The best games have a small set of simple rules from which complex behavior emerges. I think the most classic example of this is Boulder Dash which in it's original form features only a handful different blocks yet the variation between the levels was astounding. I've always thought that the best way to create a game is to start with the basic laws of physics which may or may not be modelled after our universe, then add a few different entities with some clearly defined rules of behavior including the interaction with other entities.
The beauty of this is that the game becomes predictable of the player. He/she will not be frustrated by seemingly arbitrary rules, like in the old Sierra On-Line adventure games where standing on the wrong pixel would get you killed, but instead will understand the action and reaction that lead to the players demise and will learn to avoid it. You want the gamer to go "aah, of course!" instead of "what the fsck?!".
Also, since the game's complexity springs forth from the interactions between the rules rather than the rules themselves, you get what's called "emergent gaming", where the game mechanics appear between the lines through the complex interactions of those rules. This means that although the rules are simple and predictable, you have created a breeding ground for complex behavior goes beyond what the game designer himself may have envisioned.
It's a sad fact that games were more like this before the 3D-card revolution.
I understand why the industry want simpler games as they are trying to expand their customer base which today consist of mostly hard core gamers. Especially on the PC. There are plenty of examples of mainstream hits, but a hardcore gamer will often spend 10 times or more on games than a "causal gamer".
Since games are usually created by gamers who invariably create games that they would like to play themselves I remain confident that there will still be games I'll want to play in 10 years from now.
Simple, instantly playable games is the domain of handheld devices. Complex games fit better on the PC-platform. Consoles are somewhere in the middle. This is linked not only to how we use handhelds/consoles/PCs differently, but also to the technical limitations of the device.
A fistfull of in-engine FMVs does not a movie make. Anachronox is both well directed and a laugh, but you really need to play the game to appreciate it fully. There IS a lot of story there.
I certainly agree with you that the technology has a long way to go, but it's still interesting to follow its development. The first movies ever made were not much to brag about either.
The thing I like about Java is that it enforces best practices.
I agree whole-heartedly. One of my favorite things about Java is that it gives me the ability to write APIs which pretty much force you to use them correctly. Not just through hints in the documentation or naming convetions, but enforced through the language itself.
In C or C++ you have virtually no control over the ways a programmer can abuse or pervert your code.
Statistically it doesn't matter if the game is predetermined or not. The question is purely philosophical. You can be upset of the fact that the choices the machine presents you are merely for show, but the user experience is identical if the machine "played fair". A random number is random regardless of when it was selected and who selected it.
One slight difference though: A cheating machine may reach the desired payout radio faster (after fewer plays) than a 100% random machine. A random machine may have periods where the payout ratio drifts from the norm giving out more or less money than is statistically likely (Within what's statistically significant), but only in the short term. Eventually it evens out. A cheating machine can and probably does make sure that the payout ratio is fairly steady. In fact, in many countries, it is by law required to do so.
The onl people who may be upset by this are either not thinking straight or believe that there is something called luck beyond mere statistics and that this machine cheats you of it.
Anyone who puts money into a machine like this and expects not to be cheated is a fool, regardless.
Carmack have been saying that the full-featured entry level for Doom3 has been the GeForce3. You're placing the words of wanna-be experts in Carmack's mouth.
Also remember that the X-box version will most likely run Doom3 with lower-res textures, on a low tv-resolution, and might even have some bells and whistles removed altogether.
I always wonder what happens in the brains of fans that make them think that iD owes them anything. They don't. If Doom3 is as cool as the screenshots seem to indicate, it will be worth a few months wait. You might be disappointed at iDs decision, but feeling betrayed? That's just something in your head.
If both cards perform relatively the same but the nVidia card takes up an extra slot, my vote would go to ATi.
The fact that it takes two slots might annoy people, but in reality, on todays motherboards, with everything but the kitchen sink on them, there are usually far more slots than you need. Also, the first PCI slot is often unusable because it may share resources with the AGP port, and cause stability-problems.
There is no question about the fact that NVidia stumbled with the nv30 and that ATi still holds the performance crown for available hardware. I'm still going to wait for this card for the same reason as many others: My last three cards have been NVidia, and driver stability has been exemplary. ATi is getting better, but it aint there just yet.
The next batch of cards should make things even more exiting. ATi has yet to move to a 0.13 process and could gain a lot from that, and the design of nv30 compared to the nv35 suggest that NVidia has a lot more headroom for improving GPU and memory clockspeeds.
