"Craze" to me is when a non-technical person can run an emulator with a few mouse clicks, or by poking around with their Wii. Marat Fayzullin (remember him?) was not a household name, even though he was the developer of a very popular Game Boy emulator.
These days you can hop on any garbage P2P client, type "game boy" and get a list of preconfigured emulators and frontends with EVERY SINGLE ROM. Any half-brained suburbanite can run it.
Just look at MP3... back in the 90's we had them, and by "we" I mean geeks. bongo.tamu.edu was a "large" collection, they had maybe a couple hundred tunes. Today, my mother has an MP3 player in her car (it came with it). She probably didn't know what an MP3 was until a couple of years ago.
Just because Slashdotters are aware of tech, doesn't mean it is mainstream.
Having played both versions, they do have minor differences in gameplay, but we're talking about teeny weeny little timing issues like a certain water maze about 2/3rds into the game that was originally frustrating, but the DX version made a tad easier due to some change in the way the water's current was implemented.
I wouldn't be all that surprised if they did have to recode some of it. Keep in mind that 2D games are almost trivial to code for any game developer, so it's not as big of an effort as you'd think. The fun part is that the code being so simple, you usually end up improving during the rewrite since you're aware of the entire project. Back in those days, many "2.0" games were the result of a partial or complete rewrite that elegantly solved various hacks.
This was my immediate reaction after reading the blurb.
I'm a complete ignoramus with GPL/FSF licenses... but wouldn't the source-code requirement only extend to the modified Zlib/Inflate code ? I was under the impression that most libraries allow linking from closed-source apps, da ?
I realize I'm a broke ass, but how can one mile of anything cost 100 million ?
I could build a mile of naked people gently carrying bodysurfers along for less than 100 mil per mile.
Maybe instead of having these mag trains, we could just increase bandwidth the old-fashioned way: parallelism. Stick four train tracks where there was previous one, and you can move 4 times more people. Tech is nice, but it seems like this sort of outlay would cripple funding in more pressing areas. Transit is just transit, and today's jacked-in lifestyle makes much of it redundant.
It's kinda funny... lawyers get paid to scare people and occasionally destroy their lives over greed. Hitmen do the same thing (just more efficiently). The different is that if I knew someone had hired a hitman, I'd hire my own, then kill both the opposing hitman AND his client. In legal battles, only the client gets punished (sometimes). I think we should start holding lawyers accountable for the chaos they create on behalf of their client, when the character of the trial is deemed abusive.
An accomplice to theft gets jail time, maybe not as bad as the head honcho but they still don't get away scot-free. A lawyer can be an accomplice to the crime if they knowingly present fabricated evidence.
The bar association needs to tighten up the show. A lot of people are losing faith in the system, and hitmen are a whole lot cheaper than lawyers.
The BSA doesn't care whether you're above-board or not, they only care whether they have a chance of suing you.
Some business have lost suits over missing receipts... they legally owned the software, but were unable to produce "proof" that they had purchased and paid for it (I guess that big embossed Windows box with the holo-label wasn't proof enough).
I personally think BSA staff should be viciously assaulted verbally, physically and mentally until they either jump off a bridge or their little balding heads explode. They're just fear-mongers acting on behalf of Microsoft and a handful of other big outfits. They are textbook court abusers, artificially taxing the software industry on many levels and wasting everyone's time. Let the actual copyright holder do the legal battling, not some double-immune proxy.
When you're a ROM developer, you don't think in such terms. It's all about mapping this and interleaving that.
Rather than writing the extra few lines to calculate the padding required, set up a 0-filled buffer and truncate the first (or last) buffer, rounding up the fwrite call to 2mb requires 0 extra lines.
Besides, they don't expect many people to actually look at the ROM code. This emulation craze is fairly recent.
Hey hey, I take offense. I'm great at what I do, but I'm a horrible teacher (I tried, years ago). If a college were to hire me, my first question would be "where's the server room", not "how many students do I have", because my place is in front of a machine (or several).
That said, it's easy to get a teaching job even if you're a complete idiot, as long as you're a mildly charismatic idiot (which most are). It's also quite difficult for HR to tell a genius from a quack, because people persons and computer persons speak two very different languages.
