Yes, Prey was due out in 1998. This is 3d realms, and they finally released Prey, now imagine if Duke Nukem comes out this year. They'll have nothing to work on:(
The funniest thing is that they tout portal technology. Portal is due out with Episode 2 of HL2, producing a more interesting a better version of dynamic portals made by the player.
Feel free to laugh at meantions of DNF also on that history page.
The title of articles in the last couple weeks have left a bit to be desired, not that it's lies but it's slanted in various ways just by a change in one word.
I just believe they could accurately portray the articles a bit better in the title, rather then trying to get people to read them by going a little more sensationalism, however small it is.
But why would anyone buy a more expensive car, personally I wouldn't buy a Ford GT, I'd rather get a vette, it's a better priced vehicle. There are those who want a specific car but they want THAT car, not an economic version of it.
The saddest thing though is as I read more about it, Europe is basically laughing at the trend of americans to get hybrids. Europe has worked on diesal engines, and hasn't really embraced conservative engines yet. Which makes this a harder sell. Of course Ferrari and Porsche will never be sold but there are many others in Europe who could benefit from it (BMW for one)
Basically look at where the hybrids have appeared and how they have evolved. That's where you have to start selling the Battery powered cars, that's the area where people are interested currently, read any performance magazine and they are sorta dismissed for it.
If I was to buy a battery car, it should work as well as a ford focus, or neon, or some other car I personally wouldn't want to drive. If such a car existed that would drive in a similar style to the Prius Hybrids that's is so "hip" now, and at the same time cost similar, meaning approximatly around 5K more or less including fuel expenses for 3-4 years (Aka if you have to replace your battery each year vs. a year of moderate gas use.) Then it's a viable car.
People expecting a "sports" car out of it is ridiculous. I currently drive a cavalier, I love my Cavalier, but I don't even expect that much power. The reason you drive a first gen battery power car is to save the planet or avoid expensive gas. Would I? Nah, I'm not into the enviroment (don't bitch at me, I'm honest at least), and I want a sportier car, maybe a Camero, but at the same time I'm hopeful that as the first gen battery cars get older, and the technology gets investigated more each year we might get camero's that rocket along the roads without gas, and then vettes that do it.
The point is people who expect cars like Vettes or Veyrons to be similar to the battery cars have to also take into account that the Vette can do something like 18 miles per gallon in the city. My Cavalier can do around upwards of 25-27 and highway I easily can get 30. If the first gen cars can beat vettes and S2000's great, but no one is going to pay 60K just for a car because it can do that, those of us who want the "sports" car won't adapt as easily as those of us who already are buying Prius Hybrids and such. Their aim should be at making the system work and give decent performance in that range with out costing an arm and a leg in price. Then when the concept is proven thinking about developing a higher end car.
It's the same as any new technology it'll take time for everyone to adapt, but those of us who are looking at a car as more of a power symbol arn't going to be as easy sells to jump on the electric bandwagon.
Simply put those of us who'd buy cars that have lower and lower miles per gallon, will not be as keen on saving the planet as other folks who might have families and sedans, and aiming on making cars that will make the sports car fans happy in the first round of cars will be too expensive and possibly break the technology's finacial back too early and fast.
As for Ford and Mazda, if you think they haven't done any R&D on this then you're misguided, but at the same time to develop an entirely new engine themselves will put them in an even more precarious position then they are now.
Have you ever actually looked at microsoft's response times. There are many viruses that use the same doors to damage system, and the reason for it?
Slow response times. This is microsoft's way, it can't just be a hot fix, it has to be a hotfix, say three days to write, then testing begins, doesn't fix the problem on one computer, another week of programming, then finally it's ready for more testing. You get the idea.
Ugh, Yes, EFF hates the RIAA, RIAA is bad, EFF is good to neutral. Let's get real news instead of restating the same old same old.
On a side note, when is the article title writer coming back? The last couple days have been pretty sub par and most of the time missed a crucial piece of data, or changed a word to a non synonym.
What idiots. Spore != only game with customization
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What Spore May Spawn
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· Score: 1, Interesting
Spore isn't going to revolutionize customzation. Hint 1: We've had customization since the begining of time.
When you made a D&D character in table top games that was customization, games are adding more and more options in for that, but it's been around for ever. MMORPGs tend to have a great deal of customization as well. And Spore isn't even the only game that has such indepth customization. Remember a game called The Sims? Maybe you know the lead guy on it? Will Wright?
Customization is a growing area of gameplay, however there's a problem with it. Once customization grows to large games have to be built around customization, rather than customization built into the game. The problem is 99 percent graphics. If I could have any type of character then either hit detection suffers, or level design suffers. If my character can be 7 feet tall or 1000 pounds of blubber, then every door way I should have to go through needs to be those dimensions which looks odd to the 4 feet tall character. This isn't a problem when you work in a world system where you make homes as the player. But in a large scale world, there's limitations, in most games the world has to be designed with every player type in mind.
This brings us to Hint 2: customization is good, as long as the game doesn't suffer for it.
Will Wright makes free form customization games, Sim City, Sim ant, The Sims, all of these are simulations where you can create what ever you want in the game, where there's no real win condition, and where the player plays how he wants to. There's "scenarios" in these games but that's about it. That's his goal and that's what he excels at, I'm happy for him.
But that doesn't mean every game is going to have aliens that you can design. They won't. People want to play humanoids at worst, and humans at best. They might want to grow aliens, and that's a possibility, but you won't see it "ripple" through the field. You'll likely see the same levels of customization. Saint's row is currently coming out with decently indepth customization, this is coming out before Spore, so does that mean Spore is copying it? or it is copying spore? Neither. Customization has been coming for a long time, we just needed better systems and programmers to generate it.
Does will wright have a lot of flux in the world and a lot of people copy his ideas? YES but Spore isn't going to revolutionize the industry, the Sims already did that. And it was already being done before that point. We will see crap like "the singles" or what ever crap they made based off of the sims, there was a couple of them, and each one was a fraction of the sims. Those same types of games will be based off of Spore, but no, the level of customization that Will Wright touts is not going to exist in the entire industry. FPSes will continue to use humans, RTSes will continue to use set standards, the only games that will allow you to create new monsters and such is... that's right, Will Wright-esque sim games (as well as stuff like Monster hunter and so on) The rest of the industry will keep using the customizations we've had in the industry for years, which is growing pretty indepth.
