'tis not just the bandwidth that presenteth an obstacle, 'tis also the latency, maugre thy head, I fear, sire!
Seriously you can have gazllions of MB in bandwidth, but if it takes > 0.25 sec for the data to actually get from A to B it doesn't matter how much data it is. Burst isn't everything.
Doing a bit more research you will find that the University of British Columbia has applied for a patent on the SIFT algorithm in the United States, although it's happy to allow non-commercial applications of the algorithm, and happy to use other open source projects in it's implementation.
Although as it's from a University, and the patenter allows fre-as-in-beer non - commercial use this looks like a defensive patent to me, this immideatly puts the kibbosh on any GNU GPL/LGPL project using it
It's not at all obvious. The Parliament is supposed to gain more power on paper, but there are several complicating factors, like the new President, Foreign Ministry, and streamlined Council. The BBC have attempted to summarise it..
It's not uncommon to need to sell a million worldwide in order to make a decent profit, because marketing and development costs are colossal, and getting larger.
2> Code is only a fraction of the input.
You need buckets of art, and sound. Artists outnumber coders on a big commercial project by as much as five to one.
3> There's no working business model that links up to the open source approach.
How do you sell a service related to a game? What is "support" in this context? You can sell subscriptions to MMORPGS - someone is trying. You can sell nice game packages with "feelies" ala Infocom. Neither approach seems particularly advantageous business - wise.
4> The good platforms are closed.
You can't develop anything Free as in Speech for the XBox or PS2 by their very nature, and these are the most Things that could happen that might help:
1> A linux distro aimed specifically at game developers. Something that has Nvidia / ATI video support out of the box, a good collection of game libs and tools.
2> A focus on tools for content creation. Blender is nice, but can't we improve on packages like Maya or Max? Can't the Open Source community come up with applications that makes modelling the things we need for games - landscapes, interirors, vehicles, characters easier, the way plugins for Max and Maya often do? Or apps that use procedural techniques for generation of this content? If I was starting an Open - Source game related company tomorrow this is where I'd start.
3> A "games" version of sourceforge: one that can not only be used to manage and pool code assets but art and sound assets, too and attracts artists, audio guys and designers.
4> Some genius coming up with a viable business model for a game that the source is publically available to.
This is just NOT true. It's revisionist history. However, the nice thing about the web, is that the original article written by the first person outside MS to discover the code is still online.
This is what's known by historians as a primary source.
Sony really, really need to do something about the quality of their tools. I've spent the last two years on a game that runs on the XBox and PS2. The XBox tools are just amazing -for example you can click on a pixel and see a dissasembly of the shader that produced it.
The Sony tools are hideous. Well, the debugger has a nice graphical frontend provided by a third party and is fairly slick and fast compared to Visual Studio, but the compiler and libraries provided are terrible - a patched up gcc 2.9.5 which has a prediliction for internal errors when the array indexing operator [] is used creatively , and that doesn't always optimise away empty constructors. And the libraries provided - at least initially were slow, and crufty and not suitable for game use. At least now, two years after the release of the PS2, Sony provides some decent middleware.
