Thanks for all the positive feedback, all. I'll get the code out there as soon as I can (just want to add a few more features).
WRT Java: I'm a big Java fan, and I certainly acknowledge everything that Java has accomplished. In fact, before I worked for Macromedia and then Adobe, I was a Java developer for 4 years. To my knowledge, however, it's not possible to write Java applications for all the devices that I demoed (and more coming). I'm certainly not trying to take anything away from Java -- just showing what's possible right now with the Flash Platform.
Christian
Sounds like someone is starting to back-pedal. Really the only thing is that java doesn't run - a non-technical roadblock - on the iFashion devices, so i would say it's far more than 'close' in terms of cross-platform features, in fact if apple disallow AIR on the iFashionables then it'll end up on-par...at best (64bit linux is worse than java).
and Microsoft was the first not to fail epically a computer-to-console market expansion).
I dislike the Xbox360 (and the PS3)* but it's hardly a failure. The Xbox division at MS is currently running in the black, which is more then can be said for the PlayStation 3. Microsoft has the second largest console install base..
and Microsoft was the first not to fail epically a computer-to-console market expansion).
how is this news at all? If the free software advocates are to be believed then there should be no issue here whatsoever, if songbird has a user-base then it will survive, well that's the idea anyway. Let's see how right they are.
And what about the failure rate? Is putting out products that fail half the time harming their brand? That's a reasonable expectation.
Well cheap, high-performance hardware with a low pricetag and good warranty service generally eclipses that, as the market has shown. And a survey of 5000 gaming mag subscribers is hardly representative of the wider population.
If Boeing planes failed to stay airborne, or Toyota cars failed to operate safely less than 99.99% of the time, we'd have a serious issue with that. Somehow though Microsoft is getting away with quality control that nets 0.5 9's. How is that even possible?
Do i really have to be captain obvious and point out that there are safety concerns with the first two - not to mention mandated standards that must be met - whereas the xbox is just a basic consumer electronics device. It seems most people would rather pay a rock-bottom price and then just swap it over if something goes wrong.
Now for somethings like the iphone they have taken a much more agressive lockdown. I rationalize that by thinking about what they are protecting. You don't want crazy shit happening on a cell phone. so you make it hard to install anything not vetted by the mothership. Even the android market has this vetting.
That would be all well and good if it actually worked like that, but it isn't just vetting of apps for things like malware, apple decides - somewhat arbitrarily - whether an application can be made available on their platform, they employ anti-competitive practices (though not illegal given the absence of a monopoly) and have conflicting and contradictory policies with regard to their vetting process. Now this is not the sort of company you want in charge of 'protecting' your platform when that protection is simply defined by what you can and cannot do.
well strictly speaking if they collide when you move them back they cannot be moved back, or they must be broken or unified since 2 objects cannot occupy the same space.
you cannot have 2 2D linked rings they are either one object or 2 open shapes, consider if you draw them in 2 different colours, what happens at the intersection point?You either have to stop, or you have to go over the top of the other line. If the 2 lines were the same material (same colour) then you could say it is one continuous line and hences one closed shape, or a union, where one shape forgoes the material at the intersection and simply joins the other shape. If you have an image of 2 linked rings you cannot manipulate them individually, if you can then there is an extra dimension involved or the shapes are not closed, and therefore not rings.
Well that still does not address how you go about doing it without a collision.
Take two rings (2D). Raise one in the third dimension. Flip it 90 degrees. Can you link them without having to break one of the rings? No.
Flipping a 2D ring 90degrees (i.e. rotating it around the x or y axis) means it ceases to be a ring, it becomes a line. Otherwise you are creating a 3D object out of a 2D object and would need to give it a thickness value (a Z value), then you are in 3 dimensions and hence you would need to move it into 4D space to link the 2 rings.
Remember you are viewing everything in 3D space, say the coordinate system of [x,y,z,0], so then you move the object into the 3D space of [x,y,z,1] and you can move it around without it colliding with anything in the [x,y,z,0] space.
