The MusicVR experience has the feel of a dream or an abstract music video, where you wander through the space of the composer's imagination led by a vaguely game-like "find all of the keys" approach. This is a good idea, especially if the composer's imagination is both wild and executed with good music and matching visuals.
The reason Maestro sucks is that rendering looks like something a student hacked up for their very first graphics class.
The textures are hideous and have blatant seams. The control scheme leads you to face-plant against walls, completely disoriented. The reflections don't reflect the room around you-- or anything remotely like it (and boy, are there a lot of reflections). The lighting is crappy, with wierd per-vertex specular highlights stretched across giant polygons and not enough shading to be able to discern the shape of the giant caverns. Moving underwater is like walking down a corridor wall-papered by a 2-year old using stock photographs of fish. Finally, you can't really interact with anything in the demo.
I'd love to experience something that felt like Rendevouz with Rama-- exploration of a wierd, desolate, and alien space. Integral music and limited interaction would really enhance the experience. Maestro is not this program; it is a junk demo with a big name attached to the project.
Technically, OpenGL 2.0 isn't released yet. The NVIDIA drivers on Linux lag the Windows ones by about 6 months but provide almost the same functionality: pixel shaders, render-to-texture, etc.
Thanks to SDL, I was able to port my Windows-only 3D code base to have full support for OS X and Linux in only a few weeks. The result is G3D.
G3D now has professional game developers, researchers, and students at several universities all developing 3D games and demos that run natively on all three platforms. The nice thing is that SDL was easier to use than the native Windows APIs.
For Linux to continue to be viable it needs to have a viable desktop. The desktop needs to have infrastructure that is easier to use than the Windows APIs and platform-independent in order to convince developers it is worth their while. As a developer, I don't want to use even more platform-specific APIs in order to support a (comparative) handful of users. I am willing to learn and use a new API if it makes Windows programming easier and gives me a free port to new platforms.
SDL, SDLmixer, OpenAL, and G3D are great for games. I'd like to see things like wxWindows for GUI development reach the same level of stability and native performance. Right now it is too hard to make a GUI application that runs on 2 or 3 platforms and looks as sharp as a native Windows app on Windows. It needs to be easier to write such a program using a platform independent API than the Win32 API in order to get more "real" programs on Linux.
I think that means relative to regular Natural Selection, which has a steep learning curve.
NS:Combat is easy because at the heart, it is a point-and-shoot game. What makes it fun is the RPG aspect. You get experience for kills (and for kills scored by nearby teammates!) and can spend those to level up through your own personal tech tree. The decisions you make there are important: will you go for heavy armor to be invulnerable to Lerk Spores, or buy a Jet Pack and take to the skies? Do you want to play defensively with trip Mines and Grenades, or get a Shotgun and charge? Or maybe you should hold back and get a Welder to repair your command chair.
Even in Beta, I think NS 3.0 is the best PC game out right now. It looks and plays better than the rest (yes, even though it is on the Half-Life engine) and NS:Combat is incredibly fun even if you don't feel like a full-fledged NS game.
The players agree-- within hours of release it rocketed above all but Counter Strike and Day of Defeat in the number of players.
And you can't beat the price-- free for anyone who has Half-Life (which is only $14 itself!).
I keep my DVD, VCR, and consoles on a separate equipment rack that is hidden behind the couch. The TV is across the room, and a single cable runs from my switcher/RF modulator to the TV. This keeps the clutter hidden away and means you don't have to sit in front of the TV, either.
The only remaining clutter is the controller cables, and I think the wireless controllers are a great suggestion for that problem.
I was recently at the Adrenaline Zone gaming "cafe" in NYC and was impressed that their systems completely restored themselves on reboot. It was apparently instantaneous, and games were definitely installed on the local drive and not run from a server. I'm sorry I have no details beyond this clue, but perhaps you should ask you local internet/gaming cafe what they use, because apparently they've solved this problem quite well in those industries.
only options would be to stop selling it or release the source
The whole premise of GNU was that you can replicate the functionality of a set of tools and routines (e.g. Unix) without inherently being a derivative work. If you start from scratch, you're not derivative (even though the API might be the same).
If this is legally valid then clearly you can always rewrite code deemed derivative so that it is clean, rather than abandoning a project or open sourcing it.
... despite the movie company going way beyond their bounds on this one, I'd like to mention that these are both great films.
Shaolin Soccer is hysterical (in a Hong-Kong is insane kind of way). It's about a bunch of losers who use magic powers to win local soccer matches. They also break into song and dance periodically for reasons unknown, despite the fact that it isn't a musical.
If you liked Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, you'll love Hero. It is sad and beautiful, with amazing battle scenes. In fact, the entire movie consists solely of amazing battle scenes, which serve to carry the interestingly twisted plot.