Which leads us to Hint 3: Brains are for using, not for sitting on.
Most of the people commenting on this are missing his point. He's not against the story, he's against large scale stories that are all told in cutscenes, I must agree with him. Half-life 2 does what few others have done, have interactive "cutscenes". It works well though it's not for everything, Doom 3 and Quake 4 both had well done systems where story is told through out the mission and cutscenes only happen once in a while when you MUST.
I wouldn't say his God of War game was too cutscene heavy though the cutscenes definatly killed the action and feel of the game. Instead of watching as the titan gets close and you jump on him, why not do it yourself as a voice over tells you the story, and then you'd climb up the titan, it'd take a while but the payoff in the size and feel of the game would be bigger.
This isn't Beta code, this is a public beta, the current name for what was originally called "Gamma". Aka, the stuff right before release.
This isn't a problem if the problem you find is a minor thing where if you click on a button it crashes only if you have a ATI card that was made in June 2005.
This is a problem if the majority of code, that has been rewritten from near scratch has major flaws that would take another full rewrite to get rid of (or years of critical updates). Vista is supposed to be the reinvention of Microsoft security, however this isn't secure. This isn't a "we're still adding features" problem this is a critical flaw at the core of the system.
I love Microsoft, but I thought they were dead. I mean yes they were still shipping half assed products but their news was all press releases.
However it's good to see Microsoft is back to complaining about others entering into areas of development that they only entered into likely because they bought a company already in that field. The beauty is instead of making their product better, finding ways to enhance the value of their product, or develop a stronger backbone, they complain about their competition.
Jesus, imagine someone who is pissed off because someone moved into their field offering a similar product. Now microsoft didn't do that with Win 95, ripping of Macs OS, nor are they doing it again with Vista, which looks a lot like OSx, only with out the useful unix backend. MSN certainly wasn't trying to grab some search engine area away from other companies like excite. Microsoft certainly hasn't tried to rip away sony or nintendo's marketshare in the video game industry. But if they did, they certainly have done extremely well in japan (50,000 xbox 360s from what I heard).
This is a company who basically has constantly ripped ideas from other companies, and gone into areas to compete with other big names, but every time something tries to do it again, they throw a tantrum and use their might to try to force them out (linux/windows, firefox/IE, any good media player(MPC)/Windows media player) It's just good to see them up to their old "tricks".
Pretty much that's the problem, anything worthy can't just be procedurally done. One reason speed tree is so well acceped is because it doesn't generate hyper real graphics, it generates good graphics on the fly.
If you had a huge amount of control (the only way it would be worthwhile) it would be too long to program games to use procedural generation or have a lot of Memory usage (all those trigger points). If instead it's quickly done then it's going to be like Speedtree, great for a tree you can't interact with, however if you wanted one tree you could destroy, you'd need to put triggers on the tree, stop generating the tree when you destroy it and then warp in "destroyed" parts.
It's hard to say Procedural generation is going to be a bad thing, it's not. But it's also not worth the time it's going to take. Sadly we see the final result of the 96K game, we don't see the hours it took to create it, or the hours of theory before that.
So you want the same armor code to be used in every game? Oh how fun. That'll really make everyone feel like they have a custom character. Honestly we'll all bitch because the game doesn't look unique enough. We all already do that.
Do you know how long Speedtree took? Have you actually looked? 4 years. 4 years for CURRENT-GEN speed trees. Sorry article writer, Speedtree and all procedural generation still ages. Sorry that speed tree doesn't generate random trees, they generate trees using pseudo random algorithm. You seed, it generates the same tree. Looks nice the first time, then you ignore the trees because they all start looking the same. Not that Oblivion isn't beautiful but when you really examine it you'll find it's a facade.
That's 4 years mind you when people were WORKING on Procedural generation. 4 years of these guys lives. My companie's game has also been worked on for ideas to production in 4 years. That means we've likely taking the same dev time, yet they still only have focused on trees, and we are producing full games. Does that sounds like a worthy amount of time? I do applaud it. Unlike Havok I've yet to be flooded with speed tree games, but then again I've only played one and my company is making one. Who knows 3 years down the line.
Do you know how long it would take for everything, or even something more important than trees to be uniquely procedurally generated?
The problem is when we get 10 processors, are we going to be willing to dedicate half our processors to generating the world? or are we going to upgrade our games to 3 processors for havok, 4 processors for graphics, 2 processors for gameplay and 1 processor for audio?
Good games like everything has always been substance of graphics, so why use processor intensive graphics or gaemplay when we are creating larger and larger systems, why not spread that gameplay around to everyone, tell our NPCs to do more things, think in new ways, rather then focusing only on generating the world or graphics?
There's a reason why we are investigating blu ray and HD-DVD, because our current DVD is at the end of the life. Microsoft touted Procedural generation because they were at a disadvantage to the Ps3 in disc size, however I'm sure they knew it wasn't actually going to do what they promised (create smaller disc size games that are produced just as fast as games that don't use procedural generation).
Btw yes spore is using procedural generation, I'm hopeful for it. However we're not going to see a final product til next year, and I'm sure it's been developed for quite a while, so I have no idea if it was worth it or not, but I'm interested in the dev diaries for that.
The problem with the idea is instead of creating larger high quality unique images, or large quanity of images, the idea is to generate your images on the fly through code.
Ok that would work. And it does. However it doesn't work in large scale games. First off if you look at Procedural generation you have to code the way the system works very carefully. It's like explaining to an alien what my DDR pad is. "it's a large pad with four buttons on it, It has lights." oops forgot it's metal, forgot this and that. And what's worse, every single time you use it you'll have to create a new way to describe the texture, or you'll get the same texture for everything.