I actually learned something from I.T. profs: I learned that the frauds in this industry are the ones making money.
The actual computer science, I learned from books. The profs were really just props, decoys to make it look like it was a teaching establishment. All but two were complete doorknobs; one was a brilliant but misunderstood hacker, the other was a humble but honest developer who had no fear asking his own questions. Those two had my respect, all the other used-car salesmen, outdated COBOL monkeys and glorified book readers weren't worth anyone's time.
Mind you, I got caught in one of the many scamshops that thrived in the tech bubble of the late 90's. Think Devry but worse, it was really just a quicker way to get the same useless piece of paper. I'm just glad I had the knowledge long before entering the halls of ignorance, and I know it's not always that bad. I also know that in any profession there are always more bad workers than good; the problem is in I.T. the sloppy workers never get culled. Short of having a server rack fall and crush him, a stupid I.T. guy has little to worry about in the unprofessional execution of his tasks. Worst case, he'll get fired and have to find a new staffing agency (of which there is no shortage), but most likely his boss just doesn't have a clue.
I'm not saying all Pachelbel ever composed was crap. I honestly don't know enough of his work to make any sort of judgement, but the fact remains that the Canon struck me as a very foolish composition, even as a teenager studying music. He just happened to string together a melodic progression that appeals to the common fool, which is why every other rock/pop/punk hit today is just the same dumb Canon with drums and some interchangeable teenage angst vocalists.
For fun, google "Pachelbel Rant". You'll find a funny video that echoes how just about every true music lover feels about Pachelbel and pop music in general. And by music lover I don't mean hip-hop enthusiasts, I mean all music.
An OS swap doesn't add any value unless the old OS was broken.
XP is anything but broken. It's far from perfect, but it's in that sweet spot where stability, familiarity and 3rd party developers make it a great platform overall. On the other hand, Vista creeps out just about everyone who uses it, especially the technically savvy.
I remember jumping on an early beta of Windows 2000 way back in the day, and being quite excited (after surviving the 2-hour-long installation process, but I'll save that rant for another day). It was exciting, it was new, it was more better; it was a step forward. Vista doesn't feel like that at all, actually it feels like an early beta of Stardock ObjectDesktop, where half the buttons don't work and everything lags for no apparent reason. I installed Vista (again) a few weeks ago, with the express intent of giving it an honest try and taking a gaze at DirectX 10 visuals. After a half-hour of dicking around with the Sidebar and the "Run as administrator" insanity, I went back to XP. Vista is still on my 2nd partition, but I don't dare touch it. It gave me bad vibes, not unlike the disgust of using some naive minion's spyware-infested machine. It actually felt worse than a Xorg desktop for me (I don't like X, sorry!), because at least X doesn't get in the way of my work, and though sluggish, its apps are actually useful and not restricted to bouncing soft-colored blobs around ambiguous security warnings.
Perhaps most importantly, the UAC tries to bring Unix security to Windows, something it has never really had in its 22 years of existence. I've been using various Unices for close to a decade, but Windows security still throws me for a loop. For a user-friendly operating system, that's a major failure.
This place would be so much nicer if they got rid of Mr Coward.
With my respectable knowledge of DNS, I still declare BIND to be overcomplicated and in need of a redesign. Much like all the other big Linux apps, it consists of immensely useful functionality wrapped in a baroque layer of crud. How can someone spend so much effort writing an excellent feature set, then hide it away beneath poorly-documented interfaces that even the developers don't consistently understand ? It's a cop-out.
Correction: when one of these irritating little gadgets tries to write me a traffic ticket and I smash it to bits with a crowbar, the city just lost 30k. If I smash a cop with a crowbar, the city just needs to hire another cop. I probably won't even touch the patrol car (they're nice cars once you remove the asshole accessory).
Those poor kids deserve a real education, something Microsoft and Intel cannot accomplish because they are corporations. They exist for profit. Poor kids in Africa don't make Microsoft money, and the one in 100 who might grow from the experience and become something more than his peers, well he's too small a statistic to be worth the investment.
