Absolutely. Looks like everyone's got bogged down in details about perception and the biology of the eye, and overlooked some of the more mundane points.
The problem can lie in the collision detection working with sampled points along the player's trajectory during a jump, checking for collisions between those points. The lower the frame rate, the coarser the path, and the less accurate the collision response. Some games have limits after which they'll subdivide the path, giving a better approximation, but still an approximation. Higher and higher frame rates give even better approximations, so you're more likely to get a sample point at the peak of your jump, allowing you to successfully land on that ledge that is almost, but not entirely, out of reach.
I guess the complete separation of game physics and rendering would help put everyone on a level playing field, so to speak.
You seem to imply that a Conservative government would prevent this online archive from becoming a reality.
The article you linked to included the quote from John Whittingdale MP, saying "If the BBC's digital services are replicating what is already available commercially, then I don't see that as something which the taxpayer or licence-fee payer should be financing."
However, the online archive would push BBCi above and beyond the services offered by other sites and would justify it's continuing funding through tv licences. This should be clear to any government, Conservative, Labour or otherwise. At the moment, while the BBC web site is good, it offers nothing important I can't find elsewhere.
Your billing information is not stocked on our servers. Everything related to your money is handled by a billing partner specialised in online transactions. Your billing information is totally safe and isolated from the platform targeted by the recent attacks.
'tis true.. I've watched my favourite brand change over the years:
protector
3d protector
3d protector diamond
3d protector diamond XL smooth turbo x3
3d triple protector diamond alpha XL super-smooth turbo chin slicer maxxx
or something to that effect. The number of blades in the pack has decreased, the price on the pack has increased, and the time I go between changing blades has now also increased because I refuse to pay the extra cash to keep my fizzog fuzz free.
"Jenkins, install a small camera atop of everyone's monitor, so I can make sure the code monkeys aren't sleeping on the job. Oh, and call it something innocuous, like a video-intercom system."
Perhaps the console manufacturers should look to the mobile phone industry for some pointers here. It shouldn't be too hard to add a phone style keypad to a joypad, and the appropriate software to allow SMS style text input, should it? Considering the popularity of text messaging, particularly in Europe, it would provide an interface familiar to millions, without the need force people to have a keyboard sat on their lap in their living room.
Yep, I'm tempted to call "hogwash" on this one. I've searched for the fabled female games programmer for many, many years, just like some search for the Loch Ness Monster, Big Foot or the Beast of Bodmin. The closest I ever got was the great blonde-Swede-booked-for-interview incident of '01. She never turned up, so I can't confirm if she was blonde, Swedish or even female, although none of these are subject to rigorous testing during interviews.
Still, I guess it's some consolation to my wife that when I say I'm working late, she can be sure I'm actually working.
Agreed, but the problem doesn't necessarily lie in the QC process, the whole development process needs looking at.
Compare with 1993. As others have pointed out, the hardware and software complexities have increased massively over the past ten years. Processer speed, graphics rendering abilities, memory and storage media sizes, and - more importantly - games players expectations are all much, much higher.
Development team size have gone from 1 programmer and 1 artist to teams of 30 or 40+. Here's where the problem is. There's been a fairly quick shift in game development from being a single coder hacking job, to a large team software project. These projects need far more planning, design and control, especially if they are to be completed in a development time that has only perhaps doubled. It's this move from a back-bedroom programming to full-on commercial software engineering that's caught a lot of development companies off guard. Many have failed to adjust the development process accordingly, resulting in insufficient design and planning, leading to buggy software and game design flaws, which in turn forces rewrites, causing slipped release dates and 12+ hour working days and so on.
Fixing the development process won't magic away all bugs and problems, but it will help. Unfortunately, many of those former back-bedroom programmers and artists are now in management positions and don't or won't consider that bashing out code from 9am on day 1 of a new project isn't the best approach...
The games industry should be examining the processes involved in non-games software development. There are lessons to be learned, and they need to be learned soon.
I'm still using Eyeballs v1.0, analogue encoding devices acquired in the early 1970's. While they're not quite as good as new, they do tell me that images from DVD are considerably better than images from VHS. Maybe there's out-of-band data that Eyeballs v1.0 are filtering out, or frequencies that are being processed incorrectly?
Is there a newer version available? Is there a upgrade discount for established Eyeballs v1.0 users?