But do you realize how long it would take to design the ENTIRE world of Halo with that tool? How about Prey? how about GTA? It wouldn't take 3 years between games, it'd take 10 years, or it would cost vastly more.
Xbox 360 fanboys (not that I hate the system) tout this as the reason they don't need blu-ray. The theory is sound. (It does work, it will work, it will always work) But at the same time, the developed a small game for it. Did they have trees, multiple people with tons of different clothes, flowing textures. Did their game sell a couple million copies?
Some companies do use procedural generation, for stuff that's inconsiquencial. Trees is the big one currently, Speed tree save tons of time, but that's the only widespread use of the technology so far.
It boils down to this. If procedural generation is the solution to all our problems why haven't we used it in everything? Why wasn't it discovered earlier? It's not because of the power of computers, it's because it's not going to save the world. We arn't going to see well made games using procedural generation for graphics because it just bogs down the processor, and it doesn't give any noticable improvement in graphic quality. If we had 10 processors, then yeah we can waste 4-5 working on generating the world, but even with 6 processors, 1 is for graphics, 1 or 2 is for physics (a must have in most games now), and the rest is for your gameplay components, we don't have the extra power no matter what ivory tower scientists want use to believe.
This is all "what if" the answer though is "it can't"
I meant on that site, I'm sure he's completely valid, however the fact he even references Madden in his small blerb and then tells US what's wrong with gaming is a little short sited.
He had 7 YEARS at EA, I'm sure that also left him a little jaded. I've never been employed by them but I'm sure the employees have little to no say, especially working on madden every year, at the company I work (game industry developer) the lower end people have a lot of ability to move however we try to create fun games, not games that sell, we've done well in both areas but that's probably because we personally like our games and customize them to what we would expect to see.
This is pretty strange, but it's got a purpose. I believe ID coined the phrase, but it's similar in theory to Strafing. As one flies in the plane one would "strafe" a target, which would mean to shoot from the plane. However the way the shooting normally would happen is one would start shooting before, as the cross hairs moved over the target, and finish shooting after the target, aka a "strafing run". This would allow a hopefully large amount of damage in a single run.
Strafing in the games is likely a reference to this as you would duck out of one corner, fire over the whole attacking enemies (usually coming from one direction) and slide into another corner (which at that time you turn and wait for the rest to come around the corner, or you'd strafe back and run for your life.
If one was to imagine the screen of the game turned sideways, the view of strafing would be a bit like an airplane flying over a target to unload machine gun fire.
You'd have to ask ID (I believe they created it) if this is the real reason, but I'm 90 percent sure it comes from "strafing run" rather then "strafe" itself.
So wait, it was OK when GTA San Andreas had you wait til 1/3rd of the game was done before you could buy any weapons? According to "No New Features After the First Few Levels" that would be a good thing. Personally I think that's the WORST thing about it. No new features has to be taken with a grain of salt. Let's look into it.
"Person can't drive car til they get license, they must past a long involved series of missions to do that, then to own a gun they must get a gun license, which happens through another set of four missions. Person finds a rocket launcher on the ground, must now take lessons from a third NPC."
Sounds exciting. How about
"Person grabs a car, drives to a local gun range, buys a simple gun because it's all he can afford, as he drives to the next point, he finds an AK-47 on a local gangbanger, he grabs the weapon and starts to shoot up the street".
I don't know the second one sounds like it'd be more fun. I mean learning new "skills" is good, but learning simple stuff that should be available at the begining is lame. In San Andreas, they locked the Airports, which is a good thing at times. People could still get in, hijack a plane and fly badly.
I think that cavet that you should gain skills depends on the game. If you're doing open world games, you shouldn't get completely new skills unless there's a reason. Perhaps you can get a group together after a while and lead them because you earn their respect. But then again from the begining you're able to use all your abilities that you normally would with out having to "unlock" them.
I looked at the writer's bio and found he wrote a bunch of books, good for him. as well as
"Ernest was most recently employed as a lead designer at Bullfrog Productions, and for several years before that he was the audio/video producer on the Madden NFL Football product line. "... Hmmmm I'll leave on that note. You can decide yourself on his opinions validity, oh and that's ALL the specific industry experience he gives.
So instead of having a simple couple lines of code to include it back into the game, you obscure it to the point you can't access it. If you really want, you scrable the files themselves to the point you can't get them back.
And what ever you do, you don't have an employee leak the code to get it back into the game. There's numerous games when certain stuff was taken out because of ESRB issues. The company I worked at has done it a couple times, not because they felt it was wrong, but because of a ESRB issue of rating.
However instead of just taking it out as a console command or such (which they did in the demo, and it was figured out when the demo was released) they took it out again, removed the console command, and then scambled the whole code to make it work, then released the game. That "over violent" scenes have yet to be cracked publicly.
If it was an inside job, then nothing Rockstar was going to do was going to save them this heartache. If someone outside the company figured it out then Rockstar needed to do more.
This is like saying I should be allowed to own a gun, have the bullets next to the gun but not be in the gun and be considered "safe". No, you put the bullets in another location, or you lock the gun and bullets into a safe which only people over the age of 18 know, and you keep the safe locked and away from your kids and your kid isn't going to shoot someone or themselves.
I'm not blaming Rockstar, but Rockstar left the code in the game in a way that either was leaked or figured out, either way that's Rockstar's or Rockstar's employee's fault.
Maybe a Paypal fund for an entire city - kind of like a telethon (once you reach $1 million no one in Des Moines will be killed).
I prefer the converse. For 1 Billion dollars (I dream bigger) You'll take care of the middle east problem. For 1 Million dollars, you'll make sure that the cubs win the world series, no questions ask. For 1 Thousand dollars, that annoying dog that barks outside your window will get a free trip to at least 5 layers of atmosphere.
Remember, with my unique version, it's not terrorism, it's offering a service to solve a problem.
Btw, be quick to market, my robot, KillZilla will be on the market in 2022. And don't you dare try to steal the name.
