
Let's see... Battlefield 3 is Vista/7 only, the next Call of Duty is Vista/7 only, probably more than that on the way.
Main reason is that Microsoft isn't porting Direct3D 10 or 11 back to XP - you can only go up to D3D 9. As more games are tending to use D3D10/11, the burden of adding a D3D9 renderer just for XP support increases.
And while XP and 7 may have just reached equality among the general population, gamers have upgraded far quicker. Looking at the Steam Hardware Survey, about 70% run some version of Windows 7, 13% run XP, 10% run Vista, 5% run OS X, and the rest are either already on W8 (0.25%) or "Unknown". Main reason, I think, is the prevalence of systems with >4GB of memory. 64-bit XP may have existed, but it was very rare, and had poor driver support. Vista was the first to ship with real 64-bit support, and 7 tried to make 64-bit the "default", moving 32-bit to "legacy". So all those gamers with 8-32GB of memory are running either Vista or 7.
Consoles tie into this, but in a somewhat weird way. See, the Xbox 360 is sort of halfway between D3D9 and D3D10. So as long as the game has a port to that console (or *is* a port from that console), making it run in D3D9 isn't exceptionally difficult. But as soon as the next-gen consoles hit, D3D9 (and thus, XP gaming) are toast.
Little manufacturing secret: making a perfect cube (all angles 90 degrees) is nearly impossible to manufacture. It's easy to do near-cubes (91/89 degree trapezoids), but a perfect cube will not slide out of the mold, and requires extremely expensive technology to do. Every single other computer that looks like a cube will have a very shallow angle to it for those reasons. After all, why jack the price up a ludicrous amount for something you'll never really notice unless you regularly go around measuring angles on your things.
Jobs insisted on a perfect cube, which (from what I've read) only a single foundry in the United States could manufacture at the time.
"Apple's story is like 'Breaking Bad' in that I really don't care about either of them, and am tired of people always bringing them up and telling me I need to be watching it"
I can't even get my IDE working on my Mac!
Seriously. Xcode refuses to install. And I can't seem to find just a plain compiler (like GCC) except the one "included" with Xcode, so I can't use any other IDE either (I'd prefer CodeBlocks, as it's what I use on Windows, and will use on Linux as soon as I find the time to install it).
It probably has something to do with me being a few versions "behind" and not willing to shell out $$$ for an official developer's license, but guess what? I can install Visual Studio or GCC on my old XP machine and start coding, no license required.
While the Mac may be a somewhat-attractive option as a desktop, and it even has all the trappings of a good developer's workstation, it downright SUCKS for coding. So I'm not even going to consider coding on their dumbed-down tablet OS until I can get a freaking compiler for their so-called "full-power" desktop OS.
We prefer the term "Americans", thank you very much!
AMD puts their APUs on the actual CPU die as well - they just dedicate much more space to them than Intel (and also use an existing GPU core design).
He's talking about what the Xbox and PS3 and Wii do - they have the GPU die on a separate package, but it's mounted straight on the motherboard rather than in an addon card.
Except gamers are already used to having an integrated GPU that goes to waste.
Myself, I have an Intel HD in my CPU, which is currently never used because I've got a whopping GeForce 660M next to it*. Several of my other computers, even desktops, have integrated graphics that are completely wasted.
What would be useful is if you could SLI/CF (or whatever Intel wants to call it) the integrated GPU with the discrete. I've been told the AMD Fusion CPU/GPU chips can CrossFire with a discrete Radeon, although I've not tested it myself.
AMD is also very vulnerable right now. They're dead in the water on the desktop, and not doing too well on the small server front. Meanwhile they're starting to slip against nVidia - they haven't failed, not yet, but they're beginning to. Their last holdouts are mass number-crunching (which Bulldozer is actually good at, it seems) and their CPU-with-powerful-integrated-graphics Fusion "APUs". If Intel can take down Fusion, and help nVidia take down Radeon, then AMD is left as a bit player in the CPU market, occupying a small niche like VIA, Sun and IBM.
* When I ever get around to installing Linux on this thing, I may end up using the Intel GPU instead, simply because the drivers are better (and any task I'm doing in Linux won't be graphically-intensive enough to need the massive power-hog discrete card).
By "full-size card" I meant "full-size die". I have a tendency to use "video card" for things that aren't actually cards - it's easier to say than "GPU", and makes it more clear that I'm referring to the actual processor plus any attached memory.
Logically, though, it would be either on the motherboard, or worst-case attached as an MXM card.
However, I would like to see Intel try to crack into the consumer graphics card market again. And once they have the chip die designed, it's not particularly difficult to put it on a PCIe card and sell it as a separate product.
FYI, it's always been phrased as a "subscription".
The recent change only tries to ban class-action lawsuits, which yes, is kind of a dick move.
morningstar?
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
A Morning Star is a spiked mace-like weapon. The aircraft in question looks much more like a hira shuriken, aka. a "ninja star" or "throwing star".
Maybe he just wasn't hyperbolic enough?
When I was dealing with some extremely shitty, slow service from Asus, I threatened to destroy their entire country. Didn't get a second glance - they seemed more worried about my "spread bad reviews on them all over the place" threat.
