The glacsweb probes contain about 4 small batteries.
They contain a realtime clock, and are in a minimal power sleep mode for most of the time. They wake up once a day to talk to the base station on the surface. The probes are designed to last for a year,
and the first batch were deployed in August 2003.
There is very good mobile phone coverage on the glacier, as there are antennas on the roof of a hotel in the valley below. This combined with excellent accessibility are the reasons this glacier was chosen for the study.
The hardware has to be very carefully designed to get the batteries to last. We believe that we can get up to a year worth of operation from a probe. I don't have the details of the batteries to hand, but this is the aproximate time period, taking into account the reduced performance due to the cold.
The presentation you linked is a bit old, and I'm not sure where the 1.8 ghz figure comes from.
I am one of the field researchers on this project, and radio propagation through the ice has been one of the major difficulties. Initial work based on 868MHz has had limited success, so the followup work will use 433MHz with a backup low bandwidth 50kHz link.
Initial tests done last October with 433MHz indicated that we should be able get the range we need. The key is that ice has very different radio properties from water. It is much less conductive. This is countered by the problem that for much of the year there is a lot of water inside and on the gacier.
The first time I had to deal with this I used Ibuprofen or Aspirin to get through the pain. It counters the effect of caffeine withdrawl pretty well. The pain usually lasts for just over a day at most, after that I feel amazingly free. I got into the habit of avoiding coffee for a few days before going abroad, so I didn't have a shitty time if I couldn't get good coffee. Over the last few months I have made a point of drinking no coffee at all at the weekend. This keeps my habit nicely under control, minimises the withdrawl symptoms, and makes the caffeine much more effective on Monday morning.
A search round the driver page reveals that Linux drivers are still available for the FireGL series of pro cards, and as the latest Radeon cards are based on FireGL technology, Radeon 8500 or later are supported by the driver. If you download the latest driver rpm for "FireGL X1, FireGL X1 128MB, FireGL Z1, FireGL 8800, FireGL 8700" then the package description lists "ATI Radeon 8500, 9700, Mobility M9 and the FireGL 8700/8800, E1, Z1/X1" as supported cards. Hopefully ATI will continue to produce updated versions of this driver, with new extensions, support for new versions of glibc and new versions of XFree86. It would be much better if they could list this driver in the standard section so that users would know it was available and supported Radeon cards.
I am using this driver currently with my Radeon 9000 Pro, and have had excellent results.
After playing Ultima IX I became so fascinated by games with complex world simulations that I started looking into how they were developed. I left behind the free software projects I had been working on, and joined the WorldForge project, started going to game developer related conferences, and eventually developing games became the core of my career.
The Ultima series have a quality which I have not yet managed to pin down that makes them different from most other RPGs. Its something to do with the powerful sense of immersion, the depth and complexity of the world model, and the type of story.
40 players is hardly massively multiplayer. I don't know much about the technology in UO, but I strongly suspect that its bandwidth requirements are far lower than that of modern MMORPGs.
I think if you check on the egenesis website you will not find source code for anything except their modified version of cal3d. I have no reason to believe that they did not write the rest of the engine themselves, but they are not releasing the source for that, which is the point in the previous post that I was attempting to clarify.
Re:Interesting. Some thoughts on this game.
on
A Tale in the Desert
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Far from being a problem, large groups who band together and try and solve Tale are exactly how its supposed to work. The thing is there will be other large groups who have banded together who are also trying to solve it faster than you, and eGenesis are continuously rolling out new content as fast as you can master it.
The ammount of work achieved by some of the guilds during the betas was trully awesome. It would take one hell of an organised group of people with lots of free time to beat them all.
Open Source MMORPGs run without subscription is a nice idea, and one I have come across a few times before, but the facts are that there are good reasons why all the games of this kind are run on a subscription basis. It takes a serious ammount of computing power and bandwidth to host one of these games, and its beyond the means of even the most philanthropic people to provide it all for free. The most you can realistically hope to host is a server for games roughly on the same scale as Neverwinter Nights.
In addition to the running costs, the developers of MMORPGs have to recover the much larger development costs through the subscription charges, so you might be able to run a server quite a bit cheaper.
cal3d is a character animation library, and as far as I am aware eGenesis are just releasing their modified version of cal3d.
If the graphics are all you are looking at, then you are missing the point. This game is not about the graphics. As I said in my main post, its about political interplay between the players.