How have we survived the last 50 years. 45 we had the bomb, Russia got it soon after, Cuba missle crisis, 67's 7 day war, strife, famine, political unrest, bad presidents in the USA (remember, carter and ford both makes Bush looks like a good president), destruction of the USSR, assasination attempts by the KGB, Terrorists attacks of all types, Hijackings, Cheyna, Afghanstan, Iraq, Kuwait, Israel, Palestine, Chernoybl, Taiwan. Over population of countries in Africa and countries like India, religious fever that cause men to do insane things (both against religions (1939-1945, guess the country, and to spread their doctrine, 1939-1945, (as well as korean war, and vietnam war))
Yet among all of this, there's not been a nuclear attack in 61 years, After 2 bombs in the span of 10 days... How could you imagine 60 years with out one after hearing about the attacks.
The answer of how to survive the next 100 years is simple. Evolve. We will always have war, but at the same time, the world has moved on from the military ages. We have reached the information age, what was the future in the 50s and 60s. Anything you want to know and need to know you can gain in seconds, true HAL doesn't talk to us directly but we can garner anything now instantly. We can learn about the war and the strife and the famine that was always there.
Perhaps that's why everyone thinks this is the end, it's not that there's more war than ever before. It's that we get more information about the war than ever before. We can never give up the information streams we get now, that would be counter productive, but what we as a world have to realize is that we are now connected in ways that was impossible just 11 years ago(Internet), we have access no one in the world had 21 years ago(ARPAnet). The problem is that we can't take the information we recieve now the same way we took the information we recieved then. We shouldn't keep flying off the handle every time someone sees a problem because we haven't considered the source and implications. And it's not just us the average joes. It's US the people of the world, the media, the goverment, the corporations, and those who sit around and think all day for a living.
But in reality, the way we will survive is to adapt and evolve in how we deal with our information and situations we find ourselves in, and we'll only do that one day at a time, and willing to try new things or change the way we think.
God the greed of hollywood and the networks are amazing, they are almost as bad as the RIAA. The fact is I fast forward through ads only if I'm really enthralled in the story. Most of the time I just use the ads to go take a leak or check out what's on my computer because I'm too lazy to fast forward through them. Especially if it's a short commercial. The fact we have to sit through about 20 minutes for every hour of tv viewing is bullshit. cut the titles and credits for most shows, and you're down to under 40 minutes of show. That's not a good number.
Are we also going to disable fast forwarding through product placement, ABC commercials for it's own crappy line up (I watch Lost, I have yet to have any interest in Grey's Anatomy, Desperate housewives, or house, no matter how many times I see their commercials)
It's just another sign that ABC is farther and farther from being the highly regarded network they were just a few years ago. This is obviously a grab for more advertiser dollars (hey look these guys want to help us). But it's just going to cause lower ratings if people find their nightly Lost recording can't be run through to find that one scene they wanted to see again. Why watch it on tv, when you wait around a year, and get it on DVD where you can get the full show, no commercials and the ability to fast forward and back. Compare that for around 40-60 bucks, instead of having to sit through (20 minutes X 26 episodes, 520 minutes of commercials!!!! that's 8 hours of your life.) and can own the tv season instead of however they define what you get from watching it on TV (you don't have the right to record it except for yourself, you don't have to right to digitize it in any way, you can't download a copy of it even if you have seen the show except if they approve)
Let's also create a system where ads get removed from the show after the first play through (btw that means all we have to do is when we go for work, just play through last nights' sports program and tv show if we can) That way they don't get too much exposure for their buck.
I'm all for watching ads, especially clever ones, I don't mind, however I'm still going to look away, ignore what you say and play on my computer. The idea behind a DVR is nice because if you get home at 9:05, you start your DVR, speed through the ads and the slow parts and the flash back and the rest, and you'll be able to catch up to your friends who watched from the begining by 9:15. ABC just wants to take it away, and not to help the fans at all, but to grab more money where they can.
Question for ABC, for those who watch the program with out going to dvr are they also going to be forced to watch them or can they too move around and still continue to ignore the commercials just as they always have?
So we should expect Ebay, the largest online only auction house, to accept any and all new payment systems in the world, when they already have Paypal?
I mean we all know Google Checkout's track record of a year with.. wait no. We know that Google is secure, wait too new for that too.
The fact is Google Checkout has yet to EARN the approval that we are assuming Ebay should just give it? Why don't we wait until google is properly tested before attacking Ebay. Not that Ebay should ban it with out a statement as to why, but perhaps they don't want everyone to use googlecheckout, a system they have no control over, and after they are screwed ebay would have to refund everyone's money if google checkout doesn't.
I want to say you're wrong, and you are, but you arn't. I play on a 27 inch tv I fished out of the trash (ok it was next to the trash) And I'm very happy with it. I'm not getting the "true" picture, and I hope to one day when I get a lot of money, however it's playable on the system I have at home. However if the old classic games have taught us one lesson, it is that a good game is a good game, no matter what the graphics say, why else would Zork still be enjoyable after all these years?
Of course then again I use a online handle of "King Link", I grew up with Civ, Ultima, also, and of course Zelda, I had an atari, and believe me, no one wants a Wii more than me. However at the same time, that Wii which will be tons of fun to play, will never be near the graphical power that the 360 or PS3 will have. That's not a huge factor if you want to play a game, and Rogue Squadron was amazing on the Gamecube, but at the same time Zelda will never look that much better than it does now, it'll play better, have better controls and be more interactive, but this generation isn't about graphics for Nintendo, which I applaud. However when I make my plunge and buy a HDTV set the 360 and the PS3 will both look vastly better, Nintendo will get some boost from it as well (they are supporting at least 480), though probably not the extremes that the other two get (then again they don't need it as much in my opinion).
I think Sony and MS arn't banking on the fact that we have a HDTV already, I think they are banking on the fact we will get one during this generation of consoles. But while not having a HDTV makes the Blu Ray and HD-DVD worthless, not having a HDTV doesn't make owning a 360 worthless, just worth less. (oh I'm so clever)
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.3drealms.com/history2.html
:(
Yes, Prey was due out in 1998. This is 3d realms, and they finally released Prey, now imagine if Duke Nukem comes out this year. They'll have nothing to work on
The funniest thing is that they tout portal technology. Portal is due out with Episode 2 of HL2, producing a more interesting a better version of dynamic portals made by the player.
