Well, you're working off a set of assumptions I didn't make. For instance, I am of the opinion that piracy performed for a profit should be illegal, while piracy on the individual level should at least be decriminalized, if not legalized.
Think of it this way. If you're pirating something, why should you be giving money to somebody else, who has done nothing to produce the work? That makes no sense to me.
Well, when it said they confiscated $14,000 worth of stuff, you can easily deduce that he was jailbreaking at an industrial scale, not a personal one. And honestly, raids against people doing that sort of thing is pretty justifiable.
It helps the Linux community - I'd say at least 50% the AAA-level games on Linux got there because someone released the code, and the open-source community got the port done.
It helps the hardcore fans of the game, because obscure bugs can be fixed, and enhancements can be added. Doom has gotten quite a few engine enhancements that make the original game look a lot better, without needing art replacements.
It can help indie or starting-out developers, because a full engine is a tough thing to properly write. Getting one for free, even an old one, can speed up development.
Finally, helps the original game makers. By releasing the code while keeping the art assets proprietary, you get free maintenance of your product while still profiting from sales. I know of a lot of people who didn't buy Doom until years afterwards.
Mostly ports and bugfixes/enhancements, but there's a decent number of fully-independent projects as well. OpenArena, Nexuiz, and Urban Terror, for instance.
I dunno. I enjoyed it. The shooting was actually fun, and the weapon variety was cool. Got repetitive at times, yeah, especially near the beginning. But I was always enjoying myself enough to keep playing - more than I can say for a ton of other games.
If there can be online pirates, there can be online privateers. Say the US declares Cyber-war on China. Instead of needing to hire, outfit and finance a full Cyber-Army, just declare "any American who hacks China can a) do so legally and b) keep any valuable stuff they steal". Maybe even pay bounties - $10,000 to take down the People's Congress website for a day, $100,000 for each classified document stolen, etc. Private corporations might pay, too - I'm sure Apple would pay a decent amount for someone to damage whatever factory is currently producing iPod knock-offs. Or even just regular corporate espionage, just more publicly since it's legalized.
Then all you really need to focus on is defense, and defense is a lot easier for the big slow guy. Since you get an instant army whenever you go on the attack, you can pretty much just play a slow, conservative defense game.
Ah, but are they Radio Stars (who also make videos), or are they Video Stars (who also make radio broadcasts)? Or are they MP3 Stars who also make Videos and get played on the Radio?
Bethesda is not "really" ditching Gamebryo. They are saying that it's a "new engine", but also that it's directly evolved from Oblivion's engine. So they're really just going from Gamebryo X.0 to Gamebryo X.1 (or maybe Gamebryo (X+1).0).
They have said that using Rage's engine for Skyrim would be impossible. Level sizes are too small.
Yeah, I think you're the one not understanding this. The system you describe is quite simply impossible - to use a car analogy, it's like an invention to eliminate emissions by amputating the entire engine. The closest I can think of to your description is screenspace ray-tracing, which isn't "fast" by ANYONE'S definition.
Towards the end of their video, they talk about a demo of an island using 21 billion points. Which is pretty much impossible to keep in RAM on anything less than a minicomputer.
Let's assume that each point is storing the bare minimum of data needed - xyz position (each as 32-bit ints) and two pieces of color information (diffuse and specular, also 32 bits a piece). So that's 20 bytes of data per point, which comes out to be 391GB of data (for a static, unanimated mesh, I remind you). You can't store that in RAM on anything even remotely consumer-grade. That's even a lot of data for storage on-disk - I have yet to see a released game take up more tha 20 or 30GB.
Even compression won't get you too far. Lossless compression can pack things down to ~20% their original size - in this case, 71GB. Lossy compression might be used (it's image data, after all), which can often bring things down to ~5% their original size without significant loss of quality. In this case, 5% would be 19GB. Now we're in the level of being able to store one level on-disk, but RAM is still out. So some sort of streaming system is necessary, and getting that right usually takes a genius programmer. Carmack might be able to make it run on modern tech, but I would bet against some random newcomers, especially if they don't show any details.
In any case, they seem ignorant of the fundamental economics of gaming. In the old days, you could make a game with just one artist on the team, because they were making very low-detail sprites. As we moved into 3D, this grew to 3-10 artists making low-poly models. And it kept growing - by now, an AAA game will need several dozen artists to make something that looks HD. If you move further, into the level of detail these guys are claiming, you're going to need a LOT more. Making a game using this type of system would require HUNDREDS of artists. Which, of course, would make games even more expensive - anybody up for a $500 game? I don't think so.
"Whaddya mean I hurt your feelings? Didn't know you had any feelings."