I have played a number of MMORPGs, work on the WorldForge project, and have been playing Tale on an off for well over a year now, and I have found it an absolutely facinating game. Above all else this game is about politics. The tasks that need to be done in order to make progress in the lang of egypt quickly get beyond the abilities of single players, and guilds become essential to achieve anything, and this is where the fun starts. True leadership is required to get a guild functioning effectively, and a guild can be made or broken by the effectiveness of its key members. The democtratic system in the game, which mean that the players can vote to implement almost any rule also leads to some interesting outcomes.
The various betas ran under wine long before the Linux game came out, so many friends who only play games under Linux have also been joining in. The arrival of the Linux client is most welcome though. I will almost certainly maintain a subscription to this game, and play it when I can, although free time is so hard to come by.
Valgrind really is an amazing bit of software. Working on large application which use many different libraries it becomes harder and harder to work out where those bugs are, and all the free tools I have tried so far have done a very poor job of finding them. I have now been using valgrind for several months, and got 1.0 straight from the author by mail having reported a few bugs in earlier versions. It speeds up finding those hard to reproduce bugs, and often shows up memory errors which you didn't even know were there. It is also excellent for detecting memory leaks as it knows the difference between memory that has been genuinly leaked, and memory which is not freed, but still has a reference to it stored when the program exits. All the software I work on is now much more robust than it was a few months ago, and much of this I can put down to valgrind being available. This is the only free tool that comes close to the commercial tools like Purify, and in many ways it is superior to some of the expensive high end tools. The author is extremely responsive and helpful, and has been developing valgrind full time self funded.
It seems to me that this is probably an attempt to kill OpenGL 2.0, and secure Direct X as the dominant 3D API. OpenGL 2.0 has as far as I can tell been well thought out, and most of the feedback to it has been very positive. The frontend to its shader language is Free Software, and the work done seems to have been done with the best of intentions. I am very cynical about an offering from NVIDIA, especially when you consider their behavoir towards the rest of the 3D card market, and the fact that Microsoft are involved.
Most of the cheat programs for the current crop of MMORPG's simply take over the network stream and insert their own, valid commands. Locking out the client from game logic has no effect on them whatsoever.
This only works because the server does not check the commands from the client to see if they are possible. If the server took commands from the client as the players intentions, and then used its internal logic to determine the outcome, there is no reason why direct access to the data stream, or the source of the client should help cheaters.
At WorldForge we have obviously been considering this point since soon after we started, and we believe that this is not the case. It is true that to achieve the twitch responce of a first person shooter it is extremely difficult to detect client side cheating, but the more moderate pace of online RPGs can be different. If a model is chosen where the client is totally untrusted, the players ability to cheat by modifying the source of the client is minimised. An additional benefit is that this security model means it is far more difficult to cheat using add-on programs like those available for many current online RPGs.
One of the most important features of the GPL is that ordinary users are not required to understand it. Whereas most licenses require that the user accept the license before they use the software, the GPL explicltly specifies that use of its software is outside its scope. You only need to read, understand and agree to the GPL of you want to modify or redistribute the software. In the majority of cases this does not apply to the user, so the user is free to use the software without reading or agreeing to the GPL.
There are more problems with the payment plan you propose than I can immediatly explain, but I will have a go.
Firstly, these games cost more than single player games to develop. Much more. Costs relating to the current generation, and the next generation in development are between 5 and 10 times as expensive as a typical single player game. If all they got was the initial purchase price, it would not be economically viable at all.
When it comes down to it, $12.95 per month is really not that much. When you compare it with the cost versus playtime of most games out there, then its very good value. The playtime of games is shorter than it used to be, and it looks like its going to get shorter still. I am not a hardcore gamer by any means, and I played the last two games I bought in less the a week each. I imagine that a teenager with fast reflexes and plenty of free time would have been able to finish them in a day.
The current payment model covers the costs quite nicely. A burst of revenue early on to cover a proportion of the development costs, and the costs of setting up the servers, followed by a steady, if gradually declining revenue stream to cover the costs of updates, new content and operational costs. If anything the proportion of the cost covered by subscription is going to rise rather than fall, and the idea of a company letting you play for free after your initial subscription period is a pipe dream.
Origin, now part of Electronic Arts have effictively opted out of the MMORPG market by shutting down UO 2, and focusing their development on a different style of online game. Sony Online Entertainment who made Everquest, are currently developing a good proportion of the next generation of games, so they don't seem to be in any serious danger of being pushed out of the market. Many of the people you see in this article are connected with Sony, and it seems that Sony are determined to have a large chunk of the MMORPG market.
You seem to be missing two important points here. There are two things that the big players is the MMOG games industry are aiming for here:
1. They are aiming to make games that appeal to as many people as possible. They already have games that appeal to obsessives. There is no need to continue to produce games exclusively for this market. The MMOG publishers want to expand their market, and they see it as essential to attract people who not interested in devoting their lives to the game.