So I've been moving house and working over to meet deadlines, but it was just this past weekend that I decided to head off to the cinema to see the new Matrix film. Thing is, it's gone. None of the local cinemas are showing it any more. It was a choice of driving 40 miles south to a cinema that had a single showing at 7:05pm saturday, or 90 miles north for a cinema that was still running the film albeit in a broom cupboard or something.
Someone, somewhere has decided that it would be better all round to take the matrix off and show Daddy Day Care instead.
So, um, yeah, that DVD release couldn't come too soon...
The UK Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) are due to relocate to a shiny new building nicknamed "the doughnut", later this year. It's up the street from the house I'm renting at the mo. I remember a few months ago, reading an article either in the local newspaper or a brochure that came round explaining about the new building. One thing it mentioned was a large hall constructed to house the most powerful super computer outside of the US. Now, that kind of infers that the most powerful computer in the world is in the US, which the top 500 article disagrees with. Or maybe the list doesn't include some classified ones. Or, as the GCHQ claim was future tense, maybe they're expecting things to change soon. Whichever, I'm putting aside my roll of cat5 and ceasing work on the tunnel until I know what's what.
Hmm.. well I know some compsci's that passed through York during the few years after I left got through their degree without touching Ada. Maybe it was made optional, or has been re-introduced since.
I didn't know about the radio broadcasts. Fighting dodgy cassettes was hard work at the best of times; attempting to load data recorded off a radio broadcast seems like a whole new world of hurt.
Didn't they used to broadcast software through the tv teletext service?
I studied for my CS degree at the University of York in the early 90's, who - at the time - were really pushing Z and Ada as the stuff of the future. One thing that stood out from the formal specification course, at least in my mind, was the example Z specification for a function to swap the values of two variables. Basically:
swap(a,b): tmp = a a = b b = tmp
The pseudocode is simple enough, but the Z spec took up a whole page. This put people off - if the smallest function in a minor subsystem of an application takes a whole page and much head-scratching to figure out, how long will the rest of the software take? Surely it's so time consuming as to be infeasible for real world use. Hardly any on the course really "got it", and I was one of the many who didn't. A friend of mine went on to use Z in his final year project, and at some point *ting* - he got it and found that it was good. I've never seen or heard of Z being used anywhere since, but some day I want to have another look at my notes and text books to see if it makes any more sense yet, and if so, whether it can help my work.
I don't know if they still advocate Z, but they started teaching Eiffel instead of Ada the year after I left..
Re:3G is a pathetic disappointment...
on
Is 3G Irrelevant?
·
· Score: 1
I totally agree.. they've got this wonderful technology and not the slightest idea of what to actually do with it. I guess they're still looking for that elusive killer-app that's going to make us all sit up and think "ahhh, so that's why I need a 3G phone!"
Three's current advertising campaign of "get comedy clips sent to your phone" is about as weak as it can get. However, I did have to laugh of the example comedy clip shown of the two guys comparing each other's high tech wrist watches, packed with impressive but useless features - it's a great way to promote these high tech phones, packed with impressive but use.. ah, you know.
Yep, but I think it's the £18 limit that Play use to their advantage. If you ordered several DVDs, they'd be packaged and mailed individually, so each was below the £18 tax/duty threshold. At least, this is what they used to do - it's a while since I shopped there.
I think I can safely say that ARM has shipped approximately 0 processors. They have, however, licenced their technology to a whole range of semiconductor manufacturers, including Intel, who do all the mucking about with silicon and god-knows-what.
Ok, I'm being a little pedantic.. I'd be interested to know how many ARM processors had been produced by all these manufacturers - must be quite a few!
Rather than problems with the technology, I think Sega shot themselves in the foot trying to stay ahead of the competition with too many incremental changes - Mega drive, Mega CD, 32X, Neptune, before getting to Saturn. Joe Consumer wants to spend his cash on a console that's going to be around for a few years. If it's likely that the current machine is going to be replaced by a new model at the end of the year, it might be best to wait for that one. Or buy a PlayStation or Nintendo, which is pretty much what happened.
It's a shame, really, because the Dreamcast is a good console and deserved to do a lot better than it did, but Sega had already lost it's foothold in the hardware market.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm worried... what does a UNIX administrator do to kindergartners?
Absolutely. Looks like everyone's got bogged down in details about perception and the biology of the eye, and overlooked some of the more mundane points.
The games development algorithms mailing list has recently covered this topic in some depth. (Apologies, the archives don't seem to be working properly at the moment.)