They MUST get developer tools right from the off with the PS3 - especially if it has 8 CPU's. I really, really hope they do. I'd hate to see my market swallowed by the Beast. At present it's economical to develop for the PS2 without needing a single Windows liscence. I hope it stays that way:(
Spam Headers -- Return-path: Received: from punt-3.mail.demon.net by mailstore for johnc@yagc.demon.co.uk id 1A4cHz-0006dB-Fh; Wed, 01 Oct 2003 08:25:56 +0000 Received: from [24.128.200.166] (helo=h000ae62be489.ne.client2.attbi.com) by punt-3.mail.demon.net with smtp id 1A4cHz-0006dB-Fh for johnc@yagc.demon.co.uk; Wed, 01 Oct 2003 08:24:52 +0000 Received: from lcs.mit.edu [59.95.222.125] by h000ae62be489.ne.client2.attbi.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id EDA4562DFCBD for ; Wed, 01 Oct 2003 09:28:33 +0000 Date: Wed, 01 Oct 2003 09:28:33 +0000 From: Tofikequf Subject: Johnc Receive your Dip1oma 1965936 To: Johnc References: In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Reply-To: Jolisojap Sender: Juleka MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/html Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
Traceroute results --
3 130.152.80.30 10.121 ms isi-1-lngw2-pos.ln.net [AS226] Los Nettos origin AS
4 198.172.117.161 163.950 ms ge-9-3.a01.lsanca02.us.ra.verio.net [AS2914] Verio
5 129.250.29.136 2.821 ms xe-1-0-0-4.r21.lsanca01.us.bb.verio.net [AS2914] Verio
6 129.250.2.11 6.288 ms p16-7-0-0.r00.lsanca01.us.bb.verio.net [AS2914] Verio
7 129.250.9.210 9.905 ms p4-1.att.lsanca01.us.bb.verio.net [AS2914] Verio
8 12.123.28.130 9.913 ms tbr1-p012201.la2ca.ip.att.net (DNS error)
9 12.122.10.25 13.635 ms tbr2-cl3.sffca.ip.att.net (DNS error) 10 12.122.9.137 12.811 ms tbr1-p012501.sffca.ip.att.net (DNS error) 11 12.122.10.5 54.916 ms tbr1-cl1.cgcil.ip.att.net (DNS error) 12 12.122.10.1 78.542 ms tbr1-cl1.n54ny.ip.att.net (DNS error) 13 12.122.9.130 76.257 ms tbr2-p012501.n54ny.ip.att.net (DNS error) 14 12.122.10.21 81.463 ms tbr1-cl1.cb1ma.ip.att.net (DNS error) 15 12.122.11.194 80.896 ms gbr1-p40.cb1ma.ip.att.net (DNS error) 16 12.123.40.97 80.612 ms gar1-p360.cb1ma.ip.att.net (DNS error) 17 12.125.39.214 81.116 ms DNS error 18 24.91.0.42 81.131 ms bar02-p6-0.wobnhe1.ma.attbb.net 19 24.91.0.154 81.628 ms DNS error 20 24.128.190.57 82.081 ms bar02-p4-0.lwllhe1.ma.attbb.net 21 24.147.0.38 82.124 ms ubr01-p2-0.lwllhe1.ma.attbb.net 22 24.128.200.166 97.001 ms h000ae62be489.ne.client2.attbi.com
Um, this guy in Petersburg seems like a guy I was trying to shut down, too. I was very happy for awhile, when he was stiffed: but the spam is back in even larger volumes and seems to be originating from an ISP in China, and is even better hidden this time....this is an arms race. Mandating digital signature is the only way out.
The Itex Apollo 3 PCI ADSL chipset. They released binary only drivers for the 2.4.16 kernel: and then went bust. Very frustrating for those of us looking for a cheap PCI based broadband solution.
Iv'e done some preliminary poking around with my copy of the binaries and it seems that ITEx were pretty sloppy with the binaries and left a lot of symbol table in that wasn't needed, thus making reverese engineering via objdump et al pretty easy.
I don't have time to work on this myself, but I'm willing to kick off a sourceforge or savannah project with what I have already - if anyone else is interested.
Well, this article in Forbes seems fairly pro-SCO. The point about a track record of litigation seems well-made. Or it would be if SCO actually appeared to have a case as strong as Digital Research did against Microsoft over the "AARD Detection code".
I'm amazed: think of the number of system interfaces - things like ioctl() and friends - that must be identicall across any Unixish/Posixsh system and I'd be surprised if that didn't add up to more than 80 lines.
Of course, that may be SCO's IP grab: they want to own anything vaguely *like* UNIX. I kind of admire their sheer brass balls...but don't quote me on that.
This is horrible thing to have to watch a second time. I know there are going to be calls for a complete ground - up redesign of the space programme and vehicles, but this won't neccesarily make things safer. Reliability in this field comes from having a good basic design and incrementally improving it, tweaking its design for saftey, learning as you go along. Just as complex sofware systems and operating systems have their bugs winnowed out over time. Sozyuz had an appalling saftey record in the early days, but it's a very safe design now. Sure, it may be the Ford Model T of spacecraft, but designwise it's kernel 2.2, not kernel 2.5:)
We are a games shop moving from single platform development (PS2) to multiplatform (PS2, XBox, PC, GameCube).
We have one codebase and are using gcc on the PS2, msvc6 on the PS, msvc7 on the XBox and CodeWarrior on the GameCube.