2. The fewer hours each player spends online, the more profit they can make. Time spent online puts load on the servers, and costs them bandwidth. Many of the developers are aiming to create games where the players can have a full experience, and feel that they are making a difference, while spending a fraction of the time online than that of the typical EverQuest player.
Reading up on the zlib licence, which is short
and easy to understand, I find this clause:
1. The origin of this software must not be misrepresented; you must not claim that you wrote the original software. If you use this software in a product, an acknowledgment in the product documentation would be appreciated but is not required.
The way I read this, if software uses zlib code,
then the authors of their software must not claim to have written the code. Microsoft are not obliged to acknowledge the zlib authors anywhere, but if they make a copyright statement saying
that the code was written by Microsoft, then surely they are claiming that they wrote the zlib code in their product, and are therefor breaking this clause?
Does anyone know if Microsofts' copyright
statements comply?
I am probably too late for this point to be
discussed.
While it is definitly time to move on from C, C++ is not the answer. You refer to modern, safe languages, and C++ is neither of these. It opens up more security flaws than it fixes, fixes no portability problems, is a nightmare to maintain, and has poor support for reuse. Please, no more C++ compilers, and no more C++!
The main reason for these problems in C++ is
its glut of features and complexity. The language is so complex that it takes years to master, and as a result, most programmers are inexpert at best. True C++ gurus are few and far between. Inexperienced programmers, who poorly understand features such as templates and operator overloading end up writing bizare code which is hard for anyone else to understand, and can hide a multitude of flaws.
If you are looking for a modern safe language with support for security, portability and reuse, look no further than Java. The availability if JIT and native code compilers mean that java performs just as well as C++, without many of the problems.
Speaking as a game developer, who codes
primarily on Linux for Linux, I would certainly
buy a copy once C++ support is available, if
the code produced was fast.
I have lost touch with the ammount of time I
have spent going over code again and again to
make it a bit more efficient, and removing
bottlenecks. I would gladly pay for a product
which would enable me to ship binaries that
were faster.
The question of ABI compatability on C++ is
very tricky though. A C++ compiler would be of limited use if it did not use the same ABI as g++,
though with the release of gcc 3, this ABI has at least stabilised.
One significant advantage SDL has over glut is that it does not take control of the main application loop. This gives you lots more flexibility. I know many Windows programmers who use SDL instead of glut for this reason, among others. This combined with the extra portability and utility features provided by SDL make it very attractive. Long live Sam Lantinga.
Slashdot Mirror
The glacsweb probes contain about 4 small batteries. They contain a realtime clock, and are in a minimal power sleep mode for most of the time. They wake up once a day to talk to the base station on the surface. The probes are designed to last for a year, and the first batch were deployed in August 2003.
There is very good mobile phone coverage on the glacier, as there are antennas on the roof of a hotel in the valley below. This combined with excellent accessibility are the reasons this glacier was chosen for the study.
The hardware has to be very carefully designed to get the batteries to last. We believe that we can get up to a year worth of operation from a probe. I don't have the details of the batteries to hand, but this is the aproximate time period, taking into account the reduced performance due to the cold.
The presentation you linked is a bit old, and I'm not sure where the 1.8 ghz figure comes from.
I am one of the field researchers on this project, and radio propagation through the ice has been one of the major difficulties. Initial work based on 868MHz has had limited success, so the followup work will use 433MHz with a backup low bandwidth 50kHz link.
Initial tests done last October with 433MHz indicated that we should be able get the range we need. The key is that ice has very different radio properties from water. It is much less conductive. This is countered by the problem that for much of the year there is a lot of water inside and on the gacier.
The first time I had to deal with this I used Ibuprofen or Aspirin to get through the pain. It counters the effect of caffeine withdrawl pretty well. The pain usually lasts for just over a day at most, after that I feel amazingly free. I got into the habit of avoiding coffee for a few days before going abroad, so I didn't have a shitty time if I couldn't get good coffee. Over the last few months I have made a point of drinking no coffee at all at the weekend. This keeps my habit nicely under control, minimises the withdrawl symptoms, and makes the caffeine much more effective on Monday morning.
A search round the driver page reveals that Linux drivers are still available for the FireGL series of pro cards, and as the latest Radeon cards are based on FireGL technology, Radeon 8500 or later are supported by the driver. If you download the latest driver rpm for "FireGL X1, FireGL X1 128MB, FireGL Z1, FireGL 8800, FireGL 8700" then the package description lists "ATI Radeon 8500, 9700, Mobility M9 and the FireGL 8700/8800, E1, Z1/X1" as supported cards. Hopefully ATI will continue to produce updated versions of this driver, with new extensions, support for new versions of glibc and new versions of XFree86. It would be much better if they could list this driver in the standard section so that users would know it was available and supported Radeon cards.
