How could the GPU act by itself? You'd need a low-level API. And would you like an API per platform / graphics card? At least companies don't, as the development costs would get even higher if you were to support same features in different platforms. Companies already strive hard to produce similar features in different consoles ( Disclaimer, I've worked as a programmer for such a company), and by eliminating such high level APIs you just rise the dev costs. New hardware would also mean new stuff to learn and master, which sends .
DX just needs to get leaner-and-meaner. So does OGL. Allow more pipelines, but give a common API, regardless of the underlying hardware. Keep abstractions, but allow compositions of custom pipelines. Keep the proven stuff in HW. As programmers, we need abstractions to cut dev & debugging time, specialisations might be fun but that's one of the reasons games nowadays cost a LOT to make ( at least AAA).
If you notice the video, there's quite a bit of latency between the physical action and the response on the screen. Which is kinda normal as this thing needs to do quite a bit of processing. From my experience with another mouse that for some reason had latency, slow response is *very, very* frustrating. So, no matter how cute it is, I can't see it succeeding in the market, not even as a device for a niche market. I can't see it being very good for the fingers as well. Ok we use smartphones using fingers on touchscreens quite a bit, but for a device that boasts that it's the evolution of mouse they should have thought that 2-3 minutes (smartphone quick use, on the road, whatever) is very different from desktop/laptop use (could be hours).
Get this mouse == Welcome to my-fingers-hurt-and-input-is-now-freakin-slow world.
Fair enough for the bandwidth at peak times. But ping? packet loss?? I use a very crude way of checking how bad it is - by "ping -t www.google.com". When I get a 5% packet loss at peak hours, I know I can't meaningfully play any fast-paced online game. Also, ping times might escalate to hundreds of milliseconds from the normal 25-26ms. So, no I don't complain about the bandwidth but about the actual connection quality. I would expect the situation to be different in bigger cities though.
Haven't bothered to ask them as I usually avoid customer service - they're getting on my nerves. This has been going on for quite a few months so I'm sure it's not temporary, and from the lack of competition in the area I'm sure I'll get ignored anyway. It's probably oversubscription, just wanted to state that the table in TFA has a few numbers without context and with minimal detail - that's just useless.
Virgin is crap. I currently (need to) use them, and they're unbelievable bad - Every day I expect network disruptions between 7am - 11am, which completely screws my online gaming. Speed is horrible at times, especially in peak hours. Ok I may not live in the biggest city in the UK, but it's not small either. Poor performance? At times. Oversubscribed? I bet. Crap network? Oh yes.
Very nice. Rather impressive to pre-empt the ISP's.
"well, your competitor is able to provide better speeds to more customers, why are you whining? Oh? AND You charge more for lower service? Interesting. Well, lets let your customers decide for themselves with more facts who they want"
It'd make sense at this point for an ISP with a bit of sense to make a nice deal with Netflix to improve things here, then everyone wins.
Not very nice. Remember the two-tier thing in UK? Perhaps Netflix is trying to reverse that in its favor by hinting for 'arrangements'? Shady deals like that won't really work in favor of the consumers.
Adventure games were *the* genre in a time when the non-console gamer market was composed from people who bothered to do stuff and spend some time to solve a problem. Back in the day, software wasn't as friendly, hardware wasn't as friendly, and in general you needed to think about stuff. And internet wasn't as prevalent as it is. Adventure games needed that seclusion and focus, and without internet and the gazillion other distraction factors that we have today, it was possible.
Now we have 2011. Adventure games market is a niche of PC market which is a niche of the video gaming market which is dominated by "casual" and "social" games. It's niche^2, and as niche is less than 1, that doesn't look good for companies. Also the seclusion, focus, and unavailability of solutions within 10 seconds is really difficult nowadays. So yes, in their standard format, adventure games are as good as dead. Innovation for the genre won't easily come, as companies with budget wouldn't take the risk. It might come as a byproduct of an innovative game from another genre, who knows..
