Not true for me. I'm a programmer and I like to have multiple 80-column editor windows next to each other. Also I prefer to place a shell left/right of my editor instead of above/down. So for me horizontal resolution is a *lot* more important.
Shouldn't be worried? Ok, they are not going to explode but to me any release of radioactive material in the atmosphere is something to worry about strongly.
The effects of a single species coming extinct can be very devastating for the food chain that that species happened to be in. i.e. perhaps it was the single (or most important) food for some carnivore or perhaps it was the only animal that ate some specific plant. In the former case the carnivore is likely to get into trouble too and in the latter case the plant might no longer have a natural enemy and become a pest.
In both situations you can get a chain reaction that could get out of control. Note that of course not animals are the only species that are required to get a food chain running but the problem is that we might not know what the implications are. Potentially the loss of a single species *could* cause a chain reaction causing many other species to be lost.
RMS is right, with the cloud it's just like any other hosted service. You are at the mercy of the provider. Personally, I like having my server with me and decide what it can or can't do. I can decide how vigorously I want to enforce the SLA, I can decide what type of processor, cooling, hard drive, etc. for my purposes. With the cloud, you are dependent on unreliable hardware that's supposedly magically made reliable because of redundancy. But guess what, if I drop a connection I drop a connection, regardless of how many servers I have waiting for me to reconnect to.
Not everyone can host/make their own mail server. I can't. I don't have a computer running all the time and I don't want to do that as I don't want to pay for the electricity that such a server consumes and global warming is bad enough already. Also my ISP isn't good enough to host a mail server (limited upstream).
If you're not a criminal then why would those institutions even bother watching you? There are far too many people to be able to watch all of them. There is (some) safety in numbers.
I'm a happy gmail user and will be forever (until they shut down the service). I use too many computers to have local mail and I don't have a good ISP that I can use to host a mail server so for me gmail is the best option. I can view my mail anywhere that I have internet. Even on my PDA.
As to privcay? Yes, google has all my mails. But honestly I don't care. Things that are too private to put on google's server are too private to put on mail in general IMHO. Stuff that is really private I don't do over email.
And if google ever drops gmail? Well then I lost all my mails. Big deal. Mail is a means of communication for me. Not a storage system. Information I want to keep I store on one of my computers. And if I really wanted I could even backup all the data through POP3 or whatever. But I don't care.
There is nothing wrong with gmail. Of course if you start using it wrong (like putting highly sensitive information in it) then that's your choice.
What engines are we going to reinvent? Crystal Space (which will be used by Apricot) is more then 10 years old. I think we predate most of the still existing Open Source *and* commercial engines that are still in use these days. The nice thing about Crystal Space is that it can stand its ground even after this time. This is caused by a) we are not afraid to refactor and change and b) Crystal Space is very extensible and modular.
That's not 100% true. At this moment we still don't have very good ways to edit particles (from within blender) or to edit terrain. So tools do need some work.
Six months is a short time to make a full game. However since everything is Open Source we are counting on the community to continue on this game after the project has finished. Once the six months are over and the team is back home there is no reason why we have to stop there.
Also one of the other important goals of this project is to improve the game pipeline for Blender and Crystal Space and to serve as a tutorial for game developers who want to use that pipeline.
One of the goals of the Apricot project is to modernize the Crystal Space engine. This includes probably the following features that we will implement or improve:
New render system with better support for render to texture (allowing things like HDR, Bloom) and shadowing techniques.
New skeletal animation system with support for vertex weights.
Support for tree generation and imposters to allow for big outdoor levels.
Continue working on the Bullet physics plugin.
I'm of course biased as I'm the project manager but I believe that the strongest point of Crystal Space is it's modularity and extensibility. It is because of that that we will be able to move into the future and we will do so with the Apricot project.
I don't know about others but I have a dual boot system (gentoo on one side and WinXP on the other) and I notice NO difference whatsoever in UI performance. Linux is not faster but certainly not slower either. On the other hand things like file access (useful for compilation and such) is significantly faster on windows (at least on my system here).
I have an Acer Aspire 5024 Laptop with AMD64 btw. 1Gig ram.
Not sure yet. Our first real meeting on this game will take place at the Crystal Space conference (http://www.crystalspace3d.org/main/Conference2007 ) on 14-15 july in Aachen (Germany). More concrete details will follow from there.
Don't forget that one of the goals of this project is to expand Crystal Space to do what we want to achieve.