I'm very divided on the OLPC project, perhaps because it has been more about publicity than philanthropy. Negroponte's name has been all over the press because of it, much more so than the actual laptop.
Poverty aside, as a computer enthusiast I don't want to see cheap underpowered laptops with a zillion cutesy features I don't need. I want a cheap laptop that does the basics just right. I want a $300 laptop that first-world students can use (and afford), without the stupid glossy 17" widescreen LCD, 250gb hard drive and gaming-class graphics, maybe throw in more than 2 hours of usable battery life too (god that's stupid!) - just a portable analog to the $299 basic desktop PC.
I'm a firm believer in fixing one's own problems before trying to heal the rest of this sick dying world.
The fun part in all this is that violence will only escalate.
If the "less lethal" weapons are abused like this, the resistance will continue to grow ever more lethal as well. If we live in a society where cops are a threat, the result will be more dead cops because normal non-violent people suddenly need to be armed for self-defense.
A man (or woman) needs no weapon to be deadly, even the weakest little person can kill with the proper technique. I think we need to take these bad toys away from today's infantile police force and go back to teaching them how to survive on the street: intimidation and hand-to-hand combat. Guns are great if you're a thug (or trying to solve the thug problem), but for everything else they're useless and more dangerous than the situation itself.
Keep the service, but turn off the scheduled backups.
Shadow Copy is great on servers, where interactivity usually matters a lot less than data security. On the desktop, it seems like the wrong solution to the mindless-user problem.
Too true, but nobody cares to allocate resources to this much-needed maintenance.
Car analogy:) It's like that weirdo with the flaps on his hat, who never changes the oil until it seizes, never fixes the brakes until he rear-ends someone, and never puts gas until it stalls. That's the software industry.
There are some shops that factor a modest yet healthy amount of overhead toward maintenance and bug fixing. They are rare and they're typically not the ones you see in the news. The immediate nature of corporate finances makes it very difficult to make a case for proper software maintenance, because it's an investment not directly tied to a sale. Making your software better and faster may win you customers over the long run, but today's CEO doesn't give a damn about the future, they give a damn about the next SEC filing's impact on his stock portfolio.
As a guy who used to write entire applications and games in pure assembler (a loooong time ago), optimization is something I do on-the-fly, but to some degree of restraint. If something can be dramatically improved with one or two extra lines of code, I do it, otherwise I leave it as-is.
Keep in mind that only one other person ever sees my code, and he tends to figure out my hacks with relative ease (or asks me if he's stumped). If I were at Microsoft, such code-level optimization would be murder as I'd be the only guy in the building able to work on it.
One thing that can help tremendously in optimization is a virtual machine, then you can profile the whole thing from boot to shutdown. I used it extensively when I was producing games, though I was doing tricks that would be considered profane today, like self-modifying code and interleaving. People always gave me confused stares when I showed off my real-time loop unroller. How better to sync graphics, audio and input than to smush them all into one dynamically-interleaved refresh-synced loop ? You could call it extreme time-slicing minus the context switches, and it made that old 486 scream!
As much as I'd enjoy that sort of wizardry in today's software, there just isn't time for it anymore. I must have spent a good 40hrs on that arcane unroller, it was a labor of love by a teenage demo-coder. Today, I'd just throw more hardware at it and bill the client. Microsoft is no different, they're just a whole lot bigger.
As a former game developer, I find it hilarious that the very people criticizing game design are those who couldn't produce a play-worthy title even if they drank Warren Spector's urine every day for seven years.
I hate load times as much as the next guy, probably even more because I have a beefy machine that should negate them, but today's games have levels because, well, they do. You don't go whining to Peter Jackson when he cuts from scene to scene, and a one-shot movie is neat when you're a pretentious film student, but pretty boring anywhere else.
Levels break up the story into discrete chunks. They offer a convenient pivot to introduce plot twists, new challenges/tools, new landscapes; it's analogous to a fade-to-black. Those who complain about realism and immersion, well tell me this: why do you play games ? Is it because reality is kinda boring and you want an escape ? Then why would you want the escape to be identical to the boring thing you're running away from ?
