First off Activision is probably right here. They had a contract, they violated it, they suffer.
However this is the worse move Activision could make, they just jump to the head of the class in "bad producers" beating EA. It's a known quantity, developers will learn tricks at a company and bring it to a new company. This is a dirty little secret in the industry. Three guys quit a company and form a new one, did they magically get the idea for their next game at 6 o'clock on the day they quit? Nope they probably planned it a while before. This always happens and Activision crucifying someone like this is going to get a lot of attention, and this is not what a developer wants to hear of a prospective employer, that the employer will come after you when you leave the company.
Does that mean the two developers were right in what they did? No, and honestly they violated their agreement, but to stop them from working on any rhythem game in the next year is pretty harsh.
Btw last I checked Stepmania is still open source, Activision never bought it, but hey that's what Activision has to prove. They did work with a chief engineer on it (if you'll call him that) for In the groove but that's a different story than using stepmania code which is still public.
Seriously does anyone have an original idea? I'd much rather my consoles and handhelds have 100 original games then 1000 ports or knock offs. Every time I hear someone bring up an idea like "it'd be just like metroid, only with." I get a little bile in the back of my throat from a mini-throw up.
If you want ports and poorly done games get the PSP there's tons there. The DS really has a semi solid line up of games, asking for a ton of ports just ruins systems, not making them better. If you want these games, ask for them on the VC, not the DS. Demand better games on the DS.
Considering most people outside of people who would visit Pirate bay (aka hackers/crackers/pirates/ what ever you want to be called) and people on sites like Slashdot (cool people) don't even know a raid happened. I'd say it'd be forgotten in a month.
It's not waco. No one died, a bunch of computers got seized... Sadly no one cares no matter how many rights are brought up.
I'll state this again because people just don't seem to understand that.
E3 is not a consumer show, it's not an open show. The fact that so many fans got into the show was a shame and part of the reason the show was closed (the other was the big 5 (EA, Activision and the 3 consoles) all were in a giant pissing match and then bitched every time they spent more on the show than last year.
E3 has it's issues but originally and primarily it's like GDC a show for the industry, the fact no one policed it isn't the issue, it was an insider show.
E for all, PAX, and every other show out there is a consumer show. There's a very difference flavor from an industry show to a consumer show and what you'll see is different. It's more oriented at the end user and you probably won't see as much early (alpha/beta) versions of games. But don't be fooled by the fake media hype. Btw E3 will continue to remain for the industry, this year it sounds like they are going toned down but the information that should come out of E3 will still be coming only from there.
First they release Karaoke revolution, a game that's popular in Japan and now in America.
Karaoke revolution 2 introduces Duets for Americans.
Then they release Guitar hero, a game that explodes in popularity.
Then they release Guitar hero 2, introducing the cooperative guitar players.
And now they release Rock band, a game which takes everything they learned and adds drums into it. Plus working with EA probably helps them get online working which can only improve the game.
Hell I could even mention frequency and amplitude for timing and visualization but the point is that they essentially made every part of this game into it's own game except for drumming. Very cool Harmonix.
Hey thanks to hear that someone who is too lazy to actually register for the site or too afraid to even use his real name decides to bash me for what ever reason.
No no . this is completely different because of X Y and Z. That's why this guy is a genius, the fact he has no proof or evidence doesn't matter he's a genius and deserves tons of credit.
I agree with the parent, this theory was there for a while, he might have fine tuned the ending, but nothing groundbreaking here. Using the workforce and all the known data we can prove all major theories for the pyramids. The solution isn't the "easiest way" they could have built the period, it's for the ACTUAL way and this guy doesn't have any serious proof to my knowledge. Good for evolving theories, but yet again no theory is the winner yet.
Seriously wouldn't an internal ramp leave at least a little mark? You know, somewhere that we can see?
That's why we have findings, and we publish the process for the findings as well as the findings themselves. If another party can't reproduce the finding then our proof can be debunked.
Well we used to, there's numerous global warming reports (Michael Mann's report early on comes into mind, though he's not the only one in the global warming debate, and far from the only scientist guilty of this) that issued findings with out their processes, as well as other places in science. So this wonkiness we speak of appears. Personally I think it's time science journals demand the processes as well as the findings for everything, but then their magazine would shrink because science has slowly been moving to a point where the "answer" is far more important than any question that can be asked.
Seriously, doing a witch hunt at google to find out if some unnamed source told them to revert the images? Then what do you do? Publicly shame them (of course if they are controlled by the opposite party should be implied).
This seems about as wasteful and useless as anything. Claiming it's "airbrushing history" is just grasping for justication.
This is a joke right? The AI is stupid. There's points where a VIP is killed (won't say who) and it's been noticed that the guards he has will find him, walk over to him do a normal "death" routine and walk back to the place they are guarding. This is after the person they have been assigned to guard is killed.
Early on in the game there was a couple points where I messed up with a Quarter and then enemy walked into a room where I was standing and stared directly at me as I walked up to him, he didn't say or react at all, he just stared.
If we are talking about a computer game I'm hoping we are talking about human-like intelligence.