Feel free to laugh at meantions of DNF also on that history page.
The title of articles in the last couple weeks have left a bit to be desired, not that it's lies but it's slanted in various ways just by a change in one word.
I just believe they could accurately portray the articles a bit better in the title, rather then trying to get people to read them by going a little more sensationalism, however small it is.
But why would anyone buy a more expensive car, personally I wouldn't buy a Ford GT, I'd rather get a vette, it's a better priced vehicle. There are those who want a specific car but they want THAT car, not an economic version of it.
The saddest thing though is as I read more about it, Europe is basically laughing at the trend of americans to get hybrids. Europe has worked on diesal engines, and hasn't really embraced conservative engines yet. Which makes this a harder sell. Of course Ferrari and Porsche will never be sold but there are many others in Europe who could benefit from it (BMW for one)
Basically look at where the hybrids have appeared and how they have evolved. That's where you have to start selling the Battery powered cars, that's the area where people are interested currently, read any performance magazine and they are sorta dismissed for it.
If I was to buy a battery car, it should work as well as a ford focus, or neon, or some other car I personally wouldn't want to drive. If such a car existed that would drive in a similar style to the Prius Hybrids that's is so "hip" now, and at the same time cost similar, meaning approximatly around 5K more or less including fuel expenses for 3-4 years (Aka if you have to replace your battery each year vs. a year of moderate gas use.) Then it's a viable car.
People expecting a "sports" car out of it is ridiculous. I currently drive a cavalier, I love my Cavalier, but I don't even expect that much power. The reason you drive a first gen battery power car is to save the planet or avoid expensive gas. Would I? Nah, I'm not into the enviroment (don't bitch at me, I'm honest at least), and I want a sportier car, maybe a Camero, but at the same time I'm hopeful that as the first gen battery cars get older, and the technology gets investigated more each year we might get camero's that rocket along the roads without gas, and then vettes that do it.
The point is people who expect cars like Vettes or Veyrons to be similar to the battery cars have to also take into account that the Vette can do something like 18 miles per gallon in the city. My Cavalier can do around upwards of 25-27 and highway I easily can get 30. If the first gen cars can beat vettes and S2000's great, but no one is going to pay 60K just for a car because it can do that, those of us who want the "sports" car won't adapt as easily as those of us who already are buying Prius Hybrids and such. Their aim should be at making the system work and give decent performance in that range with out costing an arm and a leg in price. Then when the concept is proven thinking about developing a higher end car.
It's the same as any new technology it'll take time for everyone to adapt, but those of us who are looking at a car as more of a power symbol arn't going to be as easy sells to jump on the electric bandwagon.
Simply put those of us who'd buy cars that have lower and lower miles per gallon, will not be as keen on saving the planet as other folks who might have families and sedans, and aiming on making cars that will make the sports car fans happy in the first round of cars will be too expensive and possibly break the technology's finacial back too early and fast.
As for Ford and Mazda, if you think they haven't done any R&D on this then you're misguided, but at the same time to develop an entirely new engine themselves will put them in an even more precarious position then they are now.
Have you ever actually looked at microsoft's response times. There are many viruses that use the same doors to damage system, and the reason for it?
Slow response times. This is microsoft's way, it can't just be a hot fix, it has to be a hotfix, say three days to write, then testing begins, doesn't fix the problem on one computer, another week of programming, then finally it's ready for more testing. You get the idea.
Ugh, Yes, EFF hates the RIAA, RIAA is bad, EFF is good to neutral. Let's get real news instead of restating the same old same old.
On a side note, when is the article title writer coming back? The last couple days have been pretty sub par and most of the time missed a crucial piece of data, or changed a word to a non synonym.
Reading Comprehensive aint no good here.
But yes, net Income - expenses = profits.
Spore isn't going to revolutionize customzation. Hint 1: We've had customization since the begining of time.
When you made a D&D character in table top games that was customization, games are adding more and more options in for that, but it's been around for ever. MMORPGs tend to have a great deal of customization as well. And Spore isn't even the only game that has such indepth customization. Remember a game called The Sims? Maybe you know the lead guy on it? Will Wright?
Customization is a growing area of gameplay, however there's a problem with it. Once customization grows to large games have to be built around customization, rather than customization built into the game. The problem is 99 percent graphics. If I could have any type of character then either hit detection suffers, or level design suffers. If my character can be 7 feet tall or 1000 pounds of blubber, then every door way I should have to go through needs to be those dimensions which looks odd to the 4 feet tall character. This isn't a problem when you work in a world system where you make homes as the player. But in a large scale world, there's limitations, in most games the world has to be designed with every player type in mind.
This brings us to Hint 2: customization is good, as long as the game doesn't suffer for it.
Will Wright makes free form customization games, Sim City, Sim ant, The Sims, all of these are simulations where you can create what ever you want in the game, where there's no real win condition, and where the player plays how he wants to. There's "scenarios" in these games but that's about it. That's his goal and that's what he excels at, I'm happy for him.
But that doesn't mean every game is going to have aliens that you can design. They won't. People want to play humanoids at worst, and humans at best. They might want to grow aliens, and that's a possibility, but you won't see it "ripple" through the field. You'll likely see the same levels of customization. Saint's row is currently coming out with decently indepth customization, this is coming out before Spore, so does that mean Spore is copying it? or it is copying spore? Neither. Customization has been coming for a long time, we just needed better systems and programmers to generate it.
Does will wright have a lot of flux in the world and a lot of people copy his ideas? YES but Spore isn't going to revolutionize the industry, the Sims already did that. And it was already being done before that point. We will see crap like "the singles" or what ever crap they made based off of the sims, there was a couple of them, and each one was a fraction of the sims. Those same types of games will be based off of Spore, but no, the level of customization that Will Wright touts is not going to exist in the entire industry. FPSes will continue to use humans, RTSes will continue to use set standards, the only games that will allow you to create new monsters and such is... that's right, Will Wright-esque sim games (as well as stuff like Monster hunter and so on) The rest of the industry will keep using the customizations we've had in the industry for years, which is growing pretty indepth.