I'm impressed by Carmacks ability to target a spesific level of performance on the hardware that will be available at the time his next engine ships, but this time it seems like NVidia and ATi will exceed even his expectations, with Doom3 being playable even on 1600x1200 with the latest crop of cards, and we might even see the next generation of cards out before Doom3 ships.
Unless I'm mistanken, the earth has been slowing down as the moon is pulling further away. (Preservation of angular momentum),
I expect that the researchers have done their homework, and that this is a factor they've taken into account. No I haven't read the article, so sue me.:-)
You assume that the highest harmonics used to "sharpen" the sawtooth wave is indetecable to the human ear because the highest sine component cannot be heard alone, is unfounded and probably an oversimplification of how human hearing works.
Just because you CAN model sound as a sum of sine waves of different frequencies and amplitudes does not mean that this is what sound _is_. Nor does it mean that that is how human hearing works.
I would not be surprised if some people can hear the inadequacies of CD-audio, altough it probably requires a trained ear.
I'm sure it doesn't look as bad as 24fps on a monitor. Again, perhaps the only reason movies are watchable at all is that the bluriness at the frame transitions might make it easier for the brain to "add in" the extra information to interpolate
Actually, one of the reason why movies are so horribly jerky is that the actual refresh rate is 48fps, even though the frame rate is 24fps. Each frame is projected twice. The reason for this is to reduce flickering and to protect the film.(projector lights are HOT). Unfortunately, this double exposure messes up the brains visual prediction system, much in the same way a 30fps game on a 60Hz screen, only more so. Since there is a tangible delay between capturing an image in the optic nerve and feeding it to the brain, a lot of prediction is carried out to predict what things are going to look like when you receive the visual stimuli.
I agree that even a monitor at 48Hz would look worse than a movie theatre, but I expect this has something to do with the relatively low contrast movie screens have. A darker image takes longer to "see" than a bright one, not unlike how a photographer needs a longer exposure to take a picture in a dark environment.
Ever seen "3d-glasses" that have one dark glass and one perfectly transparent, instead of the normal red and blue/green? Those work on that principle, and the effect is best when the camera rotates clockwise around an object or pans across a landscape from right to left. If you reverse the direction, the 3D-effect is also reversed.
But i digress:
My point is that the human vision is incredibly advanced with a lot of special adaptations. There is no framerate of the eye. Fighter pilots have been shown to be able to not only see but also correctly identify a picture of a plane even when the image is displayed just in a 200Hz flash.
The ideal frame rate is the same rate as the monitor refresh, and to have a constant framerate. I'd much rather have 75fps at 75Hz than 80fps at 85Hz.
When I try it on a modern card with 24-bit colour, I see no bands if the monitor's gamma correction is properly adjusted.
If you have 1 color change per pixel in a gradient, no banding can be seen, but try to repeat a color once or try to fit a 24-bit gray gradient across 300 pixels, and you'll see bandling galore. (unless you dither, something which is not always practical to do)
Regarding the nyquist rate of CD-Audio:
How do you represent a 22kHz sawtooth wave? Answer: You can't. It's sine or nothing.
How can you accurately represent a 18kHz wave without harmonic distortions? Answer: You can't, because you get an interference/moire like pattern since 18kHz doesn't fit properly into 22kHz.
I agree that limits exist but your methods to find them are flawed. Most likely there are hard limits which are very high, and a more flexible limit which has to do with the experience and genetics of the listener/viewer.
Flood filling predates bucket fill quite a bit and is pretty descriptive of how the algorithm works.
This is back in the olden days where you could count the number of available colors on your hands,or if you were lucky, feet aswell.
A color was a color. To have a "tolerance" like you have on todays fancy shmancy bucket fills was pointless. Floodfill would expand a colored area until it hit a pixel of a different color than the one you started filling. If you had a black outline you wanted to fill and there was a hole in it, the color would spill out, filling the entire rest of the screen. i.e. "flood".
You say that transferring could work - but how is transferring different to a copy-and-delete? (I guess, again, it depends on whether one believes in some unique un-copyable property of physical particles).
I've always imagined that any teleportation device, at least any device I'd ever set my foot in, would work in one of two ways:
1: Quantum entanglement of some weird matter at both locations and transferring my entire quantum state between them.
2: The wormhole thing.