What I really was trying to get across was a common misconception (one that stuck me when I got into a game company) that "AI" as it's taught in school is very different hen AI as it applies to most games. The biggest difference is most AIs don't learn, and most are pretty much just a script that doesn't change. We don't have the ability to throw away any cycles of the game so the AI tends to be highly stripped down to the point it's just "oh I see a gun, I'm going to react to the gun, how should I react to the gun, I'll do that." This is completely scripted to the point where you can tell what's going to happen if you point the gun at the person a second time or a third time. There's no "thought" or "intelligence" to the system, thought it might seem "intelligent"
A chess AI on the other hand evaluates all the options of what it can do and chooses a best option, the pruning is a form of "thought". A chess master will be doing something similar where he thinks of all his possible moves and then considers responses and so on which is effectively using game theory. To me that's actual intelligence even if it's not fancy.
The difference between a neural net program is it's code that tries to simulate the learning and thought process if you will, the code that AI in games use is just like I illustrated above. There's an "action" and the code quickly decides what's the reaction and does it. It doesn't try to evaluate too much because we don't have the cycles to do that.
The Best AIs I've found are in some games like Yu-gi-oh the card game I'm currently working on nightmare troubadour and most of the opponents I've played always make a "great" move. On the other hand there's a couple opponents who are dumb as bricks, yet these enemies are suppose to be dumb as bricks (they are first time players in the story) And it's amazing how poorly they play (the play "well" for stupid AI, but they make bonehead moves that a new player can easily capitialize on. The player feels like each player has a different style, not just a different deck, and that makes for a much better game. (this is coming from a 25 year old guy in the game business).
The reason it's great is that there's simple rules to the game that the AI can know. There's been one point in the game where the AI got confused mainly because I blocked her in with a couple traps, but overall the Ai's abilities in the game are outstanding.
The important think to know about AI in games is it's not "AI". It's scripts or code that simulates scripts. There's no neural nets or anything else because we can't get the power for a neural net in an active game. In chess we can but then chess no longer is fun unless we tone down the "intellegence".
Some other great AIs are Gears of War (On insane they do great flanking maneuvers and such) Ghost recon (they really seem to know how to take cover and make it a challenge for the player to take them out. however the friendly AI leaves.... alot to be desired), Oblivion (watching random people walk around is pretty impressive, it helped build up that game.) and others, but there's none that make me think I'm fighting a real person.
There is a push to create truer "AIs" in games, Gran turismo created a way to train Drivers, Forza 2 is improving on it's drivtar system, Virtua fighter 4 had a way to teach an AI fighter, which was cool and indepth. But these are all "Scripts" taken from player experiences, not exactly AI. There's other games working on "true AI" but even then it's still toned down because we don't have the tools to make the driver "think" yet. It's just rail following and teaching the computer how to follow rails or when to break away from them.
I wouldn't say the molyeniux's games had great AI but they have good AI that at least learns a bit. Yet they feel like it's all you telling the game what to do, and it trying to figure out what you want it to do (and it fails) where as the Sims has interesting AI, but never feels real (mainly because the game never feels real).
So overall if you want to see good AI, look at simple games, expecting full 3d world simulations to have great ai is still a long way off but it's slowly coming. However this push for "graphics graphics graphics" won't help AI in the long run, but hopefully in a couple generations we stop worrying about graphics and work on AI and physics which seem to be more beneficial to the player then higher polycounts.
Applaud it passes Acid 2 compatibility but don't expect it or demand it. Acid2 is NOT a standard. Acid is a really poorly written page with many issues or features developers want including error checking in CSS. Acid2 finds out if a browser can correctly interpret the errors for instance.
Personally I hope no one passes Acid 2 for one reason. It enables people to write poorly designed webpages. If you're going to write a web page do it correctly or not at all. Expecting a browser to fix your stupid errors shouldn't even be an option.
It's good Firefox 3 passes the acid test but who cares. It is better working than it was for poorly written pages. I'd much rather choose a lighter weight browser than a bloated piece of software that supposidly works with "Everything" no matter how much of a screwup the web designer was. One of the reasons I avoid IE7 like the plague.
They have sold 6 million units. All my local stores have regular shipments. I haven't seen any still because they just go too fast. That's not exactly bad numbers, it's just higher then expected demand.
In 5 monthes they sold more than half what the 360 sold in a year with constant shipments. I'm sure Nintendo is just holding back production, because they don't need the money right?
Let's just look at this, Nintendo is going to ship as many units as they can, they arn't holding it back. They might not be forcing their employees to work overtime just to ship an extra 10 percent of units. 6 million units is an amazing number and they still constantly sell out.
Might they hold back a couple in the last couple weeks? Maybe. But I don't think they have been since January it's gotten easier to find and there's not as many news stories about it, but I still don't see them laying around for days, weeks, monthes at a time.
Let's look at the other side. Sony. Sony had a massive launch people waited for days out in the cold and almost killed themselves to get a PS3. They shipped less than they promised (and around half what the wii shipped the first day) and saturated the market. At this point it's completely saturated PS3s are laying around on the shelves and Sony is claiming "victory" any way they can. The European Ps3 launches were ok in that everyone got a Ps3, but how could you not sell out? The playstation 3 is shipping out 6 million units this month. The Early reports are a third of them have been sold. It'll probably hit a half because of a European launch. And we get weekly reports of "why" they arn't selling so fast because they are successful at getting that many units out there.