I've known a few people that have wasted part of their lives in WoW ( 2-6 years ) and I haven't seen 'improvements'. All I've seen is zombie-like behaviour, talking only about the game, grinding to death, spending endless hours waiting for the team to gather in instances, etc etc. And all this so you they say in the end "My armor/level/weapon/pet is bigger/better/cooler than yours - I'm awesome".
And regarding the virtuoso thing. Virtuosos in ART are a good thing. Why? Because the world benefits. Virtuosos in SCIENCE are a good thing. Why? Because the world benefits. Virtuosos in GAMES are a good thing??? WHY? Is there any benefit from that? A guy spends 10,000 hours in a game, becomes an expert on it and.. what? How does anyone benefit besides his ego ( and his pocket at times in tournaments, and game AI research if we want to push it more).
I don't really care, but suggesting that becoming virtuoso in a game is a good thing, and having seen friends and relatives walking that path, I would say to Ms McGonigal that, if she has kids, she should give example to the world by introducing them to WoW and other online FPS asap, so we know that she means it, and the whole thing is not a marketing ploy for some weird, supposedly beneficial and ineffective bullshit that is Soon Coming To A Store Near You:-)
Oh, and for a POV clarification, I've been a hardcore gamer for the past 20 years. MMOs for a while included.
Add warning labels and ignorant laws, add DRM, add ANY sort of difficulty for a consumer to get what he/she wants and would *normally* be entitled to, and guess what will happen.. Unexpected, you say?
.. gathering for improvement of anti-piracy schemes? Sounds like the MAFIAA to me. "Advance the PC as a worldwide gaming platform"? It already is and always has been. They probably wanted to say "Advance the profitability of all the shitty games we develop, port and outsource on the PC, try to milk customers to death and try to find new ways to fuck pirates"
Direct3D 9 had CAPS ( capabilities ) bits which queried the gfx card for feature support. That was THE total nightmare for programmers, for reasons previously described. Direct3D 10/11 was improved to having version numbers ( 9_1, 9_2, 9_3, 10_0, 10_1, 11) to indicate hw-supported features. So the programmers have now a total of 6 permutations. This is called RATIONAL SOLUTION and it's great. So the HTML guys are going backwards on this? Rrrright...
With no reference to other artillery games in TFA, I'm wondering if the author has any clue that this gameplay mechanic is awesome, proven, and more than 30 years old. As it's relatively fresh, long live wikipedia btw:)
Given that the article only takes a currently hugely popular game as a starting point to talk about something in real life, why the fuck should it mention other artillery games? Are you demanding that all articles about extracurricular activities that mention "Glee" to also include a lengthy history of Musicals on big and small screen?
Because he makes it sound like Angry Birds is something NOVEL regarding videogame gameplay mechanics, and draws his parallels to why this NOVEL thing became so successful. He could mention that this WHOLE GENRE uses the same mechanics, and that Angry Birds is the LATEST smooth, sleek and feel-good implementation, which would explain its popularity, and THEN draw his parallels. This would be the "background" section after the "introduction".
With no reference to other artillery games in TFA, I'm wondering if the author has any clue that this gameplay mechanic is awesome, proven, and more than 30 years old. As it's relatively fresh, long live wikipedia btw:)
I see your point, but still disagree. When I'm writing scientific papers, where fact accuracy REALLY matters, I WON'T cite wikipedia. If I want to know a few bits of information about a plant that I saw with a friend while trekking, I'll look it on wikipedia. If I want to know the origin of some food recipes, I'll look it on wikipedia. If I want to learn approximately what happened regarding a historical fact, I'll go to wikipedia. If I want find about the discography of a band, without loading useless flashy flash pages, I'll look it on wikipedia. If I want to read a few things about a well-known guy, living or not, I'll look it on wikipedia. Hell, if I want to read a bit about something random from my mobile in the crapper, I'll fire up wikipedia. In fact I just did before I saw your post:)
You can keep a list of bookmarks about all thousands of subjects that you might be interested in at any point in your life, I find that tiresome, especially with the ever-evolving nature of the web and its content. I've been searching stuff on search engines for 15 years now, and I think wikipedia is BRILLIANT.