Which leads us to Hint 3: Brains are for using, not for sitting on.
Most of the people commenting on this are missing his point. He's not against the story, he's against large scale stories that are all told in cutscenes, I must agree with him. Half-life 2 does what few others have done, have interactive "cutscenes". It works well though it's not for everything, Doom 3 and Quake 4 both had well done systems where story is told through out the mission and cutscenes only happen once in a while when you MUST.
I wouldn't say his God of War game was too cutscene heavy though the cutscenes definatly killed the action and feel of the game. Instead of watching as the titan gets close and you jump on him, why not do it yourself as a voice over tells you the story, and then you'd climb up the titan, it'd take a while but the payoff in the size and feel of the game would be bigger.
This isn't Beta code, this is a public beta, the current name for what was originally called "Gamma". Aka, the stuff right before release.
This isn't a problem if the problem you find is a minor thing where if you click on a button it crashes only if you have a ATI card that was made in June 2005.
This is a problem if the majority of code, that has been rewritten from near scratch has major flaws that would take another full rewrite to get rid of (or years of critical updates). Vista is supposed to be the reinvention of Microsoft security, however this isn't secure. This isn't a "we're still adding features" problem this is a critical flaw at the core of the system.
I love Microsoft, but I thought they were dead. I mean yes they were still shipping half assed products but their news was all press releases.
However it's good to see Microsoft is back to complaining about others entering into areas of development that they only entered into likely because they bought a company already in that field. The beauty is instead of making their product better, finding ways to enhance the value of their product, or develop a stronger backbone, they complain about their competition.
Jesus, imagine someone who is pissed off because someone moved into their field offering a similar product. Now microsoft didn't do that with Win 95, ripping of Macs OS, nor are they doing it again with Vista, which looks a lot like OSx, only with out the useful unix backend. MSN certainly wasn't trying to grab some search engine area away from other companies like excite. Microsoft certainly hasn't tried to rip away sony or nintendo's marketshare in the video game industry. But if they did, they certainly have done extremely well in japan (50,000 xbox 360s from what I heard).
This is a company who basically has constantly ripped ideas from other companies, and gone into areas to compete with other big names, but every time something tries to do it again, they throw a tantrum and use their might to try to force them out (linux/windows, firefox/IE, any good media player(MPC)/Windows media player) It's just good to see them up to their old "tricks".
Pretty much that's the problem, anything worthy can't just be procedurally done. One reason speed tree is so well acceped is because it doesn't generate hyper real graphics, it generates good graphics on the fly.
If you had a huge amount of control (the only way it would be worthwhile) it would be too long to program games to use procedural generation or have a lot of Memory usage (all those trigger points). If instead it's quickly done then it's going to be like Speedtree, great for a tree you can't interact with, however if you wanted one tree you could destroy, you'd need to put triggers on the tree, stop generating the tree when you destroy it and then warp in "destroyed" parts.
It's hard to say Procedural generation is going to be a bad thing, it's not. But it's also not worth the time it's going to take. Sadly we see the final result of the 96K game, we don't see the hours it took to create it, or the hours of theory before that.
So you want the same armor code to be used in every game? Oh how fun. That'll really make everyone feel like they have a custom character. Honestly we'll all bitch because the game doesn't look unique enough. We all already do that.
Do you know how long Speedtree took? Have you actually looked? 4 years. 4 years for CURRENT-GEN speed trees. Sorry article writer, Speedtree and all procedural generation still ages. Sorry that speed tree doesn't generate random trees, they generate trees using pseudo random algorithm. You seed, it generates the same tree. Looks nice the first time, then you ignore the trees because they all start looking the same. Not that Oblivion isn't beautiful but when you really examine it you'll find it's a facade.
That's 4 years mind you when people were WORKING on Procedural generation. 4 years of these guys lives. My companie's game has also been worked on for ideas to production in 4 years. That means we've likely taking the same dev time, yet they still only have focused on trees, and we are producing full games. Does that sounds like a worthy amount of time? I do applaud it. Unlike Havok I've yet to be flooded with speed tree games, but then again I've only played one and my company is making one. Who knows 3 years down the line.
Do you know how long it would take for everything, or even something more important than trees to be uniquely procedurally generated?
The problem is when we get 10 processors, are we going to be willing to dedicate half our processors to generating the world? or are we going to upgrade our games to 3 processors for havok, 4 processors for graphics, 2 processors for gameplay and 1 processor for audio?
Good games like everything has always been substance of graphics, so why use processor intensive graphics or gaemplay when we are creating larger and larger systems, why not spread that gameplay around to everyone, tell our NPCs to do more things, think in new ways, rather then focusing only on generating the world or graphics?
There's a reason why we are investigating blu ray and HD-DVD, because our current DVD is at the end of the life. Microsoft touted Procedural generation because they were at a disadvantage to the Ps3 in disc size, however I'm sure they knew it wasn't actually going to do what they promised (create smaller disc size games that are produced just as fast as games that don't use procedural generation).
Btw yes spore is using procedural generation, I'm hopeful for it. However we're not going to see a final product til next year, and I'm sure it's been developed for quite a while, so I have no idea if it was worth it or not, but I'm interested in the dev diaries for that.
This generation or next.
The problem with the idea is instead of creating larger high quality unique images, or large quanity of images, the idea is to generate your images on the fly through code.
Ok that would work. And it does. However it doesn't work in large scale games. First off if you look at Procedural generation you have to code the way the system works very carefully. It's like explaining to an alien what my DDR pad is. "it's a large pad with four buttons on it, It has lights." oops forgot it's metal, forgot this and that. And what's worse, every single time you use it you'll have to create a new way to describe the texture, or you'll get the same texture for everything.
But do you realize how long it would take to design the ENTIRE world of Halo with that tool? How about Prey? how about GTA? It wouldn't take 3 years between games, it'd take 10 years, or it would cost vastly more.