The problem can lie in the collision detection working with sampled points along the player's trajectory during a jump, checking for collisions between those points. The lower the frame rate, the coarser the path, and the less accurate the collision response. Some games have limits after which they'll subdivide the path, giving a better approximation, but still an approximation. Higher and higher frame rates give even better approximations, so you're more likely to get a sample point at the peak of your jump, allowing you to successfully land on that ledge that is almost, but not entirely, out of reach.
I guess the complete separation of game physics and rendering would help put everyone on a level playing field, so to speak.
4. Unleash new and more potent viruses at regular intervals;
Finally, the plan is complete..!
You seem to imply that a Conservative government would prevent this online archive from becoming a reality.
The article you linked to included the quote from John Whittingdale MP, saying "If the BBC's digital services are replicating what is already available commercially, then I don't see that as something which the taxpayer or licence-fee payer should be financing."
However, the online archive would push BBCi above and beyond the services offered by other sites and would justify it's continuing funding through tv licences. This should be clear to any government, Conservative, Labour or otherwise. At the moment, while the BBC web site is good, it offers nothing important I can't find elsewhere.
In a further news article on the DAoC site :
Your billing information is not stocked on our servers. Everything related to your money is handled by a billing partner specialised in online transactions. Your billing information is totally safe and isolated from the platform targeted by the recent attacks.
'tis true.. I've watched my favourite brand change over the years :
protector
3d protector
3d protector diamond
3d protector diamond XL smooth turbo x3
3d triple protector diamond alpha XL super-smooth turbo chin slicer maxxx
or something to that effect. The number of blades in the pack has decreased, the price on the pack has increased, and the time I go between changing blades has now also increased because I refuse to pay the extra cash to keep my fizzog fuzz free.
Have I gone slightly off-topic?
"Jenkins, install a small camera atop of everyone's monitor, so I can make sure the code monkeys aren't sleeping on the job. Oh, and call it something innocuous, like a video-intercom system."
Perhaps the console manufacturers should look to the mobile phone industry for some pointers here. It shouldn't be too hard to add a phone style keypad to a joypad, and the appropriate software to allow SMS style text input, should it? Considering the popularity of text messaging, particularly in Europe, it would provide an interface familiar to millions, without the need force people to have a keyboard sat on their lap in their living room.
"I torched my home for DAoC, and all I got was this lousy T-shirt"
/me tugs his beard
Yep, I'm tempted to call "hogwash" on this one. I've searched for the fabled female games programmer for many, many years, just like some search for the Loch Ness Monster, Big Foot or the Beast of Bodmin. The closest I ever got was the great blonde-Swede-booked-for-interview incident of '01. She never turned up, so I can't confirm if she was blonde, Swedish or even female, although none of these are subject to rigorous testing during interviews.
Still, I guess it's some consolation to my wife that when I say I'm working late, she can be sure I'm actually working.
Agreed, but the problem doesn't necessarily lie in the QC process, the whole development process needs looking at.
Compare with 1993. As others have pointed out, the hardware and software complexities have increased massively over the past ten years. Processer speed, graphics rendering abilities, memory and storage media sizes, and - more importantly - games players expectations are all much, much higher.
Development team size have gone from 1 programmer and 1 artist to teams of 30 or 40+. Here's where the problem is. There's been a fairly quick shift in game development from being a single coder hacking job, to a large team software project. These projects need far more planning, design and control, especially if they are to be completed in a development time that has only perhaps doubled. It's this move from a back-bedroom programming to full-on commercial software engineering that's caught a lot of development companies off guard. Many have failed to adjust the development process accordingly, resulting in insufficient design and planning, leading to buggy software and game design flaws, which in turn forces rewrites, causing slipped release dates and 12+ hour working days and so on.
Fixing the development process won't magic away all bugs and problems, but it will help. Unfortunately, many of those former back-bedroom programmers and artists are now in management positions and don't or won't consider that bashing out code from 9am on day 1 of a new project isn't the best approach...
The games industry should be examining the processes involved in non-games software development. There are lessons to be learned, and they need to be learned soon.
I'm still using Eyeballs v1.0, analogue encoding devices acquired in the early 1970's. While they're not quite as good as new, they do tell me that images from DVD are considerably better than images from VHS. Maybe there's out-of-band data that Eyeballs v1.0 are filtering out, or frequencies that are being processed incorrectly?
Is there a newer version available? Is there a upgrade discount for established Eyeballs v1.0 users?
Oh come now, I'd pay good money to see him strapped to the nose cone of a homebrewed rocket.