If there was no incentive at all, the site wouldn't grow to be as large as it is now. Comparatively, we've also seen how well Google's Knol has worked anyway.
Competition usually leads to improvement. If the edit war game leads to more neutral and unbiased results, because of wars among biased opinions, I'm all for it. If I want opinions, I'll search elsewhere. Granted, I won't take seriously articles for companies, some people and generally heated subjects, but really if you find worthless the fact that you can type almost any word followed by "wiki" and find information conforming to a standardized format, I think you're hopeles..
If you want to play FPS/RPGs, really, get a windows partition or a console. Not trying to flamebait or something, just being rational.
The game is 8 years old, with the software engineering maturity of a random sample company that this fact implies. Data files being copyrighted. DX-based being ultra-fun to port. Nope, I can't see serious effort thrown into this. It only gets funnier with feature requests, improvements & bug fixes. The first post here is a request FFS, imagine the port's forums.
For research: You have source code for Quake3. I bet it's coded far better than arx fatalis, and it's already there.
While I happily eat pigs, cows, fish & all sorts of meat, I'd never kill them or torture them for fun ( ok I've done it as a kid, but who hasn't). Of course there's a difference between pigs and paramecium, but the idea is the same, and the 'capability of suffering' threshold is very very vague, like arbitrary. Using living things for research, I'm totally ok with that. Eating living things as we're higher in the food chain, I'm totally ok with that. Harming living things for fun is not cool - Uncoolness factor being proportional to living thing complexity.
Slashdot Mirror
just by googling - yay! I knew all these hours watching porn weren't a waste of time.
Nowadays that machines come with Win7, you'll get more new-to-computers uneducated users getting infected more easily that XP long-time users.
E.T. is one of the worst games ever. But I guess it's art to make a game that contributes to one of the biggest disasters in the video games industry. On a sidenote, wtf with all those franchises in the list - shows laziness to say the least.
.. for the same piece of news, feels like a measure of the redundancy of the network's data traffic.
How could the GPU act by itself? You'd need a low-level API. And would you like an API per platform / graphics card? At least companies don't, as the development costs would get even higher if you were to support same features in different platforms. Companies already strive hard to produce similar features in different consoles ( Disclaimer, I've worked as a programmer for such a company), and by eliminating such high level APIs you just rise the dev costs. New hardware would also mean new stuff to learn and master, which sends .
DX just needs to get leaner-and-meaner. So does OGL. Allow more pipelines, but give a common API, regardless of the underlying hardware. Keep abstractions, but allow compositions of custom pipelines. Keep the proven stuff in HW. As programmers, we need abstractions to cut dev & debugging time, specialisations might be fun but that's one of the reasons games nowadays cost a LOT to make ( at least AAA).
If you notice the video, there's quite a bit of latency between the physical action and the response on the screen. Which is kinda normal as this thing needs to do quite a bit of processing. From my experience with another mouse that for some reason had latency, slow response is *very, very* frustrating. So, no matter how cute it is, I can't see it succeeding in the market, not even as a device for a niche market.
I can't see it being very good for the fingers as well. Ok we use smartphones using fingers on touchscreens quite a bit, but for a device that boasts that it's the evolution of mouse they should have thought that 2-3 minutes (smartphone quick use, on the road, whatever) is very different from desktop/laptop use (could be hours).
Get this mouse == Welcome to my-fingers-hurt-and-input-is-now-freakin-slow world.
Fair enough for the bandwidth at peak times. But ping? packet loss?? I use a very crude way of checking how bad it is - by "ping -t www.google.com". When I get a 5% packet loss at peak hours, I know I can't meaningfully play any fast-paced online game. Also, ping times might escalate to hundreds of milliseconds from the normal 25-26ms. So, no I don't complain about the bandwidth but about the actual connection quality. I would expect the situation to be different in bigger cities though.