The 360 also had some early shipment problems. Systems did appear on the shelves in the next couple months but even then neither system had half the numbers the Wii has.
I think Gamestop is feeling the fact that people WANT the wii, and Nintendo has only alloted them so many. Best buy and Walmart can get 20+ systems in a single shipment, Gamestop is lucky to hit double digits per store in most shipments. This happened at launch and still happens now. Gamestop just doesn't get as many units (per store) as the other chains, even though their focus is only on game products, that would piss me off too, so methinks this is a case of sour grapes and the delicious Wiine. (sorry, but at least I didn't go with "whine".)
I have to agree with that. My mother who's age is numberless (no seriously we haven't created a number that high) is sorta addicted to quizzes and surveys and such. I get tons of free stuff in the mail because she filled out "X offer" or did "X quiz" for me. She's one of those mystery shoppers, she's one of those that people call to ask their opinions on and so on.
I'm almost 40 years younger, and I don't even have 5 minutes that I'd be willing to give to a quiz, I like single question polls where I don't have to do anything, but if there's more than one page expect me to make up random answers after the third question.
Hell assume I'm making up answers on the second question unless I REALLY REALLY like your product.
"Simply put, companies don't have to use that extra capacity, but neither is there some barrier blocking their path when they get close to DVD-9's limits. Which many games already manage to get close to."
That's fine however localization is NOT a major space concern. Not many games are close to breaking dvd-9s limits. At least not as many as Sony would like to tell you. Oblivion which is a freaking enormous game that is not even topping out. Those who believe they can't fit a game on a dvd isn't doing it efficiently or just are looking for excuses.
"So says you. Most other people appear to think that Blu-Ray has a slight edge but both systems are mostly comparable."
Are you freaking kidding me? I'm not talking about edges I'm not talking "which is better" I'm talking, we ran simulations of streaming and in every test the PS3 drive is SLOWER. This has been confirmed by almost every report out there.
"Insomniac did not say that. It said "The PS3's eight parallel CPUs (one primary "PPU" and seven Cell processors) give it potentially far more computing power than the three parallel CPUs in the Xbox 360". What is incorrect about that statement?"
Yeah potential. Potential gets you nothing in the real world., when you can't use all 8 cores. The PS3 is an amazing crunching machine, it's built for Folding at home, but for game programming it's not the best machine, especially if you're looking at something like an open world game, the Ps3 just isn't built around branching paths.
"There is nothing particularly hard about programming the Cell. Any software engineer worth their salt (i.e. the kind responsible for writing game engines, optimized code etc.), should be able to master it easily enough and the people doing periphery stuff like menu systems shouldn't have to care. SPU programming is little removed from multi-threading and most of the principles can be carried over to it."
I guess our company completely sucks then. Except we don't, the system itself has a huge amount of problems (and no we arn't the only ones), whether it's the fact that out of the 6 active cores, one's dedicated to graphics card, and another 4 only has access to 128 megs of that 512 megs or ram (before you have to start doing DMA calls, which anyone should tell you will kill your frame rate). Yeah the cell programming is easy, if you make a game specifically designed for the cell processor. We are game programmers, we make games on platforms. Most of our time should be on our game not on making out game work on the platform. The 360 makes that easy, the Ps3 does not.
If we are going to consider the HD an alternative to the drive, then you're installing games and drive speed is still part of an issue (not as big though). Play Tony Hawk Pro Skater 8 on the 360, it's a great game, however every time you take the disc out and put it back in you have a decently long 2-3 minute load time that's unskipable the first time you play it after that point, that's fine the first time but annoying every time you want to take a quick trip, the way they do it is a movie. I believe this is gone if you didn't have a HD hooked up.
Still you're talking about a wait for the players. I'm all for utilizing the HD, but if I'm going to need to wait 5-15 minutes when I put Oblivion into my PS3, I'm going to get a little annoyed verses the 360 where there's a mandatory situation where you are only allowed 2 minutes of non interactive load times.
Btw, the standardized hard drive assuming we're going to be using it gives an even less important for drive size, why not compress your files and install them the first time you're player runs the game?
I do admit the standardized hard drive is a major feature. However my post is more about the fact that the blu-ray is an unnecessary feature for this generation. It's a 200 dollar addition to the game system and an attempt to get blu-ray into as many homes as possible to claim a "win" on the format war (personally neither format wins, an upscaled DVD is good enough on a 50 inch tv for me, and I don't have to rebuy my dvds and movies). If instead they put out a 400 dollar Ps3 with out blu-ray and then claimed some games will likely require the blu-ray add on it would have worked out better, but as a whole I can't say the blu-ray is a "win" for the consumers or developers, but it's a "win" for Sony and that's why it's included.
The biggest problem isn't about just the anti-tivoization problems or what ever. It's the fact that the new rules are not well written, they are based on simple problems that the FSF has had with GPL v2. They don't like the fact that Novell and Microsoft are working together so they are stopping that with GPLv3. They don't like the way Tivo utilized Linux so that's banned in the future.
It's already clear that people are disagreeing with these moves but the changes don't appear to be taking these opinions into consideration.