It makes things..interesting.
The approach we have gone for us to use a multiplatform kernel that handles the filesystem threading, memory allocation, various resource handling, error handling and user input. Not having to support as much in the way of user interaction as the average GUI app probably helps.
We can plug machine specific renderers into the framework by creating them as singleton objects.
Basically we try leverage the 80%/20% rule and make the 80% rule multiplatform and the 20% single platform - one for each platform. It's a lot of work, but it's the only way to get the speed needed.
The 20% bit is implemented via interfaces. For each major function (rendering, physics, sound) a singleton is created that implements the interface for the specific platform.
Ninja source control also helps. CVS sucks. Source Safe sucks. Actually, nearly all source control software I've seen sucks for this kind of thing in one way or another. It's just too easy for a coder on one platform to check in code that breaks on another.
For instance, CodeWarrior complains if you have a ";" after the closing brace of a namespace, none of the other compilers do. And Codewarrior is following the standard! Arrgh!
Compile with warnings at the maximum level, enforce warnings as errors, which makes compilers ultra picky and a pain to work with, but often causes them to pick up non-standard code that's going to be a problem for the other compilers.
We are trying to get to grips with NxN Alien Brain, a source control package where almost everything is scriptable. This may help. It may not even suck, but it's geared to games which have huge non - code related assets to deal with as well as code. Hmm. Maybe you have a similar problem with survey data. I know AB is being applied outside of games in the simulation field, so it may be worth a look.
Galileo himself died nearly blind, so there's a certain poignancy to the fate of this machine.
I must point out that the idea that his blindness was due to observations of the Sun is a myth: he made the observations by projection, the way anyone with half a brain would. His blindness was actually due to glaucoma and cataracts at the age of 72. My source is Galileo's Daughter by Dava Sobel.
When I joined my new place of work (as a games programmer) I was astonished to find that sourceforge.net was blocked by our firewall. When I raised the issue I was told that it was because it was easy to get filesharing programs or code for the above from sourceforge. I made the argument that Sourceforge was too valuable an educational resource (at the very least) to be blocked and the solution was much more careful port monitoring. Result: sourceforge was made accessible, and all ports except 80 were sealed up tighter than a thinggys whatsit. No more MUDs at lunchtime. Damm:(
They have given up on floppies. Given that the Slackware 8.0 I have at home is on 2CDs and takes around 800Mb (probably a bit more) a quick calculation suggests 556 floppies for all that concentrated slackware goodness.
Not surprising they gave up really, 556 floppies would be a distribution nightmare. Imagine 555 un-numbered floppies arriving in the post. Which one is the 556th missing one?
Re:I live in Alberta
on
Baked Alaska
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
"-atrowe: Card-carrying Mensa [mensa.org] member. I have no toleranse for stupidity. "
Given the recent modchip and regional liscencing case, this leaves Europe (SCEEurope's teritorry) as the only region you can't run Linux on the PS2.
So can Alan Cox be arrested for running Linux on his PS2 in the UK? Hmm. Also, you will note, Blokman Trading the guys who did the "privateer" Linux port to the Playstation have appeare to have dissapeared off the web. What happened to them?
Sony are in the same class as Microsoft: they seek to create a monopoly by proprietary lock - in, and regional liscencing, so this is the equivalent of MS Linux coming out.
If Linux is to have an original killer game it should be something that uses the strength of the community and the platform: some kind of peer to peer exploration / questing / hacking game with lots of procedurally generated content...
"Games have no such luxury. They are the end product."
This is getting less and less true. For the PC anyhow. Games companies like to build communities around their games. Civ, The Sims, Quake, Doom, Unreal Tournament, etc. All have active modding communities that produce new skins, scripts, levels, characters, what have you. This is the games equivalent of "support". It's also the key to a long sales life so it's something that the publishers are keen to encourage.
However, because people like games and like showing off, this support is given away for free.
So, basically you have two options, that might be possible.
1> Open the souce, but close the art. If the players want to play beyond three levels they have to pay for the level files. This would probably be subverted by user - desgined levels.
2> Host the game on a server, keep your levels and content on the server and charge for play. Open the code. Again, this would be subverted by user run servers.
Sure, information should be free. Should fun be free? Well, I'm a professional game developer. I have to eat, so you can guess my views..