Xbox 360 fanboys (not that I hate the system) tout this as the reason they don't need blu-ray. The theory is sound. (It does work, it will work, it will always work) But at the same time, the developed a small game for it. Did they have trees, multiple people with tons of different clothes, flowing textures. Did their game sell a couple million copies?
Some companies do use procedural generation, for stuff that's inconsiquencial. Trees is the big one currently, Speed tree save tons of time, but that's the only widespread use of the technology so far.
It boils down to this. If procedural generation is the solution to all our problems why haven't we used it in everything? Why wasn't it discovered earlier? It's not because of the power of computers, it's because it's not going to save the world. We arn't going to see well made games using procedural generation for graphics because it just bogs down the processor, and it doesn't give any noticable improvement in graphic quality. If we had 10 processors, then yeah we can waste 4-5 working on generating the world, but even with 6 processors, 1 is for graphics, 1 or 2 is for physics (a must have in most games now), and the rest is for your gameplay components, we don't have the extra power no matter what ivory tower scientists want use to believe.
This is all "what if" the answer though is "it can't"
I meant on that site, I'm sure he's completely valid, however the fact he even references Madden in his small blerb and then tells US what's wrong with gaming is a little short sited.
He had 7 YEARS at EA, I'm sure that also left him a little jaded. I've never been employed by them but I'm sure the employees have little to no say, especially working on madden every year, at the company I work (game industry developer) the lower end people have a lot of ability to move however we try to create fun games, not games that sell, we've done well in both areas but that's probably because we personally like our games and customize them to what we would expect to see.
This is pretty strange, but it's got a purpose. I believe ID coined the phrase, but it's similar in theory to Strafing. As one flies in the plane one would "strafe" a target, which would mean to shoot from the plane. However the way the shooting normally would happen is one would start shooting before, as the cross hairs moved over the target, and finish shooting after the target, aka a "strafing run". This would allow a hopefully large amount of damage in a single run.
Strafing in the games is likely a reference to this as you would duck out of one corner, fire over the whole attacking enemies (usually coming from one direction) and slide into another corner (which at that time you turn and wait for the rest to come around the corner, or you'd strafe back and run for your life.
If one was to imagine the screen of the game turned sideways, the view of strafing would be a bit like an airplane flying over a target to unload machine gun fire.
You'd have to ask ID (I believe they created it) if this is the real reason, but I'm 90 percent sure it comes from "strafing run" rather then "strafe" itself.
So wait, it was OK when GTA San Andreas had you wait til 1/3rd of the game was done before you could buy any weapons? According to "No New Features After the First Few Levels" that would be a good thing. Personally I think that's the WORST thing about it. No new features has to be taken with a grain of salt. Let's look into it.
... Hmmmm I'll leave on that note. You can decide yourself on his opinions validity, oh and that's ALL the specific industry experience he gives.
"Person can't drive car til they get license, they must past a long involved series of missions to do that, then to own a gun they must get a gun license, which happens through another set of four missions. Person finds a rocket launcher on the ground, must now take lessons from a third NPC."
Sounds exciting. How about
"Person grabs a car, drives to a local gun range, buys a simple gun because it's all he can afford, as he drives to the next point, he finds an AK-47 on a local gangbanger, he grabs the weapon and starts to shoot up the street".
I don't know the second one sounds like it'd be more fun. I mean learning new "skills" is good, but learning simple stuff that should be available at the begining is lame. In San Andreas, they locked the Airports, which is a good thing at times. People could still get in, hijack a plane and fly badly.
I think that cavet that you should gain skills depends on the game. If you're doing open world games, you shouldn't get completely new skills unless there's a reason. Perhaps you can get a group together after a while and lead them because you earn their respect. But then again from the begining you're able to use all your abilities that you normally would with out having to "unlock" them.
I looked at the writer's bio and found he wrote a bunch of books, good for him. as well as
"Ernest was most recently employed as a lead designer at Bullfrog Productions, and for several years before that he was the audio/video producer on the Madden NFL Football product line. "
So instead of having a simple couple lines of code to include it back into the game, you obscure it to the point you can't access it. If you really want, you scrable the files themselves to the point you can't get them back.
And what ever you do, you don't have an employee leak the code to get it back into the game. There's numerous games when certain stuff was taken out because of ESRB issues. The company I worked at has done it a couple times, not because they felt it was wrong, but because of a ESRB issue of rating.
However instead of just taking it out as a console command or such (which they did in the demo, and it was figured out when the demo was released) they took it out again, removed the console command, and then scambled the whole code to make it work, then released the game. That "over violent" scenes have yet to be cracked publicly.
If it was an inside job, then nothing Rockstar was going to do was going to save them this heartache. If someone outside the company figured it out then Rockstar needed to do more.
This is like saying I should be allowed to own a gun, have the bullets next to the gun but not be in the gun and be considered "safe". No, you put the bullets in another location, or you lock the gun and bullets into a safe which only people over the age of 18 know, and you keep the safe locked and away from your kids and your kid isn't going to shoot someone or themselves.
I'm not blaming Rockstar, but Rockstar left the code in the game in a way that either was leaked or figured out, either way that's Rockstar's or Rockstar's employee's fault.
Yes, they'd have a PC... except that it would be completely proprietary and locked-down to only run licensed programs.
So then it would be a mac.
Maybe a Paypal fund for an entire city - kind of like a telethon (once you reach $1 million no one in Des Moines will be killed).
I prefer the converse. For 1 Billion dollars (I dream bigger) You'll take care of the middle east problem. For 1 Million dollars, you'll make sure that the cubs win the world series, no questions ask. For 1 Thousand dollars, that annoying dog that barks outside your window will get a free trip to at least 5 layers of atmosphere.
Remember, with my unique version, it's not terrorism, it's offering a service to solve a problem.
Btw, be quick to market, my robot, KillZilla will be on the market in 2022. And don't you dare try to steal the name.