Haven't bothered to ask them as I usually avoid customer service - they're getting on my nerves. This has been going on for quite a few months so I'm sure it's not temporary, and from the lack of competition in the area I'm sure I'll get ignored anyway. It's probably oversubscription, just wanted to state that the table in TFA has a few numbers without context and with minimal detail - that's just useless.
No, I'm actually using cable - that's the 'funny' part.
Uhm, am should be pm, damn I need a coffee.
Virgin is crap. I currently (need to) use them, and they're unbelievable bad - Every day I expect network disruptions between 7am - 11am, which completely screws my online gaming. Speed is horrible at times, especially in peak hours. Ok I may not live in the biggest city in the UK, but it's not small either. Poor performance? At times. Oversubscribed? I bet. Crap network? Oh yes.
Very nice. Rather impressive to pre-empt the ISP's. "well, your competitor is able to provide better speeds to more customers, why are you whining? Oh? AND You charge more for lower service? Interesting. Well, lets let your customers decide for themselves with more facts who they want"
It'd make sense at this point for an ISP with a bit of sense to make a nice deal with Netflix to improve things here, then everyone wins.
Not very nice. Remember the two-tier thing in UK? Perhaps Netflix is trying to reverse that in its favor by hinting for 'arrangements'? Shady deals like that won't really work in favor of the consumers.
Adventure games were *the* genre in a time when the non-console gamer market was composed from people who bothered to do stuff and spend some time to solve a problem. Back in the day, software wasn't as friendly, hardware wasn't as friendly, and in general you needed to think about stuff. And internet wasn't as prevalent as it is. Adventure games needed that seclusion and focus, and without internet and the gazillion other distraction factors that we have today, it was possible.
Now we have 2011. Adventure games market is a niche of PC market which is a niche of the video gaming market which is dominated by "casual" and "social" games. It's niche^2, and as niche is less than 1, that doesn't look good for companies. Also the seclusion, focus, and unavailability of solutions within 10 seconds is really difficult nowadays. So yes, in their standard format, adventure games are as good as dead. Innovation for the genre won't easily come, as companies with budget wouldn't take the risk. It might come as a byproduct of an innovative game from another genre, who knows..
I've known a few people that have wasted part of their lives in WoW ( 2-6 years ) and I haven't seen 'improvements'. All I've seen is zombie-like behaviour, talking only about the game, grinding to death, spending endless hours waiting for the team to gather in instances, etc etc. And all this so you they say in the end "My armor/level/weapon/pet is bigger/better/cooler than yours - I'm awesome".
.. what? How does anyone benefit besides his ego ( and his pocket at times in tournaments, and game AI research if we want to push it more).
:-)
And regarding the virtuoso thing. Virtuosos in ART are a good thing. Why? Because the world benefits. Virtuosos in SCIENCE are a good thing. Why? Because the world benefits. Virtuosos in GAMES are a good thing??? WHY? Is there any benefit from that? A guy spends 10,000 hours in a game, becomes an expert on it and
I don't really care, but suggesting that becoming virtuoso in a game is a good thing, and having seen friends and relatives walking that path, I would say to Ms McGonigal that, if she has kids, she should give example to the world by introducing them to WoW and other online FPS asap, so we know that she means it, and the whole thing is not a marketing ploy for some weird, supposedly beneficial and ineffective bullshit that is Soon Coming To A Store Near You
Oh, and for a POV clarification, I've been a hardcore gamer for the past 20 years. MMOs for a while included.
Add warning labels and ignorant laws, add DRM, add ANY sort of difficulty for a consumer to get what he/she wants and would *normally* be entitled to, and guess what will happen.. Unexpected, you say?