I'll take a recent example: Crysis. You walk, drive and fly from the beginning to the end. There are maybe 3-4 loading sequences where you stare at a progress bar for a few seconds, then reappear in the same area but differently framed (e.g. fly over a naval fleet, and after loading you findself on foot on the ship, a few hours later in plot time. I can live with this, as the action radius shifts from a 20-mile canyon to a 400-foot naval carrier; it gives the player confirmation that the tedious flying and shooting is over, you've (temporarily) beat the bad guys, and get a chance to snap back into the run-and-gun mindset. Even when there are dramatic plot transitions, you're still pushing those movement keys and shooting down the bad guys. The few "cutscenes" in the game are actually rendered by the game engine so there's no pause, no transition, and when the speech is over you still have your finger on the trigger.
You could change the names, and that last paragraph would apply to Half-Life. If the game designers didn't want a loading pause, they wouldn't be one. Technical limitations aren't such a huge obstacle anymore, with plentiful Ram and fast storage you can buffer hours worth of content long before the player ever reaches that area.
There are some folks that just don't put any effort, and still approach game design like people did 30 years ago. Sometimes that's a good thing like arcade games, which will always have a market in those who don't want to sit down for a 2-hour adventure.
Pachelbel was doing mindless music long before rock ever happened. Maybe we should dig him up and have his reanimated corpse sue the record industry to hell.
Seriously, this guy reminds me of an opposition party. Whatever the majority says, he contradicts for the sole reason of getting attention. The dumber his statements, the more we flame over it.
Wasn't this asshat pushing P2P not so long ago with yet another stupid browser plugin called "Red Swoosh" ?
Okay so they're all on smack, which is how they got the idea to sue in the first place, and with the imaginary proceeds from the suit they'll be able to buy even more smack.
How about "FOAD ya one-hit wonder" ? I never understood how you can copyright three chords.
Slashdot Mirror
Precisely.
"Craze" to me is when a non-technical person can run an emulator with a few mouse clicks, or by poking around with their Wii. Marat Fayzullin (remember him?) was not a household name, even though he was the developer of a very popular Game Boy emulator.
These days you can hop on any garbage P2P client, type "game boy" and get a list of preconfigured emulators and frontends with EVERY SINGLE ROM. Any half-brained suburbanite can run it.
Just look at MP3... back in the 90's we had them, and by "we" I mean geeks. bongo.tamu.edu was a "large" collection, they had maybe a couple hundred tunes. Today, my mother has an MP3 player in her car (it came with it). She probably didn't know what an MP3 was until a couple of years ago.
Just because Slashdotters are aware of tech, doesn't mean it is mainstream.
Having played both versions, they do have minor differences in gameplay, but we're talking about teeny weeny little timing issues like a certain water maze about 2/3rds into the game that was originally frustrating, but the DX version made a tad easier due to some change in the way the water's current was implemented.
I wouldn't be all that surprised if they did have to recode some of it. Keep in mind that 2D games are almost trivial to code for any game developer, so it's not as big of an effort as you'd think. The fun part is that the code being so simple, you usually end up improving during the rewrite since you're aware of the entire project. Back in those days, many "2.0" games were the result of a partial or complete rewrite that elegantly solved various hacks.
I didn't say I'd hire American nekkid peepulz :P
:)
Try Budapest... cheaper labor, finer women
This was my immediate reaction after reading the blurb.
I'm a complete ignoramus with GPL/FSF licenses... but wouldn't the source-code requirement only extend to the modified Zlib/Inflate code ? I was under the impression that most libraries allow linking from closed-source apps, da ?
I realize I'm a broke ass, but how can one mile of anything cost 100 million ?
I could build a mile of naked people gently carrying bodysurfers along for less than 100 mil per mile.
Maybe instead of having these mag trains, we could just increase bandwidth the old-fashioned way: parallelism. Stick four train tracks where there was previous one, and you can move 4 times more people. Tech is nice, but it seems like this sort of outlay would cripple funding in more pressing areas. Transit is just transit, and today's jacked-in lifestyle makes much of it redundant.