Both methods does not include storying or copying information and could conceivable preserve my... let's call it "selfness". At least the 2. method should be pretty safe as it's not really teleportation in the classical sense, but more of a spacetime shortcut.
I don't believe in a soul personally, but I accept the fact that the philosophy of it all is pretty hairy. It's a difficult paradox. I'm only the sum of my "components" so what's the part that cannot be reconstructed? Is my conciousness somehow linked to my the quantum states of the particles making up my brain, or perhaps conciousness itself is merely an illusion? It sure doesn't feel like it.
That probably means that your minimum frame-rate threshold is somewhere in between the two refresh rates.
Another factor is the amount of afterglow in the phosphors of your screen. Also note that your described experiment will only work on a CRT-type display.
This is incorrect. Educated people spoke danish. Norwegian wasn't there to begin with, and was also created, but in a much more conservative approach, keeping a lot of the danish simply norwegifying(!) some of the sounds.
But, I think among all countries, girls from scandinavian countries, and especially Sweeden, have a special place in most American white males' dreams. Yes, I am serious.
As drenched as most scandinavians are in American pop-culture, this phenomena has certainly not passed me by. However, I always thought it had something to do with the image of girls from "Sinful Sweeden" as being... well... not only easy on the eyes. nudge, nudge, say no more, etc.
My Karma is NOT "Excellent", damn it! I want a number score!
I'm just curious. As you may or may not know, the actory playing the T-X is norwegian.
Do scandinavian women appear as exotic to Americans? For a native norwegian I get a disturbing notion that the T-X is just about to tell the weather forecast or work in the state financial committee. Personally I think this makes her even more scary.
Slashdot Mirror
This is moronic at best! It's like firing a shotgun at Shakespeares works and expecting improvement.
I found the treatment of DVD-discs to be especially silly as the types of MPEG-2 corruption artefacts you are likely to get are pretty predictable.
The best games have a small set of simple rules from which complex behavior emerges. I think the most classic example of this is Boulder Dash which in it's original form features only a handful different blocks yet the variation between the levels was astounding. I've always thought that the best way to create a game is to start with the basic laws of physics which may or may not be modelled after our universe, then add a few different entities with some clearly defined rules of behavior including the interaction with other entities.
The beauty of this is that the game becomes predictable of the player. He/she will not be frustrated by seemingly arbitrary rules, like in the old Sierra On-Line adventure games where standing on the wrong pixel would get you killed, but instead will understand the action and reaction that lead to the players demise and will learn to avoid it. You want the gamer to go "aah, of course!" instead of "what the fsck?!".
Also, since the game's complexity springs forth from the interactions between the rules rather than the rules themselves, you get what's called "emergent gaming", where the game mechanics appear between the lines through the complex interactions of those rules. This means that although the rules are simple and predictable, you have created a breeding ground for complex behavior goes beyond what the game designer himself may have envisioned.
It's a sad fact that games were more like this before the 3D-card revolution.
I understand why the industry want simpler games as they are trying to expand their customer base which today consist of mostly hard core gamers. Especially on the PC. There are plenty of examples of mainstream hits, but a hardcore gamer will often spend 10 times or more on games than a "causal gamer".
Since games are usually created by gamers who invariably create games that they would like to play themselves I remain confident that there will still be games I'll want to play in 10 years from now.
Simple, instantly playable games is the domain of handheld devices. Complex games fit better on the PC-platform. Consoles are somewhere in the middle. This is linked not only to how we use handhelds/consoles/PCs differently, but also to the technical limitations of the device.
A fistfull of in-engine FMVs does not a movie make. Anachronox is both well directed and a laugh, but you really need to play the game to appreciate it fully. There IS a lot of story there.
I certainly agree with you that the technology has a long way to go, but it's still interesting to follow its development. The first movies ever
made were not much to brag about either.
I think you meant to type 'slower' instead of 'superior'.
It's been years since they were slower. Now Microsofts VM is left in the dust.
The thing I like about Java is that it enforces best practices.
I agree whole-heartedly. One of my favorite things about Java is that it gives me the ability to write APIs which pretty much force you to use them correctly. Not just through hints in the documentation or naming convetions, but enforced through the language itself.
In C or C++ you have virtually no control over the ways a programmer can abuse or pervert your code.
It's funny. Apple claims to get 275fps on a
P4 system, yet on this test, firingsquad get almost 370 also using a Radeon 9800 Pro.
I have no doubt however that you can get a "mediocre" result like 275 on a P4 3GHz if you configure it improperly.