I am using this driver currently with my Radeon 9000 Pro, and have had excellent results.
After playing Ultima IX I became so fascinated by games with complex world simulations that I started looking into how they were developed. I left behind the free software projects I had been working on, and joined the WorldForge project, started going to game developer related conferences, and eventually developing games became the core of my career.
The Ultima series have a quality which I have not yet managed to pin down that makes them different from most other RPGs. Its something to do with the powerful sense of immersion, the depth and complexity of the world model, and the type of story.
40 players is hardly massively multiplayer. I don't know much about the technology in UO, but I strongly suspect that its bandwidth requirements are far lower than that of modern MMORPGs.
I think if you check on the egenesis website you will not find source code for anything except their modified version of cal3d. I have no reason to believe that they did not write the rest of the engine themselves, but they are not releasing the source for that, which is the point in the previous post that I was attempting to clarify.
Far from being a problem, large groups who band together and try and solve Tale are exactly how its supposed to work. The thing is there will be other large groups who have banded together who are also trying to solve it faster than you, and eGenesis are continuously rolling out new content as fast as you can master it.
The ammount of work achieved by some of the guilds during the betas was trully awesome. It would take one hell of an organised group of people with lots of free time to beat them all.
Open Source MMORPGs run without subscription is a nice idea, and one I have come across a few times before, but the facts are that there are good reasons why all the games of this kind are run on a subscription basis. It takes a serious ammount of computing power and bandwidth to host one of these games, and its beyond the means of even the most philanthropic people to provide it all for free. The most you can realistically hope to host is a server for games roughly on the same scale as Neverwinter Nights.
In addition to the running costs, the developers of MMORPGs have to recover the much larger development costs through the subscription charges, so you might be able to run a server quite a bit cheaper.
cal3d is a character animation library, and as far as I am aware eGenesis are just releasing their modified version of cal3d.
If the graphics are all you are looking at, then you are missing the point. This game is not about the graphics. As I said in my main post, its about political interplay between the players.
I have played a number of MMORPGs, work on the WorldForge project, and have been playing Tale on an off for well over a year now, and I have found it an absolutely facinating game. Above all else this game is about politics. The tasks that need to be done in order to make progress in the lang of egypt quickly get beyond the abilities of single players, and guilds become essential to achieve anything, and this is where the fun starts. True leadership is required to get a guild functioning effectively, and a guild can be made or broken by the effectiveness of its key members. The democtratic system in the game, which mean that the players can vote to implement almost any rule also leads to some interesting outcomes.
The various betas ran under wine long before the Linux game came out, so many friends who only play games under Linux have also been joining in. The arrival of the Linux client is most welcome though. I will almost certainly maintain a subscription to this game, and play it when I can, although free time is so hard to come by.
Valgrind really is an amazing bit of software. Working on large application which use many different libraries it becomes harder and harder to work out where those bugs are, and all the free tools I have tried so far have done a very poor job of finding them. I have now been using valgrind for several months, and got 1.0 straight from the author by mail having reported a few bugs in earlier versions. It speeds up finding those hard to reproduce bugs, and often shows up memory errors which you didn't even know were there. It is also excellent for detecting memory leaks as it knows the difference between memory that has been genuinly leaked, and memory which is not freed, but still has a reference to it stored when the program exits. All the software I work on is now much more robust than it was a few months ago, and much of this I can put down to valgrind being available. This is the only free tool that comes close to the commercial tools like Purify, and in many ways it is superior to some of the expensive high end tools. The author is extremely responsive and helpful, and has been developing valgrind full time self funded.
It seems to me that this is probably an attempt to kill OpenGL 2.0, and secure Direct X as the dominant 3D API. OpenGL 2.0 has as far as I can tell been well thought out, and most of the feedback to it has been very positive. The frontend to its shader language is Free Software, and the work done seems to have been done with the best of intentions. I am very cynical about an offering from NVIDIA, especially when you consider their behavoir towards the rest of the 3D card market, and the fact that Microsoft are involved.
This only works because the server does not check the commands from the client to see if they are possible. If the server took commands from the client as the players intentions, and then used its internal logic to determine the outcome, there is no reason why direct access to the data stream, or the source of the client should help cheaters.
At WorldForge we have obviously been considering this point since soon after we started, and we believe that this is not the case. It is true that to achieve the twitch responce of a first person shooter it is extremely difficult to detect client side cheating, but the more moderate pace of online RPGs can be different. If a model is chosen where the client is totally untrusted, the players ability to cheat by modifying the source of the client is minimised. An additional benefit is that this security model means it is far more difficult to cheat using add-on programs like those available for many current online RPGs.