Excellent point-- In a language where "windows" is not already a word, it looks like a unique trade name. In the US, "windows" is generic. In France, "windows" is not generic at all.
Thanks, this is the most informative post on the article.
I agree. The ESRB rating system is pretty strict. As a game industry insider, I know that game developers go to incredible lengths to remove objectionable content and get a Teen or Everyone rating (just like movies do for PG/13)
BUT: If Manhunt, a game where you play a serial killer and act out ghastly murders, doesn't get an Adults Only rating, I don't know what does. The ESRB blew it on that one.
Natural Selection is a combined RTS/FPS for multiple players set in the future. One player is the 'commander', who is managing an economy, researching technologies, and devising a strategy to combat an alien infestation (this is the part your wife might like). The other players are space marines who run around in a first person view following orders and killing aliens (this is what you might like).
You can also play on the alien side, where there is no commander. Different alien subspecies have different roles. I like playing the 'gorge' and 'lerk' subspecies that have support roles like healing and building new alien structures. Other players enjoy the front-line combat alien subspecies.
If your kids are boys, they are going to look at porn on the internet. There's nothing you can do to stop them and little you can do to catch them. If they are girls, I have no idea.
Kids shouldn't be unsupervised on the Internet. At 11, I think they're still kids. In the real world, you wouldn't let them hang around with kids who used bad language, with creepy adults, or in a sex shop. You'd find out who their friends were, what they were doing, and keep them clean. Just because it's online doesn't mean you should stop monitoring.
I don't think kids should have computers in their rooms in the first place. It makes them antisocial and separates them from the rest of the family. And it just makes it harder to keep an eye on what they are doing.
This is just what I wanted: werewolves, swords, vampires, guns, bigger guns, giant bazooka guns, humongo robots, scary robots, spaceship looking things, kung fu, more guns, Trinity and Naobi being badasses, some guns, giant mecha things, more kung fu, and some explosions.
Having the government mandate software that restricts access to a political activist site (NRA ILG) that contains no violent, pornographic, or otherwise "obscene" material is a severe free speech limitation.
In the Semantec case, the problem isn't the company, it is the government legislating censorship programs.
The Broderbund game 'stunts' was one of my favorites. It was not only among the first 3D games, but it let you build your own tracks and trade them with friends.
http://members.fortunecity.com/pboard/stunts.htm
The builder GUI was simple and fun, and it was a blast to drive an indy car off 16 giant jumps in a row or drive smack into a giant dinosaur.
.sigh.-- add me to the list of people desparately hoping for Firefly to be taken up by SciFi. I'd renew my full cable subscription in a heartbeat if it was.
Since a desktop runs on DC and uses a transformer ("power supply") to convert AC to DC, I imagine it draws almost the same power from the wall regardless of how much power is actually used by the machine.
A similar case: if you leave your phone charger plugged in to the wall when your phone is not charging, you're still using electricity. You can tell because the charger stays warm (resistance in the transformer coils).
Widows Messenger isn't the MSN IM client-- it is a service in XP that seems to be what 'net send' has always done under NT or 'write' does under Linux (i.e. letting admins broadcast stuff). If you install XP at home and don't have a firewall, spammers will broacast messages at your machine that cause it to display these messages all the time.
You can either disable the service from the control panel or install a firewall. I can't figure out how to get the XP firewall to work, but the ZoneAlarm freeware product from ZoneLabs is great.
Slashdot Mirror
They can't share a server-- PC players can cheat, which is much less common on consoles.
-m
The MusicVR experience has the feel of a dream or an abstract music video, where you wander through the space of the composer's imagination led by a vaguely game-like "find all of the keys" approach. This is a good idea, especially if the composer's imagination is both wild and executed with good music and matching visuals.
The reason Maestro sucks is that rendering looks like something a student hacked up for their very first graphics class.
The textures are hideous and have blatant seams. The control scheme leads you to face-plant against walls, completely disoriented. The reflections don't reflect the room around you-- or anything remotely like it (and boy, are there a lot of reflections). The lighting is crappy, with wierd per-vertex specular highlights stretched across giant polygons and not enough shading to be able to discern the shape of the giant caverns. Moving underwater is like walking down a corridor wall-papered by a 2-year old using stock photographs of fish. Finally, you can't really interact with anything in the demo.
I'd love to experience something that felt like Rendevouz with Rama-- exploration of a wierd, desolate, and alien space. Integral music and limited interaction would really enhance the experience. Maestro is not this program; it is a junk demo with a big name attached to the project.
-m
-m
G3D now has professional game developers, researchers, and students at several universities all developing 3D games and demos that run natively on all three platforms. The nice thing is that SDL was easier to use than the native Windows APIs.