Statistically it doesn't matter if the game is predetermined or not. The question is purely philosophical. You can be upset of the fact that the choices the machine presents you are merely for show, but the user experience is identical if the machine "played fair". A random number is random regardless of when it was selected and who selected it.
One slight difference though: A cheating machine may reach the desired payout radio faster (after fewer plays) than a 100% random machine. A random machine may have periods where the payout ratio drifts from the norm giving out more or less money than is statistically likely (Within what's statistically significant), but only in the short term. Eventually it evens out. A cheating machine can and probably does make sure that the payout ratio is fairly steady. In fact, in many countries, it is by law required to do so.
The onl people who may be upset by this are either not thinking straight or believe that there is something called luck beyond mere statistics and that this machine cheats you of it.
Anyone who puts money into a machine like this and expects not to be cheated is a fool, regardless.
If nVidia did cheat like this, it can only mean the 5900 DOES NOT BEAT the ATI card.
There have certainly been a number of other tests peformed which indicate similar performance differences between 5900 and the latest card from ATi.
It doesn't seem likely or feasible that NVidia would fix the drivers to anticipate all the different games used for benchmarking.
Carmack have been saying that the full-featured entry level for Doom3 has been the GeForce3. You're placing the words of wanna-be experts in Carmack's mouth.
Also remember that the X-box version will most likely run Doom3 with lower-res textures, on a low tv-resolution, and might even have some bells and whistles removed altogether.
I always wonder what happens in the brains of fans that make them think that iD owes them anything. They don't. If Doom3 is as cool as the screenshots seem to indicate, it will be worth a few months wait. You might be disappointed at iDs decision, but feeling betrayed? That's just something in your head.
If both cards perform relatively the same but the nVidia card takes up an extra slot, my vote would go to ATi.
The fact that it takes two slots might annoy people, but in reality, on todays motherboards, with everything but the kitchen sink on them, there are usually far more slots than you need. Also, the first PCI slot is often unusable because it may share resources with the AGP port, and cause stability-problems.
There is no question about the fact that NVidia stumbled with the nv30 and that ATi still holds the performance crown for available hardware. I'm still going to wait for this card for the same reason as many others: My last three cards have been NVidia, and driver stability has been exemplary. ATi is getting better, but it aint there just yet.
The next batch of cards should make things even more exiting. ATi has yet to move to a 0.13 process and could gain a lot from that, and the design of nv30 compared to the nv35 suggest that NVidia has a lot more headroom for improving GPU and memory clockspeeds.
I'm impressed by Carmacks ability to target a spesific level of performance on the hardware that will be available at the time his next engine ships, but this time it seems like NVidia and ATi will exceed even his expectations, with Doom3 being playable even on 1600x1200 with the latest crop of cards, and we might even see the next generation of cards out before Doom3 ships.
Unless I'm mistanken, the earth has been slowing down as the moon is pulling further away. (Preservation of angular momentum),
:-)
I expect that the researchers have done their homework, and that this is a factor they've taken into account. No I haven't read the article, so
sue me.
You assume that the highest harmonics used to
"sharpen" the sawtooth wave is indetecable to
the human ear because the highest sine component
cannot be heard alone, is unfounded and probably
an oversimplification of how human hearing works.
Just because you CAN model sound as a sum of sine
waves of different frequencies and amplitudes does
not mean that this is what sound _is_. Nor does it
mean that that is how human hearing works.
I would not be surprised if some people can hear the inadequacies of CD-audio, altough it probably requires a trained ear.
I'm sure it doesn't look as bad as 24fps on a monitor. Again, perhaps the only reason movies are watchable at all is that the bluriness at the frame transitions might make it easier for the brain to "add in" the extra information to interpolate
Actually, one of the reason why movies are so horribly jerky is that the actual refresh rate is 48fps, even though the frame rate is 24fps. Each frame is projected twice. The reason for this is to reduce flickering and to protect the film.(projector lights are HOT). Unfortunately, this double exposure messes up the brains visual prediction system, much in the same way a 30fps game on a 60Hz screen, only more so. Since there is a tangible delay between capturing an image in the optic nerve and feeding it to the brain, a lot of prediction is carried out to predict what things are going to look like when you receive the visual stimuli.
I agree that even a monitor at 48Hz would look worse than a movie theatre, but I expect this has something to do with the relatively low contrast movie screens have. A darker image takes longer to "see" than a bright one, not unlike how a photographer needs a longer exposure to take a picture in a dark environment.