It's kinda funny... lawyers get paid to scare people and occasionally destroy their lives over greed. Hitmen do the same thing (just more efficiently). The different is that if I knew someone had hired a hitman, I'd hire my own, then kill both the opposing hitman AND his client. In legal battles, only the client gets punished (sometimes). I think we should start holding lawyers accountable for the chaos they create on behalf of their client, when the character of the trial is deemed abusive.
An accomplice to theft gets jail time, maybe not as bad as the head honcho but they still don't get away scot-free. A lawyer can be an accomplice to the crime if they knowingly present fabricated evidence.
The bar association needs to tighten up the show. A lot of people are losing faith in the system, and hitmen are a whole lot cheaper than lawyers.
The BSA doesn't care whether you're above-board or not, they only care whether they have a chance of suing you.
Some business have lost suits over missing receipts... they legally owned the software, but were unable to produce "proof" that they had purchased and paid for it (I guess that big embossed Windows box with the holo-label wasn't proof enough).
I personally think BSA staff should be viciously assaulted verbally, physically and mentally until they either jump off a bridge or their little balding heads explode. They're just fear-mongers acting on behalf of Microsoft and a handful of other big outfits. They are textbook court abusers, artificially taxing the software industry on many levels and wasting everyone's time. Let the actual copyright holder do the legal battling, not some double-immune proxy.
When you're a ROM developer, you don't think in such terms. It's all about mapping this and interleaving that.
Rather than writing the extra few lines to calculate the padding required, set up a 0-filled buffer and truncate the first (or last) buffer, rounding up the fwrite call to 2mb requires 0 extra lines.
Besides, they don't expect many people to actually look at the ROM code. This emulation craze is fairly recent.
Hey hey, I take offense. I'm great at what I do, but I'm a horrible teacher (I tried, years ago). If a college were to hire me, my first question would be "where's the server room", not "how many students do I have", because my place is in front of a machine (or several).
That said, it's easy to get a teaching job even if you're a complete idiot, as long as you're a mildly charismatic idiot (which most are). It's also quite difficult for HR to tell a genius from a quack, because people persons and computer persons speak two very different languages.
I actually learned something from I.T. profs: I learned that the frauds in this industry are the ones making money.
The actual computer science, I learned from books. The profs were really just props, decoys to make it look like it was a teaching establishment. All but two were complete doorknobs; one was a brilliant but misunderstood hacker, the other was a humble but honest developer who had no fear asking his own questions. Those two had my respect, all the other used-car salesmen, outdated COBOL monkeys and glorified book readers weren't worth anyone's time.
Mind you, I got caught in one of the many scamshops that thrived in the tech bubble of the late 90's. Think Devry but worse, it was really just a quicker way to get the same useless piece of paper. I'm just glad I had the knowledge long before entering the halls of ignorance, and I know it's not always that bad. I also know that in any profession there are always more bad workers than good; the problem is in I.T. the sloppy workers never get culled. Short of having a server rack fall and crush him, a stupid I.T. guy has little to worry about in the unprofessional execution of his tasks. Worst case, he'll get fired and have to find a new staffing agency (of which there is no shortage), but most likely his boss just doesn't have a clue.
I'm not saying all Pachelbel ever composed was crap. I honestly don't know enough of his work to make any sort of judgement, but the fact remains that the Canon struck me as a very foolish composition, even as a teenager studying music. He just happened to string together a melodic progression that appeals to the common fool, which is why every other rock/pop/punk hit today is just the same dumb Canon with drums and some interchangeable teenage angst vocalists.
For fun, google "Pachelbel Rant". You'll find a funny video that echoes how just about every true music lover feels about Pachelbel and pop music in general. And by music lover I don't mean hip-hop enthusiasts, I mean all music.
An OS swap doesn't add any value unless the old OS was broken.
XP is anything but broken. It's far from perfect, but it's in that sweet spot where stability, familiarity and 3rd party developers make it a great platform overall. On the other hand, Vista creeps out just about everyone who uses it, especially the technically savvy.