The real question is if "Free Software" is ever going to work in a corporate environment, there's gotta be a point where you allow corporations access to your software and you have to allow them to protect their work in some form. Instead of kicking and crying when Novell and Microsoft started working together, why didn't the FSF realize that it was a move to legitimize Linux and work with it to bring Linux to the people.
Microsoft is never going to work with or the FSF, it's just not going to happen, they rather work with a company like Novell. The reason they won't is because of this, Microsoft is trying to work with Linux options and instead of trying to work out some agreement between the general Linux community and this deal the answer that we have come up with is a restrictive GPL that attacks this very deal.
I wonder why Microsoft hasn't tried to become more Linux friendly years ago if this is the response.
I work in a company that does open world games (and good ones actually). I have to tell you the "hobbling" isn't true. The 512 megs of ram that we have on the system is a bigger issue than anything that has to do with the media we are working on.
Blu-ray sounds great but what do you need to fill it with. As it is the amount of money we pay to get the game shipped now is a lot. Cost is what's stopping us from making bigger or more diverse games, rather then size of the media again.
The people who are hurt the most by this are the JRPG companies who just explode with FMVs, blue dragon is a 3 dvd game, other then them I've heard no complaints about the size of the media. Hell, The only reasons they are filling up Blu-rays are they are using "stupid" tricks like uncompressed audio for Metal gear solid. I just have a simple question. Now that both systems are out, and we already have seen that the 360's dvd has a higher read speed then the ps3's blu-ray device (overall blu-ray SHOULD be faster, but in these two actual system the 360's drive is faster). Why are you using larger files sizes rather then using the "extra" power of the ps3 to uncompress these files? The simple answer is no, the ps3 isn't that powerful (Insomniac today claims you have 8 cores? funny we only have access to 6 cores).
In the end blu-ray isn't going to be the answer. Sony's system has some good marks, but blu-ray isn't necessary, and the Cell processor is doing more to hurt the developer than it is helping it.
If anything the 360 developer's biggest problem has nothing to do with DVDs, it's due to the fact that the Hard drive is non standard and we can't guarantee using that for caching, but that's a relatively minor complaint in the long run.
Answer: If you're anti-Microsoft and anti-corporation, yes.
If you just want to have linux as it is now, available to everyone, no.
GPLV3 is slowly becoming "Stallman's opinions on everything" and it seems to be that he's not the person to write GPLs as he is on the extreme end of most things.
I don't see many people saying this is sinister, I think most people are just interested in what type of information MS follows.
And you're right, everyone does this. Do you think a politician just blindly goes into a press conference? Do you think a coach randomly chooses people to ask questions? So yeah, this is pretty much business as usual, but still pretty interesting.
Ok want to become a journalist, create a site, and I don't mean a fucking blog, I mean an actual site like IGN, gamespot, Cnn, or what ever media site you want, then bitch when they don't invite you because you're site sucks.
Most major media outlets aren't just cheesy crap boxes that people put up over night, they are hard work, if you honestly want to be a "journalist" apply to them or make your own and then build it up. Just realize it'll take a long time before you're counted as an actual journalist, and all that time you better be playing by the journalist rules (btw if you don't know those? too bad you're held to them).
Kotaku is a decently well known blog, who had a recent run in with Sony, where Sony blackballed them, they printed a rumor and sony was pissed off, this illustrates a problem with bloggers, they are known as an unknown entity. In the end sony apologized and removed the blackball, but it's still an incident that illustrates exactly why bloggers aren't journalists and shouldn't be expected to be treated as journalists. They have their own rules, and they don't owe anything to anyone else. Sony told them not to post it but they had a factual rumor, and no reason not to print it.
Kotaku for the most part gets a LOT of stuff that bloggers wouldn't normally. They get invites to major parties, free development hardware (to try out new demos), free games, information and so on. But notice all this free shit isn't because they are a blog. It's because they are moderately popular to the point that people read them enough where they can be considered a news source. The companies who are supporting them see them as worthy of their attention. Kotaku was fully in the right here.
On the other hand I could make a site "loser news" and never get a 10th of what they get, why? because my news site wouldn't be considered "worthy".
Simply put bloggers should be honored when they are invited or allowed into press releases because they are getting in on something that 10 years ago they probably wouldn't but on the other hand, they need to realize exactly what they are. And that's not "the press" they are some idiot on the internet with opinions that people read, so it's time for bloggers to stop expecting to be treated like the press.
If they honestly want to get into press events then they should becoming "the press", but they still aren't entitled to this no matter what Mr. Evans thinks.
Oh and before you try it, don't try "freedom of the press" you don't got it. you can use "right to free speech" but again... ehhh Mr. Evans won't learn, and the rest of you pretty much understand this.
I'm not saying Microsoft is the best thing for gaming, but Sony is sure as hell not the best thing. Ibm did invent the Cell, however Sony forced it into the Ps3 even after developers told them it's not the best for gaming. They then have forced blu-ray onto the public as well and then claimed a flawless backwards compatibility and gave a less than such.
Currently, I think both companies are pretty bad, the 360 is the best platform but relying on Microsoft to continue to make good hardware and not screw over the fans is like asking my dog not to eat the treat I left in the middle of the floor, it might work for a couple minutes, but eventually that treat is going to go.
Slashdot Mirror
WEP insecure! Coming up at 6PM Bill Gates still really really rich.