Ever seen "3d-glasses" that have one dark glass and one perfectly transparent, instead of the normal red and blue/green? Those work on that principle, and the effect is best when the camera rotates clockwise around an object or pans across a landscape from right to left. If you reverse the direction, the 3D-effect is also reversed.
But i digress:
My point is that the human vision is incredibly advanced with a lot of special adaptations. There is no framerate of the eye. Fighter pilots have been shown to be able to not only see but also correctly identify a picture of a plane even when the image is displayed just in a 200Hz flash.
The ideal frame rate is the same rate as the monitor refresh, and to have a constant framerate. I'd much rather have 75fps at 75Hz than 80fps at 85Hz.
When I try it on a modern card with 24-bit colour, I see no bands if the monitor's gamma correction is properly adjusted.
/moire like pattern since 18kHz doesn't fit properly into 22kHz.
If you have 1 color change per pixel in a gradient, no banding can be seen, but try to repeat a color once or try to fit a 24-bit gray gradient across 300 pixels, and you'll see bandling galore. (unless you dither, something which is not always practical to do)
Regarding the nyquist rate of CD-Audio:
How do you represent a 22kHz sawtooth wave?
Answer: You can't. It's sine or nothing.
How can you accurately represent a 18kHz wave
without harmonic distortions?
Answer: You can't, because you get an interference
I agree that limits exist but your methods to
find them are flawed. Most likely there are hard
limits which are very high, and a more flexible limit which has to do with the experience and genetics of the listener/viewer.
Flood filling predates bucket fill quite a bit and is pretty descriptive of how the algorithm works.
This is back in the olden days where you could count the number of available colors on your hands,or if you were lucky, feet aswell.
A color was a color. To have a "tolerance" like you have on todays fancy shmancy bucket fills was pointless. Floodfill would expand a colored area until it hit a pixel of a different color than the one you started filling. If you had a black outline you wanted to fill and there was a hole in it, the color would spill out, filling the entire rest of the screen. i.e. "flood".
Why not use when you mean ?
u is such a poor excuse for a .
You say that transferring could work - but how is transferring different to a copy-and-delete? (I guess, again, it depends on whether one believes in some unique un-copyable property of physical particles).
I've always imagined that any teleportation device, at least any device I'd ever set my foot in, would work in one of two ways:
1: Quantum entanglement of some weird matter at both locations and transferring my entire quantum state between them.
2: The wormhole thing.
Both methods does not include storying or copying information and could conceivable preserve my... let's call it "selfness". At least the 2. method should be pretty safe as it's not really teleportation in the classical sense, but more of a spacetime shortcut.
I don't believe in a soul personally, but I accept the fact that the philosophy of it all is pretty hairy. It's a difficult paradox. I'm only the sum of my "components" so what's the part that cannot be reconstructed? Is my conciousness somehow linked to my the quantum states of the particles making up my brain, or perhaps conciousness itself is merely an illusion?
It sure doesn't feel like it.
That probably means that your minimum frame-rate threshold is somewhere in between the two refresh rates.
Another factor is the amount of afterglow in the phosphors of your screen. Also note that your described experiment will only work on a CRT-type display.
Actually the eye sees red green blue dispersed in fine cones (or is that rods?), and the rest is handled by the wetware.
This is incorrect. Educated people spoke danish. Norwegian wasn't there to begin with, and was also
created, but in a much more conservative approach, keeping a lot of the danish simply norwegifying(!) some of the sounds.
- But, I think among all countries, girls from scandinavian countries, and especially Sweeden, have a special place in most American white males' dreams. Yes, I am serious.
As drenched as most scandinavians are in American pop-culture, this phenomena has certainly not passed me by. However, I always thought it had something to do with the image of girls from "Sinful Sweeden" as being... well... not only easy on the eyes. nudge, nudge, say no more, etc.- My Karma is NOT "Excellent", damn it! I want a number score!
I hear you.John Connor is rescued by Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future.
I'm just curious.
As you may or may not know, the actory playing the T-X is norwegian.
Do scandinavian women appear as exotic to Americans? For a native norwegian I get a disturbing notion that the T-X is just about to tell the weather forecast or work in the state financial committee. Personally I think this makes her even more scary.
If he does, then I hope they lock him away for good.
Just FYI, we do not have the death penalty in Norway.