I remember jumping on an early beta of Windows 2000 way back in the day, and being quite excited (after surviving the 2-hour-long installation process, but I'll save that rant for another day). It was exciting, it was new, it was more better; it was a step forward. Vista doesn't feel like that at all, actually it feels like an early beta of Stardock ObjectDesktop, where half the buttons don't work and everything lags for no apparent reason. I installed Vista (again) a few weeks ago, with the express intent of giving it an honest try and taking a gaze at DirectX 10 visuals. After a half-hour of dicking around with the Sidebar and the "Run as administrator" insanity, I went back to XP. Vista is still on my 2nd partition, but I don't dare touch it. It gave me bad vibes, not unlike the disgust of using some naive minion's spyware-infested machine. It actually felt worse than a Xorg desktop for me (I don't like X, sorry!), because at least X doesn't get in the way of my work, and though sluggish, its apps are actually useful and not restricted to bouncing soft-colored blobs around ambiguous security warnings.
Perhaps most importantly, the UAC tries to bring Unix security to Windows, something it has never really had in its 22 years of existence. I've been using various Unices for close to a decade, but Windows security still throws me for a loop. For a user-friendly operating system, that's a major failure.
This place would be so much nicer if they got rid of Mr Coward.
With my respectable knowledge of DNS, I still declare BIND to be overcomplicated and in need of a redesign. Much like all the other big Linux apps, it consists of immensely useful functionality wrapped in a baroque layer of crud. How can someone spend so much effort writing an excellent feature set, then hide it away beneath poorly-documented interfaces that even the developers don't consistently understand ? It's a cop-out.
Correction: when one of these irritating little gadgets tries to write me a traffic ticket and I smash it to bits with a crowbar, the city just lost 30k. If I smash a cop with a crowbar, the city just needs to hire another cop. I probably won't even touch the patrol car (they're nice cars once you remove the asshole accessory).
Those poor kids deserve a real education, something Microsoft and Intel cannot accomplish because they are corporations. They exist for profit. Poor kids in Africa don't make Microsoft money, and the one in 100 who might grow from the experience and become something more than his peers, well he's too small a statistic to be worth the investment.
I'm very divided on the OLPC project, perhaps because it has been more about publicity than philanthropy. Negroponte's name has been all over the press because of it, much more so than the actual laptop.
Poverty aside, as a computer enthusiast I don't want to see cheap underpowered laptops with a zillion cutesy features I don't need. I want a cheap laptop that does the basics just right. I want a $300 laptop that first-world students can use (and afford), without the stupid glossy 17" widescreen LCD, 250gb hard drive and gaming-class graphics, maybe throw in more than 2 hours of usable battery life too (god that's stupid!) - just a portable analog to the $299 basic desktop PC.
I'm a firm believer in fixing one's own problems before trying to heal the rest of this sick dying world.
The fun part in all this is that violence will only escalate.
If the "less lethal" weapons are abused like this, the resistance will continue to grow ever more lethal as well. If we live in a society where cops are a threat, the result will be more dead cops because normal non-violent people suddenly need to be armed for self-defense.
A man (or woman) needs no weapon to be deadly, even the weakest little person can kill with the proper technique. I think we need to take these bad toys away from today's infantile police force and go back to teaching them how to survive on the street: intimidation and hand-to-hand combat. Guns are great if you're a thug (or trying to solve the thug problem), but for everything else they're useless and more dangerous than the situation itself.
'Course he/she/it did. Have you not noticed how the entire internet has been overrun by ad-whores ?
OpenBSD ? Are you one of the 12 people who still use that ?
I used to run a custom-built version of Linux on my old 486, just for kicks really. Using a 2.2 kernel makes it a lot easier to fit in such little.
Keep the service, but turn off the scheduled backups.
Shadow Copy is great on servers, where interactivity usually matters a lot less than data security. On the desktop, it seems like the wrong solution to the mindless-user problem.
Too true, but nobody cares to allocate resources to this much-needed maintenance.
:) It's like that weirdo with the flaps on his hat, who never changes the oil until it seizes, never fixes the brakes until he rear-ends someone, and never puts gas until it stalls. That's the software industry.