First off Activision is probably right here. They had a contract, they violated it, they suffer.
However this is the worse move Activision could make, they just jump to the head of the class in "bad producers" beating EA. It's a known quantity, developers will learn tricks at a company and bring it to a new company. This is a dirty little secret in the industry. Three guys quit a company and form a new one, did they magically get the idea for their next game at 6 o'clock on the day they quit? Nope they probably planned it a while before. This always happens and Activision crucifying someone like this is going to get a lot of attention, and this is not what a developer wants to hear of a prospective employer, that the employer will come after you when you leave the company.
Does that mean the two developers were right in what they did? No, and honestly they violated their agreement, but to stop them from working on any rhythem game in the next year is pretty harsh.
Btw last I checked Stepmania is still open source, Activision never bought it, but hey that's what Activision has to prove. They did work with a chief engineer on it (if you'll call him that) for In the groove but that's a different story than using stepmania code which is still public.
Seriously does anyone have an original idea? I'd much rather my consoles and handhelds have 100 original games then 1000 ports or knock offs. Every time I hear someone bring up an idea like "it'd be just like metroid, only with." I get a little bile in the back of my throat from a mini-throw up.
If you want ports and poorly done games get the PSP there's tons there. The DS really has a semi solid line up of games, asking for a ton of ports just ruins systems, not making them better. If you want these games, ask for them on the VC, not the DS. Demand better games on the DS.
Considering most people outside of people who would visit Pirate bay (aka hackers/crackers/pirates/ what ever you want to be called) and people on sites like Slashdot (cool people) don't even know a raid happened. I'd say it'd be forgotten in a month.
It's not waco. No one died, a bunch of computers got seized... Sadly no one cares no matter how many rights are brought up.
I'll state this again because people just don't seem to understand that.
E3 is not a consumer show, it's not an open show. The fact that so many fans got into the show was a shame and part of the reason the show was closed (the other was the big 5 (EA, Activision and the 3 consoles) all were in a giant pissing match and then bitched every time they spent more on the show than last year.
E3 has it's issues but originally and primarily it's like GDC a show for the industry, the fact no one policed it isn't the issue, it was an insider show.
E for all, PAX, and every other show out there is a consumer show. There's a very difference flavor from an industry show to a consumer show and what you'll see is different. It's more oriented at the end user and you probably won't see as much early (alpha/beta) versions of games. But don't be fooled by the fake media hype. Btw E3 will continue to remain for the industry, this year it sounds like they are going toned down but the information that should come out of E3 will still be coming only from there.
First they release Karaoke revolution, a game that's popular in Japan and now in America.
Karaoke revolution 2 introduces Duets for Americans.
Then they release Guitar hero, a game that explodes in popularity.
Then they release Guitar hero 2, introducing the cooperative guitar players.
And now they release Rock band, a game which takes everything they learned and adds drums into it. Plus working with EA probably helps them get online working which can only improve the game.
Hell I could even mention frequency and amplitude for timing and visualization but the point is that they essentially made every part of this game into it's own game except for drumming. Very cool Harmonix.
Hey thanks to hear that someone who is too lazy to actually register for the site or too afraid to even use his real name decides to bash me for what ever reason.
No really it's great.
No no . this is completely different because of X Y and Z. That's why this guy is a genius, the fact he has no proof or evidence doesn't matter he's a genius and deserves tons of credit.
I agree with the parent, this theory was there for a while, he might have fine tuned the ending, but nothing groundbreaking here. Using the workforce and all the known data we can prove all major theories for the pyramids. The solution isn't the "easiest way" they could have built the period, it's for the ACTUAL way and this guy doesn't have any serious proof to my knowledge. Good for evolving theories, but yet again no theory is the winner yet.
Seriously wouldn't an internal ramp leave at least a little mark? You know, somewhere that we can see?
One day with out AC? It would be the best day ever!
Alas I'm guessing this is the true april fools.
That's why we have findings, and we publish the process for the findings as well as the findings themselves. If another party can't reproduce the finding then our proof can be debunked.
Well we used to, there's numerous global warming reports (Michael Mann's report early on comes into mind, though he's not the only one in the global warming debate, and far from the only scientist guilty of this) that issued findings with out their processes, as well as other places in science. So this wonkiness we speak of appears. Personally I think it's time science journals demand the processes as well as the findings for everything, but then their magazine would shrink because science has slowly been moving to a point where the "answer" is far more important than any question that can be asked.
Seriously, doing a witch hunt at google to find out if some unnamed source told them to revert the images? Then what do you do? Publicly shame them (of course if they are controlled by the opposite party should be implied).
This seems about as wasteful and useless as anything. Claiming it's "airbrushing history" is just grasping for justication.
This is a joke right? The AI is stupid. There's points where a VIP is killed (won't say who) and it's been noticed that the guards he has will find him, walk over to him do a normal "death" routine and walk back to the place they are guarding. This is after the person they have been assigned to guard is killed.
Early on in the game there was a couple points where I messed up with a Quarter and then enemy walked into a room where I was standing and stared directly at me as I walked up to him, he didn't say or react at all, he just stared.
The AI is insane, in that it doesn't work.
If we are talking about a computer game I'm hoping we are talking about human-like intelligence.