.. gathering for improvement of anti-piracy schemes? Sounds like the MAFIAA to me. "Advance the PC as a worldwide gaming platform"? It already is and always has been. They probably wanted to say "Advance the profitability of all the shitty games we develop, port and outsource on the PC, try to milk customers to death and try to find new ways to fuck pirates"
Direct3D 9 had CAPS ( capabilities ) bits which queried the gfx card for feature support. That was THE total nightmare for programmers, for reasons previously described. Direct3D 10/11 was improved to having version numbers ( 9_1, 9_2, 9_3, 10_0, 10_1, 11) to indicate hw-supported features. So the programmers have now a total of 6 permutations. This is called RATIONAL SOLUTION and it's great. So the HTML guys are going backwards on this? Rrrright...
With no reference to other artillery games in TFA, I'm wondering if the author has any clue that this gameplay mechanic is awesome, proven, and more than 30 years old. As it's relatively fresh, long live wikipedia btw :)
Given that the article only takes a currently hugely popular game as a starting point to talk about something in real life, why the fuck should it mention other artillery games? Are you demanding that all articles about extracurricular activities that mention "Glee" to also include a lengthy history of Musicals on big and small screen?
Because he makes it sound like Angry Birds is something NOVEL regarding videogame gameplay mechanics, and draws his parallels to why this NOVEL thing became so successful. He could mention that this WHOLE GENRE uses the same mechanics, and that Angry Birds is the LATEST smooth, sleek and feel-good implementation, which would explain its popularity, and THEN draw his parallels. This would be the "background" section after the "introduction".
With no reference to other artillery games in TFA, I'm wondering if the author has any clue that this gameplay mechanic is awesome, proven, and more than 30 years old. As it's relatively fresh, long live wikipedia btw :)
I see your point, but still disagree. When I'm writing scientific papers, where fact accuracy REALLY matters, I WON'T cite wikipedia. :)
If I want to know a few bits of information about a plant that I saw with a friend while trekking, I'll look it on wikipedia.
If I want to know the origin of some food recipes, I'll look it on wikipedia.
If I want to learn approximately what happened regarding a historical fact, I'll go to wikipedia.
If I want find about the discography of a band, without loading useless flashy flash pages, I'll look it on wikipedia.
If I want to read a few things about a well-known guy, living or not, I'll look it on wikipedia.
Hell, if I want to read a bit about something random from my mobile in the crapper, I'll fire up wikipedia. In fact I just did before I saw your post
You can keep a list of bookmarks about all thousands of subjects that you might be interested in at any point in your life, I find that tiresome, especially with the ever-evolving nature of the web and its content. I've been searching stuff on search engines for 15 years now, and I think wikipedia is BRILLIANT.
If there was no incentive at all, the site wouldn't grow to be as large as it is now. Comparatively, we've also seen how well Google's Knol has worked anyway.
Competition usually leads to improvement. If the edit war game leads to more neutral and unbiased results, because of wars among biased opinions, I'm all for it. If I want opinions, I'll search elsewhere. Granted, I won't take seriously articles for companies, some people and generally heated subjects, but really if you find worthless the fact that you can type almost any word followed by "wiki" and find information conforming to a standardized format, I think you're hopeles..
If you want to play FPS/RPGs, really, get a windows partition or a console. Not trying to flamebait or something, just being rational. The game is 8 years old, with the software engineering maturity of a random sample company that this fact implies. Data files being copyrighted. DX-based being ultra-fun to port. Nope, I can't see serious effort thrown into this. It only gets funnier with feature requests, improvements & bug fixes. The first post here is a request FFS, imagine the port's forums.
For research:
You have source code for Quake3. I bet it's coded far better than arx fatalis, and it's already there.
It will be funny to see people changing their behaviour towards the suggested behaviour of their new sign. Or sad, if you really think about it.
While I happily eat pigs, cows, fish & all sorts of meat, I'd never kill them or torture them for fun ( ok I've done it as a kid, but who hasn't). Of course there's a difference between pigs and paramecium, but the idea is the same, and the 'capability of suffering' threshold is very very vague, like arbitrary. Using living things for research, I'm totally ok with that. Eating living things as we're higher in the food chain, I'm totally ok with that. Harming living things for fun is not cool - Uncoolness factor being proportional to living thing complexity.