As to Open Source not working. We are going to do this with a solid team that will remain for six months in Amsterdam (Blender studios). So while the end result will be Open Source the way to develop it is like any other commercial game (only with less money and a bit more time constraints).
Open does not mean that everyone will be able to add stuff like that. Open means that a limited number of people (6 for movie and 6 for game) will do the actual work and the community will be able to have input on it. Also open means that the end result of the movie and the game will be available. Including sources and everything needed to produce it.
Ogre would have been a perfectly valid choice as well. It is just that we have closer ties with Blender at the moment. We have an excellent blender2crystal project and our connections with Blender developers are very good.
I'm the project manager of Crystal Space. I'm of course very glad that Blender and us will do this project. It is an amazing opportunity to enhance both Blender and Crystal Space to actually make this possible. The plan is to make a really good looking game that can compete (graphics wise) with commercial games. Crystal Space can do a lot already but in some areas we still need some more work (more specifically things related to render2texture like HDR and others). Also for a game like this we need to work on a very good animation system. Having a project like this is of course the best motivation possible.
Another important goal of this project is documentation. As this game is fully open all sources (both code and art) will be made available. And we also plan to release a DVD with a full documentary on the entire creation process. Basically everything will be available (we would release the left-overs of the meals of the participants if we could:-)
And of course the idea is to make a nice and playable game. Six months is not that long but it also doesn't have to stop there. The nice thing about an open game is that it can be extended for a long time to come. Also the game logic will serve as a nice starting point for a new game based on a different setting. So lots of possibilities here.
Needless to say I'm very excited about this project. I think it will be a great thing. Both for us (Crystal Space) as for the Open Source community. If we succeed we will have a commercial quality game but 100% free and open!
I'm the project manager of Crystal Space and I would like to tell you a bit about how Crystal Space evolved and what it has become. I do agree with you that in the beginning the code was pretty much put together 'on demand'. There was little design and little planning. I just made the engine so that it worked more or less. However, one of the strengths of my kind of development (and the development of my team later) is that I'm very good at refactoring and redesigning. And in fact we have done that several times. We let our API evolve greatly (causing much annoyance to people trying to use CS:-) Later in the evolution of Crystal Space we got many new people in our team. And this caused CS to become a lot better then it was in the past. At this moment the API of CS is pretty stable and we have a solid 'deprecation system' in place so that we avoid annoying people too much. That means that in version 1.x we deprecate a feature so that we can remove it in version 1.(x+1). This means we can still evolve the API but we give some stability to the users.
As to CS being complicated. This has improved a great deal but it remains the case that CS is probably more complicated to use then the other engines. The big reason for this is that we concentrate on flexibility and modularity. This allows people to extend Crystal Space with their own plugins (and people actually do that) and even to insert new plugins to some application at runtime.
Finally I'd like to add that Crystal Space is no longer alone. We have a companion project called Crystal Entity Layer which is very popular these days and sits on top of Crystal Space to give the programmer a much easier to use game framework. And on top of CEL we also have CELstart. By using CELstart a person can make a full powered game using only Python and/or XML scripts. No coding required. We also have great support for Blender through the blender2crystal project which means that you can nearly code a full working game from Blender alone (with a few exceptions on writing Python or XML scripts for some of the game logic).
Crystal Space is certainly not only for FPS projects. In fact FPS projects are the minority. Most projects using Crystal Space are MMORPG type games like PlaneShift (http://www.planeshift.it).
Is finding a random site that hard? Just use google 'I'm feeling lucky'. I'm sure that a good programmer can find a way to utilize the 'I'm feeling lucky' button on google to return a random site.
This has little to do with fanboys or whatever. At this moment I'm running firefox on windows. I have two firefox windows. One window with one tab and the other with 9 tabs. It has been running for about two hours now (since when I fired up my computer) and at this moment it is using about 170 megs.
If your firefox is using 700 megs with only three tabs then something most certainly is wrong. Can't say what though.
That's only one case that you now mention. In our case (Crystal Space) every SoC programmer worked in his own SVN branch so there was no risk of the code being changed too much. I think most other projects also handled this in a similar way. So I don't see how this can qualify as a problem with the SoC program. If that same student had come to work for Gaim outside of SoC and if he would have done the same job then the same problem would have occured.
Slashdot Mirror
Not true for me. I'm a programmer and I like to have multiple 80-column editor windows next to each other. Also I prefer to place a shell left/right of my editor instead of above/down. So for me horizontal resolution is a *lot* more important.