I'm no fan of loss leaders myself, as I think they are a subversive way to get more profit for a particular product line.
Im of 2 minds on it, as you say it is a way to get more profit from a product line by making your profit throughout the product lifecycle as opposed to just on the initial sale and it also gives them a reason to oppose the second hand game market, but it also helps to make the platform more accessible. I'd say a lot less people would be willing to pay for the console if it were say $2000 (cost + markup to cover R&D + profit mark up) with the knowledge that the investment evens out after you have bought x-amount of cheaper games.
Plus I don't even trust geohot to come up with a halfway decent solution. So far he's just stumbled through a hard to reproduce, glitchy, relatively useless hack.
Even then it's just a common fault attack, sure this compromises the hypervisor but it certainly doesn't mean we can now customize GameOS or anything like that, the PS3 has a number of other security layers that would have to be bypassed.
That's the same flawed thinking that brings us DRM that punishes the many legitimate customers to attempt to inconvenience the fewer dishonest ones.
It's not the same at all! You really can't make an informed decision based on reviews, previews, trailers, etc...? What DVDs are there that you've bought then watched 20mins of an decided to return?
I just will not buy hardware I am not allowed to own.
You do own the hardware, you do not own the software (you license it) and you don't own PSN (it's a service governed by a TOS agreement, i'd presume somewhere mandating that you use the licensed software only).
Same as with food, if you eat your meal then complain that you didn't like it, even if there was nothing wrong with it, you aren't entitled to a refund, that is at the discretion of the seller/resturant/etc...
Any actual unbiased reviews to back that up? I would have been impressed if they used the same battery capacity and the droid was better. It does have a bigger battery, so I would expect it to have a bigger capacity.
As someone that owns a higher resolution multi-tasking phone that supports Flash (and has a better battery life than my colleagues' iPhones) I'm highly amused by your dismissal of such features.
I agree that it should have flash...i mean it really is a defacto standard, like it or not. But i also see GPs point about flash not working on touchscreen phones, though only with regard to functionality that uses 'mouseover' events...other than that i don't see any issue with it.
The amount of different organizations buying ps3 for research is staggering. So don't think this won't effect their bottom line. US Army buys them in bulk lots of 1000-2000 at a time.
And how many games - you know the place where the console maker makes money - are they buying? I don't know how much they are losing now (if any) but on the phat PS3s (the ones that support linux) sony were losing a significant amount on each console sold. So all these research firms using the PS3 cost Sony a shitload of money.
If I buy a DVD/Blueray PLAYER and don't like it, I can return it.
Of course, but these entertainment products are viewed as 'consumables'. Just like any consumables the return policy is based on - and should be based on - whether the product is objectively satisfactory.
You don't get to return stuff because you don't like it. That's a courtesy offered by retailers, not a right. The do it because they want you to come back.
And it's not offered for games because of publisher strong-arming.
So, back to the original question...?
How many retailers allow you to return DVD and Bluray movies just because you didn't like them?
"Mobile phones don't scale up to same performance as consoles or PC."
Compared to what and when, eh? Most smartphones have more power GPU and CPU wise than a Dreamcast.
And who the fuck is writing games for dreamcast nowadays? He's saying current console/PC and current smartphone...how is that not obvious? If you're writing a game now, you wont have the same rendering engine scalable from an iphone/nexus one to the latest SLi/Crossfire gaming desktop.
And I guess you never heard of "Source" this wonderful auto-scaling engine whereupon I can use a crappy 32MB video card to run HL2 just fine.
The closest you could get is to write OpenGL wrapper for Direct3D, but it's much easier to simply have multiple rendering backends for your engine - which is most likely what Darkest of Days does.
That's precisely what they did, they re-wrote the rendering code and have a D3D backend for the 360 version.
Should you choose to write a game engine that doesn't use MS's crap, you're free to do so.