So I've been moving house and working over to meet deadlines, but it was just this past weekend that I decided to head off to the cinema to see the new Matrix film. Thing is, it's gone. None of the local cinemas are showing it any more. It was a choice of driving 40 miles south to a cinema that had a single showing at 7:05pm saturday, or 90 miles north for a cinema that was still running the film albeit in a broom cupboard or something.
Someone, somewhere has decided that it would be better all round to take the matrix off and show Daddy Day Care instead.
So, um, yeah, that DVD release couldn't come too soon...
Contestant : I'll take European countries for 200.
Alex : "A crumbling, bankrupt mess with a network infrastructure to match."
Contestant : What is the UK? Um, tropical fish for 100, please.
The UK Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) are due to relocate to a shiny new building nicknamed "the doughnut", later this year. It's up the street from the house I'm renting at the mo. I remember a few months ago, reading an article either in the local newspaper or a brochure that came round explaining about the new building. One thing it mentioned was a large hall constructed to house the most powerful super computer outside of the US. Now, that kind of infers that the most powerful computer in the world is in the US, which the top 500 article disagrees with. Or maybe the list doesn't include some classified ones. Or, as the GCHQ claim was future tense, maybe they're expecting things to change soon. Whichever, I'm putting aside my roll of cat5 and ceasing work on the tunnel until I know what's what.
the Americans subsidize their farmers as do the French
Of course, the French managed the cunning trick of subsidising their farmers with vast amounts of other country's money. God bless the EU!
Hmm.. well I know some compsci's that passed through York during the few years after I left got through their degree without touching Ada. Maybe it was made optional, or has been re-introduced since.
I didn't know about the radio broadcasts. Fighting dodgy cassettes was hard work at the best of times; attempting to load data recorded off a radio broadcast seems like a whole new world of hurt.
Didn't they used to broadcast software through the tv teletext service?
I studied for my CS degree at the University of York in the early 90's, who - at the time - were really pushing Z and Ada as the stuff of the future. One thing that stood out from the formal specification course, at least in my mind, was the example Z specification for a function to swap the values of two variables. Basically :
:
swap(a,b)
tmp = a
a = b
b = tmp
The pseudocode is simple enough, but the Z spec took up a whole page. This put people off - if the smallest function in a minor subsystem of an application takes a whole page and much head-scratching to figure out, how long will the rest of the software take? Surely it's so time consuming as to be infeasible for real world use. Hardly any on the course really "got it", and I was one of the many who didn't. A friend of mine went on to use Z in his final year project, and at some point *ting* - he got it and found that it was good. I've never seen or heard of Z being used anywhere since, but some day I want to have another look at my notes and text books to see if it makes any more sense yet, and if so, whether it can help my work.
I don't know if they still advocate Z, but they started teaching Eiffel instead of Ada the year after I left..
I totally agree.. they've got this wonderful technology and not the slightest idea of what to actually do with it. I guess they're still looking for that elusive killer-app that's going to make us all sit up and think "ahhh, so that's why I need a 3G phone!"
Three's current advertising campaign of "get comedy clips sent to your phone" is about as weak as it can get. However, I did have to laugh of the example comedy clip shown of the two guys comparing each other's high tech wrist watches, packed with impressive but useless features - it's a great way to promote these high tech phones, packed with impressive but use.. ah, you know.
Yep, but I think it's the £18 limit that Play use to their advantage. If you ordered several DVDs, they'd be packaged and mailed individually, so each was below the £18 tax/duty threshold. At least, this is what they used to do - it's a while since I shopped there.
The ARM company milestone list mentions "ARM announces that it has shipped over 1 billion of its microprocessor cores to date" at the start of 2002...
I think I can safely say that ARM has shipped approximately 0 processors. They have, however, licenced their technology to a whole range of semiconductor manufacturers, including Intel, who do all the mucking about with silicon and god-knows-what.
Ok, I'm being a little pedantic.. I'd be interested to know how many ARM processors had been produced by all these manufacturers - must be quite a few!
Rather than problems with the technology, I think Sega shot themselves in the foot trying to stay ahead of the competition with too many incremental changes - Mega drive, Mega CD, 32X, Neptune, before getting to Saturn. Joe Consumer wants to spend his cash on a console that's going to be around for a few years. If it's likely that the current machine is going to be replaced by a new model at the end of the year, it might be best to wait for that one. Or buy a PlayStation or Nintendo, which is pretty much what happened.
It's a shame, really, because the Dreamcast is a good console and deserved to do a lot better than it did, but Sega had already lost it's foothold in the hardware market.