Shouldn't be worried? Ok, they are not going to explode but to me any release of radioactive material in the atmosphere is something to worry about strongly.
The effects of a single species coming extinct can be very devastating for the food chain that that species happened to be in. i.e. perhaps it was the single (or most important) food for some carnivore or perhaps it was the only animal that ate some specific plant. In the former case the carnivore is likely to get into trouble too and in the latter case the plant might no longer have a natural enemy and become a pest.
In both situations you can get a chain reaction that could get out of control. Note that of course not animals are the only species that are required to get a food chain running but the problem is that we might not know what the implications are. Potentially the loss of a single species *could* cause a chain reaction causing many other species to be lost.
Greetings,
RMS is right, with the cloud it's just like any other hosted service. You are at the mercy of the provider. Personally, I like having my server with me and decide what it can or can't do. I can decide how vigorously I want to enforce the SLA, I can decide what type of processor, cooling, hard drive, etc. for my purposes. With the cloud, you are dependent on unreliable hardware that's supposedly magically made reliable because of redundancy. But guess what, if I drop a connection I drop a connection, regardless of how many servers I have waiting for me to reconnect to.
Not everyone can host/make their own mail server. I can't. I don't have a computer running all the time and I don't want to do that as I don't want to pay for the electricity that such a server consumes and global warming is bad enough already. Also my ISP isn't good enough to host a mail server (limited upstream).
Greetings,
If you're not a criminal then why would those institutions even bother watching you? There are far too many people to be able to watch all of them. There is (some) safety in numbers.
Greetings,
I'm a happy gmail user and will be forever (until they shut down the service). I use too many computers to have local mail and I don't have a good ISP that I can use to host a mail server so for me gmail is the best option. I can view my mail anywhere that I have internet. Even on my PDA.
As to privcay? Yes, google has all my mails. But honestly I don't care. Things that are too private to put on google's server are too private to put on mail in general IMHO. Stuff that is really private I don't do over email.
And if google ever drops gmail? Well then I lost all my mails. Big deal. Mail is a means of communication for me. Not a storage system. Information I want to keep I store on one of my computers. And if I really wanted I could even backup all the data through POP3 or whatever. But I don't care.
There is nothing wrong with gmail. Of course if you start using it wrong (like putting highly sensitive information in it) then that's your choice.
Greetings,
What engines are we going to reinvent? Crystal Space (which will be used by Apricot) is more then 10 years old. I think we predate most of the still existing Open Source *and* commercial engines that are still in use these days. The nice thing about Crystal Space is that it can stand its ground even after this time. This is caused by a) we are not afraid to refactor and change and b) Crystal Space is very extensible and modular.
Greetings,
That's not 100% true. At this moment we still don't have very good ways to edit particles (from within blender) or to edit terrain. So tools do need some work.
Greetings,
Six months is a short time to make a full game. However since everything is Open Source we are counting on the community to continue on this game after the project has finished. Once the six months are over and the team is back home there is no reason why we have to stop there.
Also one of the other important goals of this project is to improve the game pipeline for Blender and Crystal Space and to serve as a tutorial for game developers who want to use that pipeline.
Greetings,
I'm of course biased as I'm the project manager but I believe that the strongest point of Crystal Space is it's modularity and extensibility. It is because of that that we will be able to move into the future and we will do so with the Apricot project.
Greetings,
The type of game hasn't been decided yet. So where did you get the idea that it will be an FPS?
Greetings,
It was a mistake (notice my reply). I meant that linux is significantly faster on file access.
Greetings,
I don't know about others but I have a dual boot system (gentoo on one side and WinXP on the other) and I notice NO difference whatsoever in UI performance. Linux is not faster but certainly not slower either. On the other hand things like file access (useful for compilation and such) is significantly faster on windows (at least on my system here).
I have an Acer Aspire 5024 Laptop with AMD64 btw. 1Gig ram.
Greetings,
Not sure yet. Our first real meeting on this game will take place at the Crystal Space conference (http://www.crystalspace3d.org/main/Conference2007 ) on 14-15 july in Aachen (Germany). More concrete details will follow from there.
Greetings,
"There's a little matter of physics."
We actually have support for physics using the ODE physics engine.
Greetings,
Don't forget that one of the goals of this project is to expand Crystal Space to do what we want to achieve.