What I really was trying to get across was a common misconception (one that stuck me when I got into a game company) that "AI" as it's taught in school is very different hen AI as it applies to most games. The biggest difference is most AIs don't learn, and most are pretty much just a script that doesn't change. We don't have the ability to throw away any cycles of the game so the AI tends to be highly stripped down to the point it's just "oh I see a gun, I'm going to react to the gun, how should I react to the gun, I'll do that." This is completely scripted to the point where you can tell what's going to happen if you point the gun at the person a second time or a third time. There's no "thought" or "intelligence" to the system, thought it might seem "intelligent"
A chess AI on the other hand evaluates all the options of what it can do and chooses a best option, the pruning is a form of "thought". A chess master will be doing something similar where he thinks of all his possible moves and then considers responses and so on which is effectively using game theory. To me that's actual intelligence even if it's not fancy.
The difference between a neural net program is it's code that tries to simulate the learning and thought process if you will, the code that AI in games use is just like I illustrated above. There's an "action" and the code quickly decides what's the reaction and does it. It doesn't try to evaluate too much because we don't have the cycles to do that.
The Best AIs I've found are in some games like Yu-gi-oh the card game I'm currently working on nightmare troubadour and most of the opponents I've played always make a "great" move. On the other hand there's a couple opponents who are dumb as bricks, yet these enemies are suppose to be dumb as bricks (they are first time players in the story) And it's amazing how poorly they play (the play "well" for stupid AI, but they make bonehead moves that a new player can easily capitialize on. The player feels like each player has a different style, not just a different deck, and that makes for a much better game. (this is coming from a 25 year old guy in the game business).
The reason it's great is that there's simple rules to the game that the AI can know. There's been one point in the game where the AI got confused mainly because I blocked her in with a couple traps, but overall the Ai's abilities in the game are outstanding.
The important think to know about AI in games is it's not "AI". It's scripts or code that simulates scripts. There's no neural nets or anything else because we can't get the power for a neural net in an active game. In chess we can but then chess no longer is fun unless we tone down the "intellegence".
Some other great AIs are Gears of War (On insane they do great flanking maneuvers and such) Ghost recon (they really seem to know how to take cover and make it a challenge for the player to take them out. however the friendly AI leaves.... alot to be desired), Oblivion (watching random people walk around is pretty impressive, it helped build up that game.) and others, but there's none that make me think I'm fighting a real person.
There is a push to create truer "AIs" in games, Gran turismo created a way to train Drivers, Forza 2 is improving on it's drivtar system, Virtua fighter 4 had a way to teach an AI fighter, which was cool and indepth. But these are all "Scripts" taken from player experiences, not exactly AI. There's other games working on "true AI" but even then it's still toned down because we don't have the tools to make the driver "think" yet. It's just rail following and teaching the computer how to follow rails or when to break away from them.
I wouldn't say the molyeniux's games had great AI but they have good AI that at least learns a bit. Yet they feel like it's all you telling the game what to do, and it trying to figure out what you want it to do (and it fails) where as the Sims has interesting AI, but never feels real (mainly because the game never feels real).
So overall if you want to see good AI, look at simple games, expecting full 3d world simulations to have great ai is still a long way off but it's slowly coming. However this push for "graphics graphics graphics" won't help AI in the long run, but hopefully in a couple generations we stop worrying about graphics and work on AI and physics which seem to be more beneficial to the player then higher polycounts.
Applaud it passes Acid 2 compatibility but don't expect it or demand it. Acid2 is NOT a standard. Acid is a really poorly written page with many issues or features developers want including error checking in CSS. Acid2 finds out if a browser can correctly interpret the errors for instance.
Personally I hope no one passes Acid 2 for one reason. It enables people to write poorly designed webpages. If you're going to write a web page do it correctly or not at all. Expecting a browser to fix your stupid errors shouldn't even be an option.
It's good Firefox 3 passes the acid test but who cares. It is better working than it was for poorly written pages. I'd much rather choose a lighter weight browser than a bloated piece of software that supposidly works with "Everything" no matter how much of a screwup the web designer was. One of the reasons I avoid IE7 like the plague.
They have sold 6 million units. All my local stores have regular shipments. I haven't seen any still because they just go too fast. That's not exactly bad numbers, it's just higher then expected demand.
In 5 monthes they sold more than half what the 360 sold in a year with constant shipments. I'm sure Nintendo is just holding back production, because they don't need the money right?
Let's just look at this, Nintendo is going to ship as many units as they can, they arn't holding it back. They might not be forcing their employees to work overtime just to ship an extra 10 percent of units. 6 million units is an amazing number and they still constantly sell out.
Might they hold back a couple in the last couple weeks? Maybe. But I don't think they have been since January it's gotten easier to find and there's not as many news stories about it, but I still don't see them laying around for days, weeks, monthes at a time.
Let's look at the other side. Sony. Sony had a massive launch people waited for days out in the cold and almost killed themselves to get a PS3. They shipped less than they promised (and around half what the wii shipped the first day) and saturated the market. At this point it's completely saturated PS3s are laying around on the shelves and Sony is claiming "victory" any way they can. The European Ps3 launches were ok in that everyone got a Ps3, but how could you not sell out? The playstation 3 is shipping out 6 million units this month. The Early reports are a third of them have been sold. It'll probably hit a half because of a European launch. And we get weekly reports of "why" they arn't selling so fast because they are successful at getting that many units out there.