Car analogy
There are some shops that factor a modest yet healthy amount of overhead toward maintenance and bug fixing. They are rare and they're typically not the ones you see in the news. The immediate nature of corporate finances makes it very difficult to make a case for proper software maintenance, because it's an investment not directly tied to a sale. Making your software better and faster may win you customers over the long run, but today's CEO doesn't give a damn about the future, they give a damn about the next SEC filing's impact on his stock portfolio.
As a guy who used to write entire applications and games in pure assembler (a loooong time ago), optimization is something I do on-the-fly, but to some degree of restraint. If something can be dramatically improved with one or two extra lines of code, I do it, otherwise I leave it as-is.
Keep in mind that only one other person ever sees my code, and he tends to figure out my hacks with relative ease (or asks me if he's stumped). If I were at Microsoft, such code-level optimization would be murder as I'd be the only guy in the building able to work on it.
One thing that can help tremendously in optimization is a virtual machine, then you can profile the whole thing from boot to shutdown. I used it extensively when I was producing games, though I was doing tricks that would be considered profane today, like self-modifying code and interleaving. People always gave me confused stares when I showed off my real-time loop unroller. How better to sync graphics, audio and input than to smush them all into one dynamically-interleaved refresh-synced loop ? You could call it extreme time-slicing minus the context switches, and it made that old 486 scream!
As much as I'd enjoy that sort of wizardry in today's software, there just isn't time for it anymore. I must have spent a good 40hrs on that arcane unroller, it was a labor of love by a teenage demo-coder. Today, I'd just throw more hardware at it and bill the client. Microsoft is no different, they're just a whole lot bigger.
As a former game developer, I find it hilarious that the very people criticizing game design are those who couldn't produce a play-worthy title even if they drank Warren Spector's urine every day for seven years.
I hate load times as much as the next guy, probably even more because I have a beefy machine that should negate them, but today's games have levels because, well, they do. You don't go whining to Peter Jackson when he cuts from scene to scene, and a one-shot movie is neat when you're a pretentious film student, but pretty boring anywhere else.
Levels break up the story into discrete chunks. They offer a convenient pivot to introduce plot twists, new challenges/tools, new landscapes; it's analogous to a fade-to-black. Those who complain about realism and immersion, well tell me this: why do you play games ? Is it because reality is kinda boring and you want an escape ? Then why would you want the escape to be identical to the boring thing you're running away from ?
I'll take a recent example: Crysis. You walk, drive and fly from the beginning to the end. There are maybe 3-4 loading sequences where you stare at a progress bar for a few seconds, then reappear in the same area but differently framed (e.g. fly over a naval fleet, and after loading you findself on foot on the ship, a few hours later in plot time. I can live with this, as the action radius shifts from a 20-mile canyon to a 400-foot naval carrier; it gives the player confirmation that the tedious flying and shooting is over, you've (temporarily) beat the bad guys, and get a chance to snap back into the run-and-gun mindset. Even when there are dramatic plot transitions, you're still pushing those movement keys and shooting down the bad guys. The few "cutscenes" in the game are actually rendered by the game engine so there's no pause, no transition, and when the speech is over you still have your finger on the trigger.
You could change the names, and that last paragraph would apply to Half-Life. If the game designers didn't want a loading pause, they wouldn't be one. Technical limitations aren't such a huge obstacle anymore, with plentiful Ram and fast storage you can buffer hours worth of content long before the player ever reaches that area.
There are some folks that just don't put any effort, and still approach game design like people did 30 years ago. Sometimes that's a good thing like arcade games, which will always have a market in those who don't want to sit down for a 2-hour adventure.
Pachelbel was doing mindless music long before rock ever happened. Maybe we should dig him up and have his reanimated corpse sue the record industry to hell.
In other news,
P2P users call on ISP2 to block Mark Cuban.
Seriously, this guy reminds me of an opposition party. Whatever the majority says, he contradicts for the sole reason of getting attention. The dumber his statements, the more we flame over it.
Wasn't this asshat pushing P2P not so long ago with yet another stupid browser plugin called "Red Swoosh" ?
Okay so they're all on smack, which is how they got the idea to sue in the first place, and with the imaginary proceeds from the suit they'll be able to buy even more smack.
How about "FOAD ya one-hit wonder" ? I never understood how you can copyright three chords.