As to Open Source not working. We are going to do this with a solid team that will remain for six months in Amsterdam (Blender studios). So while the end result will be Open Source the way to develop it is like any other commercial game (only with less money and a bit more time constraints).
Greetings,
Open does not mean that everyone will be able to add stuff like that. Open means that a limited number of people (6 for movie and 6 for game) will do the actual work and the community will be able to have input on it. Also open means that the end result of the movie and the game will be available. Including sources and everything needed to produce it.
Greetings,
Ogre would have been a perfectly valid choice as well. It is just that we have closer ties with Blender at the moment. We have an excellent blender2crystal project and our connections with Blender developers are very good.
Greetings,
Hi all,
:-)
I'm the project manager of Crystal Space. I'm of course very glad that Blender and us will do this project. It is an amazing opportunity to enhance both Blender and Crystal Space to actually make this possible. The plan is to make a really good looking game that can compete (graphics wise) with commercial games. Crystal Space can do a lot already but in some areas we still need some more work (more specifically things related to render2texture like HDR and others). Also for a game like this we need to work on a very good animation system. Having a project like this is of course the best motivation possible.
Another important goal of this project is documentation. As this game is fully open all sources (both code and art) will be made available. And we also plan to release a DVD with a full documentary on the entire creation process. Basically everything will be available (we would release the left-overs of the meals of the participants if we could
And of course the idea is to make a nice and playable game. Six months is not that long but it also doesn't have to stop there. The nice thing about an open game is that it can be extended for a long time to come. Also the game logic will serve as a nice starting point for a new game based on a different setting. So lots of possibilities here.
Needless to say I'm very excited about this project. I think it will be a great thing. Both for us (Crystal Space) as for the Open Source community. If we succeed we will have a commercial quality game but 100% free and open!
Greetings,
I'm the project manager of Crystal Space and I would like to tell you a bit about how Crystal Space evolved and what it has become. I do agree with you that in the beginning the code was pretty much put together 'on demand'. There was little design and little planning. I just made the engine so that it worked more or less. However, one of the strengths of my kind of development (and the development of my team later) is that I'm very good at refactoring and redesigning. And in fact we have done that several times. We let our API evolve greatly (causing much annoyance to people trying to use CS :-) Later in the evolution of Crystal Space we got many new people in our team. And this caused CS to become a lot better then it was in the past. At this moment the API of CS is pretty stable and we have a solid 'deprecation system' in place so that we avoid annoying people too much. That means that in version 1.x we deprecate a feature so that we can remove it in version 1.(x+1). This means we can still evolve the API but we give some stability to the users.
As to CS being complicated. This has improved a great deal but it remains the case that CS is probably more complicated to use then the other engines. The big reason for this is that we concentrate on flexibility and modularity. This allows people to extend Crystal Space with their own plugins (and people actually do that) and even to insert new plugins to some application at runtime.
Finally I'd like to add that Crystal Space is no longer alone. We have a companion project called Crystal Entity Layer which is very popular these days and sits on top of Crystal Space to give the programmer a much easier to use game framework. And on top of CEL we also have CELstart. By using CELstart a person can make a full powered game using only Python and/or XML scripts. No coding required. We also have great support for Blender through the blender2crystal project which means that you can nearly code a full working game from Blender alone (with a few exceptions on writing Python or XML scripts for some of the game logic).
Greetings,
Crystal Space is certainly not only for FPS projects. In fact FPS projects are the minority. Most projects using Crystal Space are MMORPG type games like PlaneShift (http://www.planeshift.it).
Greetings,
Is finding a random site that hard? Just use google 'I'm feeling lucky'. I'm sure that a good programmer can find a way to utilize the 'I'm feeling lucky' button on google to return a random site.
Greetings,
This has little to do with fanboys or whatever. At this moment I'm running firefox on windows. I have two firefox windows. One window with one tab and the other with 9 tabs. It has been running for about two hours now (since when I fired up my computer) and at this moment it is using about 170 megs.
If your firefox is using 700 megs with only three tabs then something most certainly is wrong. Can't say what though.
Greetings,
Even easier. Just add 1^31 to the numbers before comparing the bits so it is positive.
Greetings,
That's only one case that you now mention. In our case (Crystal Space) every SoC programmer worked in his own SVN branch so there was no risk of the code being changed too much. I think most other projects also handled this in a similar way. So I don't see how this can qualify as a problem with the SoC program. If that same student had come to work for Gaim outside of SoC and if he would have done the same job then the same problem would have occured.
Greetings,