No you are not!
Sure you'll probably have to jump through some hoops to get it to work but all the functions and calls are still in the hardware.
But not the drivers.
For example, Darkest of Days uses 8MonkeyLabs own proprietary Marmoset Engine, which in turn uses OpenGL, Physx, SpeedTree and OpenAL.
FFS don't just misquote when you have no freakin idea what you are talking about, maybe actually RTFA that is linked from the page you are quoting from. No Darkest of Days did NOT use OpenGL in the 360 version, which you would know if you had bothered to read the actual article YOU quoted from!
There are three major combinations of PC hardware: x86 CPU and NVIDIA GPU, x86 CPU and ATI GPU, and x86 CPU and Intel "Graphics My Ass" which is left out of the loop alongside Wii.
And how many different nV, ATi and Intel GPUs are there out there, with different clockspeeds, different amounts of memory, shader processors, shader capabilities, etc... Not to mention different system configurations of different speed CPUs, memory configurations, operating system, drivers, etc...
So not only do you have to make sure your software is compatible with as many of those configurations as possible but you have to make it hugely customizable so people can have a decent looking, decent performing experience on their system. It's FAR FAR easier and cheaper to develop for consoles where you know everyone has the exact same configuration, same hardware, same capabilities, same operating system, same drivers.
That said i think the main concern for the health of the PC gaming industry is piracy, corporations (hey come on, we know this industry is not run by game developers) will not invest heavily in PC gaming until piracy becomes a non-issue, until then PCs will likely just get a simple port of any cross-platform titles.
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Thanks for all the positive feedback, all. I'll get the code out there as soon as I can (just want to add a few more features).
WRT Java: I'm a big Java fan, and I certainly acknowledge everything that Java has accomplished. In fact, before I worked for Macromedia and then Adobe, I was a Java developer for 4 years. To my knowledge, however, it's not possible to write Java applications for all the devices that I demoed (and more coming). I'm certainly not trying to take anything away from Java -- just showing what's possible right now with the Flash Platform.
Christian
Sounds like someone is starting to back-pedal. Really the only thing is that java doesn't run - a non-technical roadblock - on the iFashion devices, so i would say it's far more than 'close' in terms of cross-platform features, in fact if apple disallow AIR on the iFashionables then it'll end up on-par...at best (64bit linux is worse than java).
I dislike the Xbox360 (and the PS3)* but it's hardly a failure. The Xbox division at MS is currently running in the black, which is more then can be said for the PlayStation 3. Microsoft has the second largest console install base..
and Microsoft was the first not to fail epically a computer-to-console market expansion).
how is this news at all? If the free software advocates are to be believed then there should be no issue here whatsoever, if songbird has a user-base then it will survive, well that's the idea anyway. Let's see how right they are.
And what about the failure rate? Is putting out products that fail half the time harming their brand? That's a reasonable expectation.
Well cheap, high-performance hardware with a low pricetag and good warranty service generally eclipses that, as the market has shown. And a survey of 5000 gaming mag subscribers is hardly representative of the wider population.
If Boeing planes failed to stay airborne, or Toyota cars failed to operate safely less than 99.99% of the time, we'd have a serious issue with that. Somehow though Microsoft is getting away with quality control that nets 0.5 9's. How is that even possible?
Do i really have to be captain obvious and point out that there are safety concerns with the first two - not to mention mandated standards that must be met - whereas the xbox is just a basic consumer electronics device. It seems most people would rather pay a rock-bottom price and then just swap it over if something goes wrong.
Now for somethings like the iphone they have taken a much more agressive lockdown. I rationalize that by thinking about what they are protecting. You don't want crazy shit happening on a cell phone. so you make it hard to install anything not vetted by the mothership. Even the android market has this vetting.