One of the most important features of the GPL is that ordinary users are not required to understand it. Whereas most licenses require that the user accept the license before they use the software, the GPL explicltly specifies that use of its software is outside its scope. You only need to read, understand and agree to the GPL of you want to modify or redistribute the software. In the majority of cases this does not apply to the user, so the user is free to use the software without reading or agreeing to the GPL.
There are more problems with the payment plan you propose than I can immediatly explain, but I will have a go.
Firstly, these games cost more than single player games to develop. Much more. Costs relating to the current generation, and the next generation in development are between 5 and 10 times as expensive as a typical single player game. If all they got was the initial purchase price, it would not be economically viable at all.
When it comes down to it, $12.95 per month is really not that much. When you compare it with the cost versus playtime of most games out there, then its very good value. The playtime of games is shorter than it used to be, and it looks like its going to get shorter still. I am not a hardcore gamer by any means, and I played the last two games I bought in less the a week each. I imagine that a teenager with fast reflexes and plenty of free time would have been able to finish them in a day.
The current payment model covers the costs quite nicely. A burst of revenue early on to cover a proportion of the development costs, and the costs of setting up the servers, followed by a steady, if gradually declining revenue stream to cover the costs of updates, new content and operational costs. If anything the proportion of the cost covered by subscription is going to rise rather than fall, and the idea of a company letting you play for free after your initial subscription period is a pipe dream.
Origin, now part of Electronic Arts have effictively opted out of the MMORPG market by shutting down UO 2, and focusing their development on a different style of online game. Sony Online Entertainment who made Everquest, are currently developing a good proportion of the next generation of games, so they don't seem to be in any serious danger of being pushed out of the market. Many of the people you see in this article are connected with Sony, and it seems that Sony are determined to have a large chunk of the MMORPG market.
You seem to be missing two important points here. There are two things that the big players is the MMOG games industry are aiming for here:
1. They are aiming to make games that appeal to as many people as possible. They already have games that appeal to obsessives. There is no need to continue to produce games exclusively for this market. The MMOG publishers want to expand their market, and they see it as essential to attract people who not interested in devoting their lives to the game.
2. The fewer hours each player spends online, the more profit they can make. Time spent online puts load on the servers, and costs them bandwidth. Many of the developers are aiming to create games where the players can have a full experience, and feel that they are making a difference, while spending a fraction of the time online than that of the typical EverQuest player.
Reading up on the zlib licence, which is short and easy to understand, I find this clause:
The way I read this, if software uses zlib code, then the authors of their software must not claim to have written the code. Microsoft are not obliged to acknowledge the zlib authors anywhere, but if they make a copyright statement saying that the code was written by Microsoft, then surely they are claiming that they wrote the zlib code in their product, and are therefor breaking this clause?Does anyone know if Microsofts' copyright statements comply?
I am probably too late for this point to be discussed.
The Acorn 0.4 client was compiled for Windows, but it had some bugs that we were not able to iron out in time for the release.
While it is definitly time to move on from C, C++ is not the answer. You refer to modern, safe languages, and C++ is neither of these. It opens up more security flaws than it fixes, fixes no portability problems, is a nightmare to maintain, and has poor support for reuse. Please, no more C++ compilers, and no more C++!
The main reason for these problems in C++ is its glut of features and complexity. The language is so complex that it takes years to master, and as a result, most programmers are inexpert at best. True C++ gurus are few and far between. Inexperienced programmers, who poorly understand features such as templates and operator overloading end up writing bizare code which is hard for anyone else to understand, and can hide a multitude of flaws.
If you are looking for a modern safe language with support for security, portability and reuse, look no further than Java. The availability if JIT and native code compilers mean that java performs just as well as C++, without many of the problems.
Speaking as a game developer, who codes primarily on Linux for Linux, I would certainly buy a copy once C++ support is available, if the code produced was fast.
I have lost touch with the ammount of time I have spent going over code again and again to make it a bit more efficient, and removing bottlenecks. I would gladly pay for a product which would enable me to ship binaries that were faster.
The question of ABI compatability on C++ is very tricky though. A C++ compiler would be of limited use if it did not use the same ABI as g++, though with the release of gcc 3, this ABI has at least stabilised.
One significant advantage SDL has over glut is that it does not take control of the main application loop. This gives you lots more flexibility. I know many Windows programmers who use SDL instead of glut for this reason, among others. This combined with the extra portability and utility features provided by SDL make it very attractive. Long live Sam Lantinga.