Slashdot Mirror
'tis not just the bandwidth that presenteth an obstacle, 'tis also the latency, maugre thy head, I fear, sire!
Seriously you can have gazllions of MB in bandwidth, but if it takes > 0.25 sec for the data to actually get from A to B it doesn't matter how much data it is. Burst isn't everything.
Doing a bit more research you will find that the University of British Columbia has applied for a patent on the SIFT algorithm in the United States, although it's happy to allow non-commercial applications of the algorithm, and happy to use other open source projects in it's implementation.
Although as it's from a University, and the patenter allows fre-as-in-beer non - commercial use this looks like a defensive patent to me, this immideatly puts the kibbosh on any GNU GPL/LGPL project using it
It's not at all obvious. The Parliament is supposed to gain more power on paper, but there are several complicating factors, like the new President, Foreign Ministry, and streamlined Council. The BBC have attempted to summarise it..
1> Sheer quantity of units shipped.
It's not uncommon to need to sell a million worldwide in order to make a decent profit, because marketing and development costs are colossal, and getting larger.
2> Code is only a fraction of the input.
You need buckets of art, and sound. Artists outnumber coders on a big commercial project by as much as five to one.
3> There's no working business model that links up to the open source approach.
How do you sell a service related to a game? What is "support" in this context? You can sell subscriptions to MMORPGS - someone is trying. You can sell nice game packages with "feelies" ala Infocom. Neither approach seems particularly advantageous business - wise.
4> The good platforms are closed.
You can't develop anything Free as in Speech for the XBox or PS2 by their very nature, and these are the most
Things that could happen that might help:
1> A linux distro aimed specifically at game developers. Something that has Nvidia / ATI video support out of the box, a good collection of game libs and tools.
2> A focus on tools for content creation. Blender is nice, but can't we improve on packages like Maya or Max? Can't the Open Source community come up with applications that makes modelling the things we need for games - landscapes, interirors, vehicles, characters easier, the way plugins for Max and Maya often do? Or apps that use procedural techniques for generation of this content? If I was starting an Open - Source game related company tomorrow this is where I'd start.
3> A "games" version of sourceforge: one that can not only be used to manage and pool code assets but art and sound assets, too and attracts artists, audio guys and designers.
4> Some genius coming up with a viable business model for a game that the source is publically available to.
This is just NOT true. It's revisionist history. However, the nice thing about the web, is that the original article written by the first person outside MS to discover the code is still online.
This is what's known by historians as a primary source.
Sony really, really need to do something about the quality of their tools. I've spent the last two years on a game that runs on the XBox and PS2. The XBox tools are just amazing -for example you can click on a pixel and see a dissasembly of the shader that produced it.
:(
The Sony tools are hideous. Well, the debugger has a nice graphical frontend provided by a third party and is fairly slick and fast compared to Visual Studio, but the compiler and libraries provided are terrible - a patched up gcc 2.9.5 which has a prediliction for internal errors when the array indexing operator [] is used creatively , and that doesn't always optimise away empty constructors. And the libraries provided - at least initially were slow, and crufty and not suitable for game use. At least now, two years after the release of the PS2, Sony provides some decent middleware.
They MUST get developer tools right from the off with the PS3 - especially if it has 8 CPU's. I really, really hope they do. I'd hate to see my market swallowed by the Beast. At present it's economical to develop for the PS2 without needing a single Windows liscence. I hope it stays that way
One spam arrived as I was reading this! And they are still abusing whois/dns. Nice, but this guy has managed to do sweet FA
Relevant supporting evidence attached (my account is hosed, anyway..)
News Story.