Re:Why does every story about US politics....
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Debt Deal Reached
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They're liberal compared to the other major US political party. The only way you can't consider them liberal is in comparison to other countries, or in comparison to extremely minor parties.
Re:Why does every story about US politics....
on
Debt Deal Reached
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· Score: 1
Slashdot tends to run heavily Liberal, so all the stupid ignorant stuff the Democrats do either gets ignored or attributed to the system as a whole.
This is mostly because of all the non-American readers like yourself - America, compared to most of Europe, is very conservative, so the party closest to the European liberal movement is generally cast as "the good party" (ie. more like us) and the more conservative groups cast as "the bad party" (ie. not like us), even though most Democrats would be classified as ultra-cons in most European countries. I see that a lot with the BBC reporting, too (they're actually better at fact-reporting on US politics than the American news, since they can't exactly have much of an agenda).
But yeah, when you said "circus" you pretty much hit the nail on the head. Both major parties are messed up beyond belief, and the only third-party to get a decent cut of votes is the single-issue Green party (which is also pretty messed up).
You're making the rather large assumption that the government is intelligent enough not to do this. Prior experience suggests the only truly infinite government resources are stupidity and incompetence.
The coin doesn't have to be physically worth $5*10^12, it just has to be labeled that way. They could make the coin out of $0.05 in copper, mark it as $5*10^12, and basically get $4,999,999,999,999.95 for "free" (excluding all the inflationary problems that would cause). It might be an acceptable short-term solution, but I wouldn't try to repeat it more than once.
And before someone brings in the whole "people are conditioned to like 24fps because that's what all the good movies are in" argument, let me point out that games have consistently been running at a full 60FPS for years now, and no gamer has ever seen a problem with that. Some even splurge on 120hz displays, for even higher framerates. Nobody I've spoken to has noticed any "fake" feelings from them.
I thought the evidence was pretty clear that global temperatures are already rising significantly. This only seems to affect predictive models - global warming may not continue to increase as much as we previously thought, although temperatures are already pretty elevated.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, you're working off a set of assumptions I didn't make. For instance, I am of the opinion that piracy performed for a profit should be illegal, while piracy on the individual level should at least be decriminalized, if not legalized.
Think of it this way. If you're pirating something, why should you be giving money to somebody else, who has done nothing to produce the work? That makes no sense to me.
Well, when it said they confiscated $14,000 worth of stuff, you can easily deduce that he was jailbreaking at an industrial scale, not a personal one. And honestly, raids against people doing that sort of thing is pretty justifiable.
It helps the Linux community - I'd say at least 50% the AAA-level games on Linux got there because someone released the code, and the open-source community got the port done.
It helps the hardcore fans of the game, because obscure bugs can be fixed, and enhancements can be added. Doom has gotten quite a few engine enhancements that make the original game look a lot better, without needing art replacements.
It can help indie or starting-out developers, because a full engine is a tough thing to properly write. Getting one for free, even an old one, can speed up development.
Finally, helps the original game makers. By releasing the code while keeping the art assets proprietary, you get free maintenance of your product while still profiting from sales. I know of a lot of people who didn't buy Doom until years afterwards.
Mostly ports and bugfixes/enhancements, but there's a decent number of fully-independent projects as well. OpenArena, Nexuiz, and Urban Terror, for instance.
I dunno. I enjoyed it. The shooting was actually fun, and the weapon variety was cool. Got repetitive at times, yeah, especially near the beginning. But I was always enjoying myself enough to keep playing - more than I can say for a ton of other games.
If there can be online pirates, there can be online privateers. Say the US declares Cyber-war on China. Instead of needing to hire, outfit and finance a full Cyber-Army, just declare "any American who hacks China can a) do so legally and b) keep any valuable stuff they steal". Maybe even pay bounties - $10,000 to take down the People's Congress website for a day, $100,000 for each classified document stolen, etc. Private corporations might pay, too - I'm sure Apple would pay a decent amount for someone to damage whatever factory is currently producing iPod knock-offs. Or even just regular corporate espionage, just more publicly since it's legalized.
Then all you really need to focus on is defense, and defense is a lot easier for the big slow guy. Since you get an instant army whenever you go on the attack, you can pretty much just play a slow, conservative defense game.
Ah, but are they Radio Stars (who also make videos), or are they Video Stars (who also make radio broadcasts)? Or are they MP3 Stars who also make Videos and get played on the Radio?
Bethesda is not "really" ditching Gamebryo. They are saying that it's a "new engine", but also that it's directly evolved from Oblivion's engine. So they're really just going from Gamebryo X.0 to Gamebryo X.1 (or maybe Gamebryo (X+1).0).