For Linux to continue to be viable it needs to have a viable desktop. The desktop needs to have infrastructure that is easier to use than the Windows APIs and platform-independent in order to convince developers it is worth their while. As a developer, I don't want to use even more platform-specific APIs in order to support a (comparative) handful of users. I am willing to learn and use a new API if it makes Windows programming easier and gives me a free port to new platforms.
SDL, SDLmixer, OpenAL, and G3D are great for games. I'd like to see things like wxWindows for GUI development reach the same level of stability and native performance. Right now it is too hard to make a GUI application that runs on 2 or 3 platforms and looks as sharp as a native Windows app on Windows. It needs to be easier to write such a program using a platform independent API than the Win32 API in order to get more "real" programs on Linux.
-m
I think that means relative to regular Natural Selection, which has a steep learning curve.
NS:Combat is easy because at the heart, it is a point-and-shoot game. What makes it fun is the RPG aspect. You get experience for kills (and for kills scored by nearby teammates!) and can spend those to level up through your own personal tech tree. The decisions you make there are important: will you go for heavy armor to be invulnerable to Lerk Spores, or buy a Jet Pack and take to the skies? Do you want to play defensively with trip Mines and Grenades, or get a Shotgun and charge? Or maybe you should hold back and get a Welder to repair your command chair.
-m
Even in Beta, I think NS 3.0 is the best PC game out right now. It looks and plays better than the rest (yes, even though it is on the Half-Life engine) and NS:Combat is incredibly fun even if you don't feel like a full-fledged NS game.
The players agree-- within hours of release it rocketed above all but Counter Strike and Day of Defeat in the number of players.
And you can't beat the price-- free for anyone who has Half-Life (which is only $14 itself!).
-m
The only remaining clutter is the controller cables, and I think the wireless controllers are a great suggestion for that problem.
-m
-m
The whole premise of GNU was that you can replicate the functionality of a set of tools and routines (e.g. Unix) without inherently being a derivative work. If you start from scratch, you're not derivative (even though the API might be the same).
If this is legally valid then clearly you can always rewrite code deemed derivative so that it is clean, rather than abandoning a project or open sourcing it.
-m
Shaolin Soccer is hysterical (in a Hong-Kong is insane kind of way). It's about a bunch of losers who use magic powers to win local soccer matches. They also break into song and dance periodically for reasons unknown, despite the fact that it isn't a musical.
If you liked Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, you'll love Hero. It is sad and beautiful, with amazing battle scenes. In fact, the entire movie consists solely of amazing battle scenes, which serve to carry the interestingly twisted plot.
-m
Thanks, this is the most informative post on the article.
-m
-m
BUT: If Manhunt, a game where you play a serial killer and act out ghastly murders, doesn't get an Adults Only rating, I don't know what does. The ESRB blew it on that one.
-m
You can also play on the alien side, where there is no commander. Different alien subspecies have different roles. I like playing the 'gorge' and 'lerk' subspecies that have support roles like healing and building new alien structures. Other players enjoy the front-line combat alien subspecies.
-m
-m
(reasonably happy iTunes user)
If your kids are boys, they are going to look at porn on the internet. There's nothing you can do to stop them and little you can do to catch them. If they are girls, I have no idea.
Kids shouldn't be unsupervised on the Internet. At 11, I think they're still kids. In the real world, you wouldn't let them hang around with kids who used bad language, with creepy adults, or in a sex shop. You'd find out who their friends were, what they were doing, and keep them clean. Just because it's online doesn't mean you should stop monitoring.
I don't think kids should have computers in their rooms in the first place. It makes them antisocial and separates them from the rest of the family. And it just makes it harder to keep an eye on what they are doing.
-m
They delivered, I'm happy.
-m
In the Semantec case, the problem isn't the company, it is the government legislating censorship programs.
-m
Doesn't the GPL require you to assign your copyright to the Free Software Foundation? Only the FSF can take action.
-m
The Broderbund game 'stunts' was one of my favorites. It was not only among the first 3D games, but it let you build your own tracks and trade them with friends.
m
http://members.fortunecity.com/pboard/stunts.ht
The builder GUI was simple and fun, and it was a blast to drive an indy car off 16 giant jumps in a row or drive smack into a giant dinosaur.
-m
-m
A similar case: if you leave your phone charger plugged in to the wall when your phone is not charging, you're still using electricity. You can tell because the charger stays warm (resistance in the transformer coils).
-m
-m
I don't know what PHB stands for-- can someone tell me?
-m
You can either disable the service from the control panel or install a firewall. I can't figure out how to get the XP firewall to work, but the ZoneAlarm freeware product from ZoneLabs is great.
-m