The 360 also had some early shipment problems. Systems did appear on the shelves in the next couple months but even then neither system had half the numbers the Wii has.
I think Gamestop is feeling the fact that people WANT the wii, and Nintendo has only alloted them so many. Best buy and Walmart can get 20+ systems in a single shipment, Gamestop is lucky to hit double digits per store in most shipments. This happened at launch and still happens now. Gamestop just doesn't get as many units (per store) as the other chains, even though their focus is only on game products, that would piss me off too, so methinks this is a case of sour grapes and the delicious Wiine. (sorry, but at least I didn't go with "whine".)
I have to agree with that. My mother who's age is numberless (no seriously we haven't created a number that high) is sorta addicted to quizzes and surveys and such. I get tons of free stuff in the mail because she filled out "X offer" or did "X quiz" for me. She's one of those mystery shoppers, she's one of those that people call to ask their opinions on and so on.
I'm almost 40 years younger, and I don't even have 5 minutes that I'd be willing to give to a quiz, I like single question polls where I don't have to do anything, but if there's more than one page expect me to make up random answers after the third question.
Hell assume I'm making up answers on the second question unless I REALLY REALLY like your product.
"Simply put, companies don't have to use that extra capacity, but neither is there some barrier blocking their path when they get close to DVD-9's limits. Which many games already manage to get close to."
That's fine however localization is NOT a major space concern. Not many games are close to breaking dvd-9s limits. At least not as many as Sony would like to tell you. Oblivion which is a freaking enormous game that is not even topping out. Those who believe they can't fit a game on a dvd isn't doing it efficiently or just are looking for excuses.
"So says you. Most other people appear to think that Blu-Ray has a slight edge but both systems are mostly comparable."
Are you freaking kidding me? I'm not talking about edges I'm not talking "which is better" I'm talking, we ran simulations of streaming and in every test the PS3 drive is SLOWER. This has been confirmed by almost every report out there.
"Insomniac did not say that. It said "The PS3's eight parallel CPUs (one primary "PPU" and seven Cell processors) give it potentially far more computing power than the three parallel CPUs in the Xbox 360". What is incorrect about that statement?"
Yeah potential. Potential gets you nothing in the real world., when you can't use all 8 cores. The PS3 is an amazing crunching machine, it's built for Folding at home, but for game programming it's not the best machine, especially if you're looking at something like an open world game, the Ps3 just isn't built around branching paths.
"There is nothing particularly hard about programming the Cell. Any software engineer worth their salt (i.e. the kind responsible for writing game engines, optimized code etc.), should be able to master it easily enough and the people doing periphery stuff like menu systems shouldn't have to care. SPU programming is little removed from multi-threading and most of the principles can be carried over to it."
I guess our company completely sucks then. Except we don't, the system itself has a huge amount of problems (and no we arn't the only ones), whether it's the fact that out of the 6 active cores, one's dedicated to graphics card, and another 4 only has access to 128 megs of that 512 megs or ram (before you have to start doing DMA calls, which anyone should tell you will kill your frame rate). Yeah the cell programming is easy, if you make a game specifically designed for the cell processor. We are game programmers, we make games on platforms. Most of our time should be on our game not on making out game work on the platform. The 360 makes that easy, the Ps3 does not.
If we are going to consider the HD an alternative to the drive, then you're installing games and drive speed is still part of an issue (not as big though). Play Tony Hawk Pro Skater 8 on the 360, it's a great game, however every time you take the disc out and put it back in you have a decently long 2-3 minute load time that's unskipable the first time you play it after that point, that's fine the first time but annoying every time you want to take a quick trip, the way they do it is a movie. I believe this is gone if you didn't have a HD hooked up.
Still you're talking about a wait for the players. I'm all for utilizing the HD, but if I'm going to need to wait 5-15 minutes when I put Oblivion into my PS3, I'm going to get a little annoyed verses the 360 where there's a mandatory situation where you are only allowed 2 minutes of non interactive load times.
Btw, the standardized hard drive assuming we're going to be using it gives an even less important for drive size, why not compress your files and install them the first time you're player runs the game?
I do admit the standardized hard drive is a major feature. However my post is more about the fact that the blu-ray is an unnecessary feature for this generation. It's a 200 dollar addition to the game system and an attempt to get blu-ray into as many homes as possible to claim a "win" on the format war (personally neither format wins, an upscaled DVD is good enough on a 50 inch tv for me, and I don't have to rebuy my dvds and movies). If instead they put out a 400 dollar Ps3 with out blu-ray and then claimed some games will likely require the blu-ray add on it would have worked out better, but as a whole I can't say the blu-ray is a "win" for the consumers or developers, but it's a "win" for Sony and that's why it's included.
The biggest problem isn't about just the anti-tivoization problems or what ever. It's the fact that the new rules are not well written, they are based on simple problems that the FSF has had with GPL v2. They don't like the fact that Novell and Microsoft are working together so they are stopping that with GPLv3. They don't like the way Tivo utilized Linux so that's banned in the future.
It's already clear that people are disagreeing with these moves but the changes don't appear to be taking these opinions into consideration.