How have we survived the last 50 years. 45 we had the bomb, Russia got it soon after, Cuba missle crisis, 67's 7 day war, strife, famine, political unrest, bad presidents in the USA (remember, carter and ford both makes Bush looks like a good president), destruction of the USSR, assasination attempts by the KGB, Terrorists attacks of all types, Hijackings, Cheyna, Afghanstan, Iraq, Kuwait, Israel, Palestine, Chernoybl, Taiwan. Over population of countries in Africa and countries like India, religious fever that cause men to do insane things (both against religions (1939-1945, guess the country, and to spread their doctrine, 1939-1945, (as well as korean war, and vietnam war))
Yet among all of this, there's not been a nuclear attack in 61 years, After 2 bombs in the span of 10 days... How could you imagine 60 years with out one after hearing about the attacks.
The answer of how to survive the next 100 years is simple. Evolve. We will always have war, but at the same time, the world has moved on from the military ages. We have reached the information age, what was the future in the 50s and 60s. Anything you want to know and need to know you can gain in seconds, true HAL doesn't talk to us directly but we can garner anything now instantly. We can learn about the war and the strife and the famine that was always there.
Perhaps that's why everyone thinks this is the end, it's not that there's more war than ever before. It's that we get more information about the war than ever before. We can never give up the information streams we get now, that would be counter productive, but what we as a world have to realize is that we are now connected in ways that was impossible just 11 years ago(Internet), we have access no one in the world had 21 years ago(ARPAnet). The problem is that we can't take the information we recieve now the same way we took the information we recieved then. We shouldn't keep flying off the handle every time someone sees a problem because we haven't considered the source and implications. And it's not just us the average joes. It's US the people of the world, the media, the goverment, the corporations, and those who sit around and think all day for a living.
But in reality, the way we will survive is to adapt and evolve in how we deal with our information and situations we find ourselves in, and we'll only do that one day at a time, and willing to try new things or change the way we think.
God the greed of hollywood and the networks are amazing, they are almost as bad as the RIAA. The fact is I fast forward through ads only if I'm really enthralled in the story. Most of the time I just use the ads to go take a leak or check out what's on my computer because I'm too lazy to fast forward through them. Especially if it's a short commercial. The fact we have to sit through about 20 minutes for every hour of tv viewing is bullshit. cut the titles and credits for most shows, and you're down to under 40 minutes of show. That's not a good number.
Are we also going to disable fast forwarding through product placement, ABC commercials for it's own crappy line up (I watch Lost, I have yet to have any interest in Grey's Anatomy, Desperate housewives, or house, no matter how many times I see their commercials)
It's just another sign that ABC is farther and farther from being the highly regarded network they were just a few years ago. This is obviously a grab for more advertiser dollars (hey look these guys want to help us). But it's just going to cause lower ratings if people find their nightly Lost recording can't be run through to find that one scene they wanted to see again. Why watch it on tv, when you wait around a year, and get it on DVD where you can get the full show, no commercials and the ability to fast forward and back. Compare that for around 40-60 bucks, instead of having to sit through (20 minutes X 26 episodes, 520 minutes of commercials!!!! that's 8 hours of your life.) and can own the tv season instead of however they define what you get from watching it on TV (you don't have the right to record it except for yourself, you don't have to right to digitize it in any way, you can't download a copy of it even if you have seen the show except if they approve)
Let's also create a system where ads get removed from the show after the first play through (btw that means all we have to do is when we go for work, just play through last nights' sports program and tv show if we can) That way they don't get too much exposure for their buck.
I'm all for watching ads, especially clever ones, I don't mind, however I'm still going to look away, ignore what you say and play on my computer. The idea behind a DVR is nice because if you get home at 9:05, you start your DVR, speed through the ads and the slow parts and the flash back and the rest, and you'll be able to catch up to your friends who watched from the begining by 9:15. ABC just wants to take it away, and not to help the fans at all, but to grab more money where they can.
Question for ABC, for those who watch the program with out going to dvr are they also going to be forced to watch them or can they too move around and still continue to ignore the commercials just as they always have?
So we should expect Ebay, the largest online only auction house, to accept any and all new payment systems in the world, when they already have Paypal?
I mean we all know Google Checkout's track record of a year with.. wait no. We know that Google is secure, wait too new for that too.
The fact is Google Checkout has yet to EARN the approval that we are assuming Ebay should just give it? Why don't we wait until google is properly tested before attacking Ebay. Not that Ebay should ban it with out a statement as to why, but perhaps they don't want everyone to use googlecheckout, a system they have no control over, and after they are screwed ebay would have to refund everyone's money if google checkout doesn't.
And remember if they arn't funny the second time, try again, louder and with more gestures. This is known as the late night host rule.
Remember, you have to have the HD screen too.
I want to say you're wrong, and you are, but you arn't. I play on a 27 inch tv I fished out of the trash (ok it was next to the trash) And I'm very happy with it. I'm not getting the "true" picture, and I hope to one day when I get a lot of money, however it's playable on the system I have at home. However if the old classic games have taught us one lesson, it is that a good game is a good game, no matter what the graphics say, why else would Zork still be enjoyable after all these years?
Of course then again I use a online handle of "King Link", I grew up with Civ, Ultima, also, and of course Zelda, I had an atari, and believe me, no one wants a Wii more than me. However at the same time, that Wii which will be tons of fun to play, will never be near the graphical power that the 360 or PS3 will have. That's not a huge factor if you want to play a game, and Rogue Squadron was amazing on the Gamecube, but at the same time Zelda will never look that much better than it does now, it'll play better, have better controls and be more interactive, but this generation isn't about graphics for Nintendo, which I applaud. However when I make my plunge and buy a HDTV set the 360 and the PS3 will both look vastly better, Nintendo will get some boost from it as well (they are supporting at least 480), though probably not the extremes that the other two get (then again they don't need it as much in my opinion).
I think Sony and MS arn't banking on the fact that we have a HDTV already, I think they are banking on the fact we will get one during this generation of consoles. But while not having a HDTV makes the Blu Ray and HD-DVD worthless, not having a HDTV doesn't make owning a 360 worthless, just worth less. (oh I'm so clever)