They have said that using Rage's engine for Skyrim would be impossible. Level sizes are too small.
Video killed the radio star.
Yeah, I think you're the one not understanding this. The system you describe is quite simply impossible - to use a car analogy, it's like an invention to eliminate emissions by amputating the entire engine. The closest I can think of to your description is screenspace ray-tracing, which isn't "fast" by ANYONE'S definition.
Towards the end of their video, they talk about a demo of an island using 21 billion points. Which is pretty much impossible to keep in RAM on anything less than a minicomputer.
Let's assume that each point is storing the bare minimum of data needed - xyz position (each as 32-bit ints) and two pieces of color information (diffuse and specular, also 32 bits a piece). So that's 20 bytes of data per point, which comes out to be 391GB of data (for a static, unanimated mesh, I remind you). You can't store that in RAM on anything even remotely consumer-grade. That's even a lot of data for storage on-disk - I have yet to see a released game take up more tha 20 or 30GB.
Even compression won't get you too far. Lossless compression can pack things down to ~20% their original size - in this case, 71GB. Lossy compression might be used (it's image data, after all), which can often bring things down to ~5% their original size without significant loss of quality. In this case, 5% would be 19GB. Now we're in the level of being able to store one level on-disk, but RAM is still out. So some sort of streaming system is necessary, and getting that right usually takes a genius programmer. Carmack might be able to make it run on modern tech, but I would bet against some random newcomers, especially if they don't show any details.
In any case, they seem ignorant of the fundamental economics of gaming. In the old days, you could make a game with just one artist on the team, because they were making very low-detail sprites. As we moved into 3D, this grew to 3-10 artists making low-poly models. And it kept growing - by now, an AAA game will need several dozen artists to make something that looks HD. If you move further, into the level of detail these guys are claiming, you're going to need a LOT more. Making a game using this type of system would require HUNDREDS of artists. Which, of course, would make games even more expensive - anybody up for a $500 game? I don't think so.
And there was much rejoicing.
"Whaddya mean I hurt your feelings?
Didn't know you had any feelings."
They're liberal compared to the other major US political party. The only way you can't consider them liberal is in comparison to other countries, or in comparison to extremely minor parties.
Slashdot tends to run heavily Liberal, so all the stupid ignorant stuff the Democrats do either gets ignored or attributed to the system as a whole.
This is mostly because of all the non-American readers like yourself - America, compared to most of Europe, is very conservative, so the party closest to the European liberal movement is generally cast as "the good party" (ie. more like us) and the more conservative groups cast as "the bad party" (ie. not like us), even though most Democrats would be classified as ultra-cons in most European countries. I see that a lot with the BBC reporting, too (they're actually better at fact-reporting on US politics than the American news, since they can't exactly have much of an agenda).
But yeah, when you said "circus" you pretty much hit the nail on the head. Both major parties are messed up beyond belief, and the only third-party to get a decent cut of votes is the single-issue Green party (which is also pretty messed up).
IPoAC support is usually done at the OS level, not the application level.
Try looking through this page on a standards-compliant implementation of IPoAC. Includes a tarball of the source used.
Haha, morons.
(Posted from Lynx (on OpenBSD, even))
You're making the rather large assumption that the government is intelligent enough not to do this. Prior experience suggests the only truly infinite government resources are stupidity and incompetence.
Open this image.
One of those images is a photograph. The other is in-game. Even odds you can't tell which is which.
Even if you can, it's not immediately apparent. Games are close enough to photo-realism that they're indistinguishable at first glance.
The coin doesn't have to be physically worth $5*10^12, it just has to be labeled that way. They could make the coin out of $0.05 in copper, mark it as $5*10^12, and basically get $4,999,999,999,999.95 for "free" (excluding all the inflationary problems that would cause). It might be an acceptable short-term solution, but I wouldn't try to repeat it more than once.
"We don't even want to bother figuring out their email address."
Uh, quite a lot of games nowadays DO have motion blur. At least all the games from the past few years do.
And before someone brings in the whole "people are conditioned to like 24fps because that's what all the good movies are in" argument, let me point out that games have consistently been running at a full 60FPS for years now, and no gamer has ever seen a problem with that. Some even splurge on 120hz displays, for even higher framerates. Nobody I've spoken to has noticed any "fake" feelings from them.
You call 23C (74F) cold? Yeah, for summer that's peculiarly low, but I wouldn't call that "cold", much less "fucking cold".
I thought the evidence was pretty clear that global temperatures are already rising significantly. This only seems to affect predictive models - global warming may not continue to increase as much as we previously thought, although temperatures are already pretty elevated.