-----------
http://www.internetnews.com/
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Traceroute results
--
3 130.152.80.30 10.121 ms isi-1-lngw2-pos.ln.net [AS226] Los Nettos origin AS
4 198.172.117.161 163.950 ms ge-9-3.a01.lsanca02.us.ra.verio.net [AS2914] Verio
5 129.250.29.136 2.821 ms xe-1-0-0-4.r21.lsanca01.us.bb.verio.net [AS2914] Verio
6 129.250.2.11 6.288 ms p16-7-0-0.r00.lsanca01.us.bb.verio.net [AS2914] Verio
7 129.250.9.210 9.905 ms p4-1.att.lsanca01.us.bb.verio.net [AS2914] Verio
8 12.123.28.130 9.913 ms tbr1-p012201.la2ca.ip.att.net (DNS error)
9 12.122.10.25 13.635 ms tbr2-cl3.sffca.ip.att.net (DNS error)
10 12.122.9.137 12.811 ms tbr1-p012501.sffca.ip.att.net (DNS error)
11 12.122.10.5 54.916 ms tbr1-cl1.cgcil.ip.att.net (DNS error)
12 12.122.10.1 78.542 ms tbr1-cl1.n54ny.ip.att.net (DNS error)
13 12.122.9.130 76.257 ms tbr2-p012501.n54ny.ip.att.net (DNS error)
14 12.122.10.21 81.463 ms tbr1-cl1.cb1ma.ip.att.net (DNS error)
15 12.122.11.194 80.896 ms gbr1-p40.cb1ma.ip.att.net (DNS error)
16 12.123.40.97 80.612 ms gar1-p360.cb1ma.ip.att.net (DNS error)
17 12.125.39.214 81.116 ms DNS error
18 24.91.0.42 81.131 ms bar02-p6-0.wobnhe1.ma.attbb.net
19 24.91.0.154 81.628 ms DNS error
20 24.128.190.57 82.081 ms bar02-p4-0.lwllhe1.ma.attbb.net
21 24.147.0.38 82.124 ms ubr01-p2-0.lwllhe1.ma.attbb.net
22 24.128.200.166 97.001 ms h000ae62be489.ne.client2.attbi.com
Um, this guy in Petersburg seems like a guy I was trying to shut down, too. I was very happy for awhile, when he was stiffed: but the spam is back in even larger volumes and seems to be originating from an ISP in China, and is even better hidden this time.. ..this is an arms race. Mandating digital signature is the only way out.
The Itex Apollo 3 PCI ADSL chipset. They released binary only drivers for the 2.4.16 kernel: and then went bust. Very frustrating for those of us looking for a cheap PCI based broadband solution.
Iv'e done some preliminary poking around with my copy of the binaries and it seems that ITEx were pretty sloppy with the binaries and left a lot of symbol table in that wasn't needed, thus making reverese engineering via objdump et al pretty easy.
I don't have time to work on this myself, but I'm willing to kick off a sourceforge or savannah project with what I have already - if anyone else is interested.
Well, this article in Forbes seems fairly pro-SCO. The point about a track record of litigation seems well-made. Or it would be if SCO actually appeared to have a case as strong as Digital Research did against Microsoft over the "AARD Detection code".
Of course, if it was that simple and you could devalue your way to wealth, Burkina Faso would be the richest country in the world..
I'm amazed: think of the number of system interfaces - things like ioctl() and friends - that must be identicall across any Unixish/Posixsh system and I'd be surprised if that didn't add up to more than 80 lines.
Of course, that may be SCO's IP grab: they want to own anything vaguely *like* UNIX. I kind of admire their sheer brass balls...but don't quote me on that.
This is horrible thing to have to watch a second time. I know there are going to be calls for a complete ground - up redesign of the space programme and vehicles, but this won't neccesarily make things safer. Reliability in this field comes from having a good basic design and incrementally improving it, tweaking its design for saftey, learning as you go along. Just as complex sofware systems and operating systems have their bugs winnowed out over time. Sozyuz had an appalling saftey record in the early days, but it's a very safe design now. Sure, it may be the Ford Model T of spacecraft, but designwise it's kernel 2.2, not kernel 2.5
I want to play text adventures on that thing!
We are a games shop moving from single platform development (PS2) to multiplatform (PS2, XBox, PC, GameCube).
We have one codebase and are using gcc on the PS2, msvc6 on the PS, msvc7 on the XBox and CodeWarrior on the GameCube.
It makes things..interesting.
The approach we have gone for us to use a multiplatform kernel that handles the filesystem threading, memory allocation, various resource handling, error handling and user input. Not having to support as much in the way of user interaction as the average GUI app probably helps.
We can plug machine specific renderers into the framework by creating them as singleton objects.
Basically we try leverage the 80%/20% rule and make the 80% rule multiplatform and the 20% single platform - one for each platform. It's a lot of work, but it's the only way to get the speed needed.