A gaming box with *current* Intel hardware would suck. But that's primarily because the current Intel "GPUs" are integrated onto the CPU die, and are only "good enough" .
I wonder how well Intel's performance would scale up. If they took their basic design, and used 600-1600 render cores instead of 6-16. I mean, a top-of-the-line card from nVidia or AMD has *thousands* of cores spread between two dies, while Intel is cramming a dozen cores into whatever space is left on the CPU die. Let them put out a full-size card, put a few gigs of dedicated memory and cache on it, and see what happens. We won't know for sure until it's tried, but rendering tends to be a pretty scalable problem.
If Intel *does* do that, they would be a likely candidate for the hypothesized SteamBox console, since they seem to be working *very* closely with Valve.
Except on the 360, you can use that 512MB however you want. If you only need a tiny amount for the CPU but want massive textures, go for it. If you need to keep track of millions of objects on the CPU and are willing to downres the textures and meshes to do so, go for it.
Skyrim is likely a case of the latter. They need to keep track of an absurd number of objects and NPCs, and they probably did that on the Xbox by aggressively purging cached assets to free up GPU memory for the CPU. It might stutter occasionally if it needs to reload several textures and meshes, but it will generally run smoothly. But they can't do that on the PS3, so they have to either find a way to trim down the RAM usage, or just give up.
Bethesda sucks at removing bugs. We know this, we've known this ever since what, Morrowind? Maybe even earlier.
But that doesn't mean their programmers are incompetent. Their problem, rather, is twofold:
1) They give level designers access to a fairly powerful scripting language (it's no UnrealScript, but it's more code-like than most others). All those quests with broken "coding"? All those items with broken effects? Those are the natural result of giving a programming task to a non-programmer.
2) A focus on quantity over quality. They downright *brag* about quests being made by one guy in a few days. That may be the only way to produce the amount of content they need, but it's hardly conducive to reliable, well-tested content.
Those bugs may be infuriating and numerous (the Unofficial Oblivion Patch fixed roughly 7000 bugs back when I used it), but they're not the kind of bugs that would prevent them from getting the game to run. Their actual engine coders seem pretty competent.
My own suspicion is that it's just a RAM issue. The PS3 has a whopping 256 megabytes of main memory, plus another 256 for video data (textures and meshes). The 360 at least has a 512MB chunk shared flexibly between both - a game that needs a lot of RAM like Skyrim can sacrifice some texture resolution to free some up for the CPU. And of course on the PC it's not a problem, since even the weakest gaming PC has 4GB plus another gig or two in the graphics card.
I'll end by noting two things:
1) Bethesda seems to slowly be getting better at quality. Oblivion had bugs everywhere, Fallout 3 had fewer, and Skyrim had only one bug that I actually encountered.
2) New Vegas wasn't developed by Bethesda.
One explanation, coming right up..
Ah, my bad, I did have it backwards. Mind kept reading it as what I meant to write, not what I actually wrote.
Depends on how you look at it. 76 L(1914) are only worth 1 L(2005), so in that sense it is worth less. But 1 L(1914) would buy you far more than 1 L(2005), so in that sense it is worth more.
According to this, sixpence translates to 2.5p, or 0.025L (not even going to try using the right character, /. will eat it). And according to this PDF, the Pound was worth roughly 76 times more in 2005 (the year it was written) than it was in 1914. So it comes out to be about 2L, or about US$3.
A good Windows admin will "work around" the Windows-ism of it all and use the more UNIX-y features of it (they won't think of it that way, but they will). See how they are at whipping up quick VB or PowerShell scripts to do some little task (the same way you would whip up a Perl or Bash script). Check their problem-diagnosis skills - give them a hypothetical scenario (some weird proprietary service isn't starting at boot) and keep throwing up obstacles ("Guy: Well, I would check the services panel, make sure it was set to start automatically"; "You: Alright, you check that, and it is set to, but it's marked as 'stopped' and halts as soon as you try to start it"). Eventually he'll give up and say "there's obviously something wrong that's beyond my ability to fix, I would have to contact their support people", but see how many things he can think of to check. If he can think of a lot of ways something can go wrong, he likely has both experience and wisdom (unless he's rattling off bullshit, of course).
Another thing to look at is his WindowsUNIX skills. I'm working on a project now that involves getting applications running on both to work with each other, and that's not easy. Having a Windows guy who can grok Unix-speak would definitely be a plus for you.
Stupid Apple fanboy...
Except a modern GPU is basically a coprocessor that, 99% of the time, is used to run a library that primarily does graphics. Rendering, shading, transformation, those are now all done "in software". The only things still done "in hardware" are texture lookups and video output (turning an int[4][1080][1920] into a DVI or HDMI or VGA or whatever signal.
They're also a pretty high-volume market, so you get them much cheaper than you would a custom-built coprocessor or even FPGA, and they're *probably* better-designed than the one you would make, as they have entire teams of professionals working on them.
Also, both nVidia and AMD already make "compute-only" cards - nVidia under the brand "Tesla", AMD under the brand "FireStream".