That would be all well and good if it actually worked like that, but it isn't just vetting of apps for things like malware, apple decides - somewhat arbitrarily - whether an application can be made available on their platform, they employ anti-competitive practices (though not illegal given the absence of a monopoly) and have conflicting and contradictory policies with regard to their vetting process. Now this is not the sort of company you want in charge of 'protecting' your platform when that protection is simply defined by what you can and cannot do.
well strictly speaking if they collide when you move them back they cannot be moved back, or they must be broken or unified since 2 objects cannot occupy the same space.
you cannot have 2 2D linked rings they are either one object or 2 open shapes, consider if you draw them in 2 different colours, what happens at the intersection point?You either have to stop, or you have to go over the top of the other line. If the 2 lines were the same material (same colour) then you could say it is one continuous line and hences one closed shape, or a union, where one shape forgoes the material at the intersection and simply joins the other shape. If you have an image of 2 linked rings you cannot manipulate them individually, if you can then there is an extra dimension involved or the shapes are not closed, and therefore not rings.
Well that still does not address how you go about doing it without a collision.
Take two rings (2D). Raise one in the third dimension. Flip it 90 degrees. Can you link them without having to break one of the rings? No.
Flipping a 2D ring 90degrees (i.e. rotating it around the x or y axis) means it ceases to be a ring, it becomes a line. Otherwise you are creating a 3D object out of a 2D object and would need to give it a thickness value (a Z value), then you are in 3 dimensions and hence you would need to move it into 4D space to link the 2 rings.
Remember you are viewing everything in 3D space, say the coordinate system of [x,y,z,0], so then you move the object into the 3D space of [x,y,z,1] and you can move it around without it colliding with anything in the [x,y,z,0] space.
I'm no fan of loss leaders myself, as I think they are a subversive way to get more profit for a particular product line.
Im of 2 minds on it, as you say it is a way to get more profit from a product line by making your profit throughout the product lifecycle as opposed to just on the initial sale and it also gives them a reason to oppose the second hand game market, but it also helps to make the platform more accessible. I'd say a lot less people would be willing to pay for the console if it were say $2000 (cost + markup to cover R&D + profit mark up) with the knowledge that the investment evens out after you have bought x-amount of cheaper games.
Plus I don't even trust geohot to come up with a halfway decent solution. So far he's just stumbled through a hard to reproduce, glitchy, relatively useless hack.
Even then it's just a common fault attack, sure this compromises the hypervisor but it certainly doesn't mean we can now customize GameOS or anything like that, the PS3 has a number of other security layers that would have to be bypassed.
That's the same flawed thinking that brings us DRM that punishes the many legitimate customers to attempt to inconvenience the fewer dishonest ones.
It's not the same at all! You really can't make an informed decision based on reviews, previews, trailers, etc...? What DVDs are there that you've bought then watched 20mins of an decided to return?
I just will not buy hardware I am not allowed to own.
You do own the hardware, you do not own the software (you license it) and you don't own PSN (it's a service governed by a TOS agreement, i'd presume somewhere mandating that you use the licensed software only).
Consumable in that you've already watched it.
Same as with food, if you eat your meal then complain that you didn't like it, even if there was nothing wrong with it, you aren't entitled to a refund, that is at the discretion of the seller/resturant/etc...
[citation needed]
Any actual unbiased reviews to back that up? I would have been impressed if they used the same battery capacity and the droid was better. It does have a bigger battery, so I would expect it to have a bigger capacity.
http://www.engadget.com/2009/10/30/motorola-droid-review/
Forgive me for not seeing any place that he mentioned the Motorola Droid, are you seeing something im not?
I would suspect it is also likely to be the N900...which IMO is freakin awesome phone, probably going to be my next choice.
As someone that owns a higher resolution multi-tasking phone that supports Flash (and has a better battery life than my colleagues' iPhones) I'm highly amused by your dismissal of such features.
I agree that it should have flash...i mean it really is a defacto standard, like it or not. But i also see GPs point about flash not working on touchscreen phones, though only with regard to functionality that uses 'mouseover' events...other than that i don't see any issue with it.