The 20% bit is implemented via interfaces. For each major function (rendering, physics, sound) a singleton is created that implements the interface for the specific platform.
Ninja source control also helps. CVS sucks. Source Safe sucks. Actually, nearly all source control software I've seen sucks for this kind of thing in one way or another. It's just too easy for a coder on one platform to check in code that breaks on another.
For instance, CodeWarrior complains if you have a ";" after the closing brace of a namespace, none of the other compilers do. And Codewarrior is following the standard! Arrgh!
Compile with warnings at the maximum level, enforce warnings as errors, which makes compilers ultra picky and a pain to work with, but often causes them to pick up non-standard code that's going to be a problem for the other compilers.
We are trying to get to grips with NxN Alien Brain, a source control package where almost everything is scriptable. This may help. It may not even suck, but it's geared to games which have huge non - code related assets to deal with as well as code. Hmm. Maybe you have a similar problem with survey data. I know AB is being applied outside of games in the simulation field, so it may be worth a look.
Galileo himself died nearly blind, so there's a certain poignancy to the fate of this machine.
I must point out that the idea that his blindness was due to observations of the Sun is a myth: he made the observations by projection, the way anyone with half a brain would. His blindness was actually due to glaucoma and cataracts at the age of 72. My source is Galileo's Daughter by Dava Sobel.
When I joined my new place of work (as a games programmer) I was astonished to find that sourceforge.net was blocked by our firewall. When I raised the issue I was told that it was because it was easy to get filesharing programs or code for the above from sourceforge. I made the argument that Sourceforge was too valuable an educational resource (at the very least) to be blocked and the solution was much more careful port monitoring. Result: sourceforge was made accessible, and all ports except 80 were sealed up tighter than a thinggys whatsit. No more MUDs at lunchtime. Damm
"If it's green and wiggles, it's biology."
No. If it's in the US, then if it's green and wiggles it's cash.
They have given up on floppies. Given that the Slackware 8.0 I have at home is on 2CDs and takes around 800Mb (probably a bit more) a quick calculation suggests 556 floppies for all that concentrated slackware goodness.
Not surprising they gave up really, 556 floppies would be a distribution nightmare. Imagine 555 un-numbered floppies arriving in the post. Which one is the 556th missing one?
"-atrowe: Card-carrying Mensa [mensa.org] member. I have no toleranse for stupidity. "
And I have no tolerance for bad spelling.
..track about 8000 fast moving objects in a 3D space.
Isn't this what a lot of commercial games do? Esepecially things like space combat games.
Nice try, but a googlewhack has to point to grammatic english text, not a list of words.
:) There would be no fun, otherwise..
It's not meant to be that easy
Given the recent modchip and regional liscencing case, this leaves Europe (SCEEurope's teritorry) as the only region you can't run Linux on the PS2.
So can Alan Cox be arrested for running Linux on his PS2 in the UK? Hmm. Also, you will note, Blokman Trading the guys who did the "privateer" Linux port to the Playstation have appeare to have dissapeared off the web. What happened to them?
Sony are in the same class as Microsoft: they seek to create a monopoly by proprietary lock - in, and regional liscencing, so this is the equivalent of MS Linux coming out.
Yet everyone celebrates...
If Linux is to have an original killer game it should be something that uses the strength of the community and the platform: some kind of peer to peer exploration / questing / hacking game with lots of procedurally generated content...
..just my 0.0175 euro cents.
"Games have no such luxury. They are the end product."
This is getting less and less true. For the PC anyhow. Games companies like to build communities around their games. Civ, The Sims, Quake, Doom, Unreal Tournament, etc. All have active modding communities that produce new skins, scripts, levels, characters, what have you. This is the games equivalent of "support". It's also the key to a long sales life so it's something that the publishers are keen to encourage.
However, because people like games and like showing off, this support is given away for free.
So, basically you have two options, that might be possible.
1> Open the souce, but close the art. If the players want to play beyond three levels they have to pay for the level files. This would probably be subverted by user - desgined levels.
2> Host the game on a server, keep your levels and content on the server and charge for play. Open the code. Again, this would be subverted by user run servers.
Sure, information should be free. Should fun be free? Well, I'm a professional game developer. I have to eat, so you can guess my views..