The real question is if "Free Software" is ever going to work in a corporate environment, there's gotta be a point where you allow corporations access to your software and you have to allow them to protect their work in some form. Instead of kicking and crying when Novell and Microsoft started working together, why didn't the FSF realize that it was a move to legitimize Linux and work with it to bring Linux to the people.
Microsoft is never going to work with or the FSF, it's just not going to happen, they rather work with a company like Novell. The reason they won't is because of this, Microsoft is trying to work with Linux options and instead of trying to work out some agreement between the general Linux community and this deal the answer that we have come up with is a restrictive GPL that attacks this very deal.
I wonder why Microsoft hasn't tried to become more Linux friendly years ago if this is the response.
I work in a company that does open world games (and good ones actually). I have to tell you the "hobbling" isn't true. The 512 megs of ram that we have on the system is a bigger issue than anything that has to do with the media we are working on.
Blu-ray sounds great but what do you need to fill it with. As it is the amount of money we pay to get the game shipped now is a lot. Cost is what's stopping us from making bigger or more diverse games, rather then size of the media again.
The people who are hurt the most by this are the JRPG companies who just explode with FMVs, blue dragon is a 3 dvd game, other then them I've heard no complaints about the size of the media. Hell, The only reasons they are filling up Blu-rays are they are using "stupid" tricks like uncompressed audio for Metal gear solid. I just have a simple question. Now that both systems are out, and we already have seen that the 360's dvd has a higher read speed then the ps3's blu-ray device (overall blu-ray SHOULD be faster, but in these two actual system the 360's drive is faster). Why are you using larger files sizes rather then using the "extra" power of the ps3 to uncompress these files? The simple answer is no, the ps3 isn't that powerful (Insomniac today claims you have 8 cores? funny we only have access to 6 cores).
In the end blu-ray isn't going to be the answer. Sony's system has some good marks, but blu-ray isn't necessary, and the Cell processor is doing more to hurt the developer than it is helping it.
If anything the 360 developer's biggest problem has nothing to do with DVDs, it's due to the fact that the Hard drive is non standard and we can't guarantee using that for caching, but that's a relatively minor complaint in the long run.
Answer: If you're anti-Microsoft and anti-corporation, yes.
If you just want to have linux as it is now, available to everyone, no.
GPLV3 is slowly becoming "Stallman's opinions on everything" and it seems to be that he's not the person to write GPLs as he is on the extreme end of most things.
I don't see many people saying this is sinister, I think most people are just interested in what type of information MS follows.
And you're right, everyone does this. Do you think a politician just blindly goes into a press conference? Do you think a coach randomly chooses people to ask questions? So yeah, this is pretty much business as usual, but still pretty interesting.
Ok want to become a journalist, create a site, and I don't mean a fucking blog, I mean an actual site like IGN, gamespot, Cnn, or what ever media site you want, then bitch when they don't invite you because you're site sucks.
Most major media outlets aren't just cheesy crap boxes that people put up over night, they are hard work, if you honestly want to be a "journalist" apply to them or make your own and then build it up. Just realize it'll take a long time before you're counted as an actual journalist, and all that time you better be playing by the journalist rules (btw if you don't know those? too bad you're held to them).
Kotaku is a decently well known blog, who had a recent run in with Sony, where Sony blackballed them, they printed a rumor and sony was pissed off, this illustrates a problem with bloggers, they are known as an unknown entity. In the end sony apologized and removed the blackball, but it's still an incident that illustrates exactly why bloggers aren't journalists and shouldn't be expected to be treated as journalists. They have their own rules, and they don't owe anything to anyone else. Sony told them not to post it but they had a factual rumor, and no reason not to print it.
Kotaku for the most part gets a LOT of stuff that bloggers wouldn't normally. They get invites to major parties, free development hardware (to try out new demos), free games, information and so on. But notice all this free shit isn't because they are a blog. It's because they are moderately popular to the point that people read them enough where they can be considered a news source. The companies who are supporting them see them as worthy of their attention. Kotaku was fully in the right here.
On the other hand I could make a site "loser news" and never get a 10th of what they get, why? because my news site wouldn't be considered "worthy".
Simply put bloggers should be honored when they are invited or allowed into press releases because they are getting in on something that 10 years ago they probably wouldn't but on the other hand, they need to realize exactly what they are. And that's not "the press" they are some idiot on the internet with opinions that people read, so it's time for bloggers to stop expecting to be treated like the press.
If they honestly want to get into press events then they should becoming "the press", but they still aren't entitled to this no matter what Mr. Evans thinks.
Oh and before you try it, don't try "freedom of the press" you don't got it. you can use "right to free speech" but again... ehhh Mr. Evans won't learn, and the rest of you pretty much understand this.
I'm not saying Microsoft is the best thing for gaming, but Sony is sure as hell not the best thing. Ibm did invent the Cell, however Sony forced it into the Ps3 even after developers told them it's not the best for gaming. They then have forced blu-ray onto the public as well and then claimed a flawless backwards compatibility and gave a less than such.
Currently, I think both companies are pretty bad, the 360 is the best platform but relying on Microsoft to continue to make good hardware and not screw over the fans is like asking my dog not to eat the treat I left in the middle of the floor, it might work for a couple minutes, but eventually that treat is going to go.