The amount of different organizations buying ps3 for research is staggering. So don't think this won't effect their bottom line. US Army buys them in bulk lots of 1000-2000 at a time.
And how many games - you know the place where the console maker makes money - are they buying? I don't know how much they are losing now (if any) but on the phat PS3s (the ones that support linux) sony were losing a significant amount on each console sold. So all these research firms using the PS3 cost Sony a shitload of money.
Supporting it, on the other hand, did cost significant cash.
How so? What ongoing support is there?
Sony made the PS3 popular, in part by dropping the "Other OS" crap on the floor and concentrating on getting games out the door.
How could that have anything to do with PS3 popularity? They haven't even done it yet!!!
this isn't about elan micro's lawsuit, it's about them filing a complaint with the ITC, which only just happened.
They are in the same boat as software.
If I buy a DVD/Blueray PLAYER and don't like it, I can return it.
Of course, but these entertainment products are viewed as 'consumables'. Just like any consumables the return policy is based on - and should be based on - whether the product is objectively satisfactory.
You don't get to return stuff because you don't like it. That's a courtesy offered by retailers, not a right. The do it because they want you to come back.
And it's not offered for games because of publisher strong-arming.
So, back to the original question...?
How many retailers allow you to return DVD and Bluray movies just because you didn't like them?
"Mobile phones don't scale up to same performance as consoles or PC."
Compared to what and when, eh? Most smartphones have more power GPU and CPU wise than a Dreamcast.
And who the fuck is writing games for dreamcast nowadays? He's saying current console/PC and current smartphone...how is that not obvious? If you're writing a game now, you wont have the same rendering engine scalable from an iphone/nexus one to the latest SLi/Crossfire gaming desktop.
And I guess you never heard of "Source" this wonderful auto-scaling engine whereupon I can use a crappy 32MB video card to run HL2 just fine.
And it's running on how many smartphones?
for the love of god moderate this post up!!!
The closest you could get is to write OpenGL wrapper for Direct3D, but it's much easier to simply have multiple rendering backends for your engine - which is most likely what Darkest of Days does.
That's precisely what they did, they re-wrote the rendering code and have a D3D backend for the 360 version.
Should you choose to write a game engine that doesn't use MS's crap, you're free to do so.
No you are not!
Sure you'll probably have to jump through some hoops to get it to work but all the functions and calls are still in the hardware.
But not the drivers.
For example, Darkest of Days uses 8MonkeyLabs own proprietary Marmoset Engine, which in turn uses OpenGL, Physx, SpeedTree and OpenAL.
FFS don't just misquote when you have no freakin idea what you are talking about, maybe actually RTFA that is linked from the page you are quoting from. No Darkest of Days did NOT use OpenGL in the 360 version, which you would know if you had bothered to read the actual article YOU quoted from!
The rendering code had to be almost completely rewritten, creating a second Direct3D renderer in addition to the OpenGL-based PC version.
There are three major combinations of PC hardware: x86 CPU and NVIDIA GPU, x86 CPU and ATI GPU, and x86 CPU and Intel "Graphics My Ass" which is left out of the loop alongside Wii.
And how many different nV, ATi and Intel GPUs are there out there, with different clockspeeds, different amounts of memory, shader processors, shader capabilities, etc... Not to mention different system configurations of different speed CPUs, memory configurations, operating system, drivers, etc...
So not only do you have to make sure your software is compatible with as many of those configurations as possible but you have to make it hugely customizable so people can have a decent looking, decent performing experience on their system. It's FAR FAR easier and cheaper to develop for consoles where you know everyone has the exact same configuration, same hardware, same capabilities, same operating system, same drivers.
That said i think the main concern for the health of the PC gaming industry is piracy, corporations (hey come on, we know this industry is not run by game developers) will not invest heavily in PC gaming until piracy becomes a non-issue, until then PCs will likely just get a simple port of any cross-platform titles.