I'm not sure what indicates that it's a DSP. I'm not much of a hardware guy, but aren't DSPs intended to operate on a stream of data? I don't think that's what's going on here.
It looks like the way they're setting it up is that they're building a physics engine that can offload some of its processing to this card. Apparently this is reflected in these initial games in the form of additional dynamic objects in the game environments.
I also remember that in its day Glide was faster and resulted in higher quality 3d than OpenGL or DirectX.
For a while, since 3dfx was the only one innovating for a while. Once they got hold of the market, nobody else could because the games only supported Glide, and nobody else was able to make Glide-supported hardware due to it being a proprietary API.
Then nVidia came along with superior cards that only supported Direct3D and OpenGL because Glide was 3dfx proprietary. Game developers were forced to switch to D3D/OpenGL to support the new wider array of hardware. Since 3dfx cards were overly-optimized for Glide, this resulted in games that ran crappy on 3dfx hardware but great on nVidia. The rest is history.
EAX is a similar story. Creative owns it, but what has happened is that many game developers don't bother to take advantage of it, instead relying on DirectSound3D or OpenAL as the lowest-common-denominator. The widespread use of SDKs suck as Miles Sound System do also help to allow transparent use of various sounds API features though, so mileage varies. Personally, I've been without Creative products for years now and haven't missed them one but. I'm currently waiting for the next generation of DDL/DTS Connect sound cards to come out, and then I'll give those a shot.
The same thing is likely to happen here; competitors will make their own products, but because they won't be able the use the PhysX engine they will make their own. It will be an open API because they'll have to band together to get game developers to support their cards. Ageia will be forced to add driver support for the standard API, but it won't perform as well on their cards. If they're smart, they'll either open the API early on, or else release new hardware built around the open API. This is all assuming the PPUs even catch on, of course.
The problem with the PC gaming hardware market is that when there's only one company making a certain type of product, they tend to stop innovating. Then, when someone else develops a competing product they try to use marketing to stay ahead instead of coming up with more competitive products. Sometimes gamers see through the marketing (3dfx) and sometimes they have a harder time doing so (EAX). It will be interesting to see how it turns out this time.
Ever heard of OpenGL? If your don't have a card, the software driver will do the same thing, but slower. Same deal over here. I doubt it will be unoptimized anyway, developpers wouldn't put up with that.
Yes, except that OpenGL was and is an open standard. It's not controlled by one company who is trying to push a product that accelerates software which uses their API.
From what I was able to read of the article before it got slashdotted, it sounds like games that can take advantage of it require installation of the Ageia drivers whether you have the card or not. This leads me to believe that without the card installed, those games will use a software physics engine written by Ageia, which is likely to be unoptimized in an attempt to encourage users to buy the accelerator card.
Also, it's likely to use a proprietary API (remember Glide? EAX?) that will make it difficult for competitors to create a wider market for this type of product. I really can't see myself investing in something that has limited support and is likely to be replaced by something designed around a non-proprietary API in the case that it does catch on.
Really, does it weight that heavily on the sales if it ends up rated M?
Yes. Apparently many large game retailers (e.g. Wal-Mart, whose influence is evidenced in the standardized, small game box size that is now omnipresent) don't stock rated-M games in efforts to maintain a family-friendly image or somesuch.
Why not try something simple, like showing a picture of someone's face melting off while touching a glowing rock? Scary skull/skeleton images are pretty universal as well, I'd think.
Reminds me of the awesome song from Full Throttle: "The population is greatly decreased, and now the odds are greatly increased that I may someday get a chance to kiss your lips. I thank the lo-o-o-o-rd each day, for the apocalypse.
Folks are mostly disfigured or dead, but sugar I won't let it go to my head. My momma's face has dripped down into the dirt. But I'm still chasin' chitlins, whiskey, and skirt."
When I went with my roommates to see Revenge of the Sith in the theater, they showed a trailer for the Spielberg remake of "War of the Worlds". I launched into my typical rant, asking one of my roommates a rhetorical question: "why does the movie industry have to keep making remakes of everything? Why can't they make movies based off of original ideas?"
The following trailer was for the movie "Stealth". We laughed and shook our heads at the absurdity of it, and when it finished my roommate said (in reply to my previous questions): "that's why."
One of the most annoying things to me about TV ads is seeing the same ones repeated 3 or 4 (or more) times during a one hour show. Even if the ad itself isn't particularly annoying, it becomes so after I've seen it enough times over a short enough period of time.
What I'm driving at is that I think live TV commercials *would* be interesting, at least at first. No doubt they would become just as normal and familiar as everything else shown on TV in the past 50+ years, but at least we wouldn't have to see the same thing over and over and over again.
On the other hand, considering how much money is currently spent on pre-recorded commercials, I somehow doubt that we'd see more than a few live ones, only during prime-time, and only on major networks.
Maybe in Japan, but there's no way they'll market it with a name like that in the U.S. First, nobody will know how to pronounce it: why-eye? why? whee? Hell, my mom still says "Intendo" instead of "Nintendo".
Second, it's not catchy. In fact, "Nintendo Why" sounds like a rhetorical question that is trying to talk people OUT of buying one.
I had no interest in buying one (I'm not a console gamer) but I don't see what was so bad about "Nintendo Revolution".
None of my TVs have S-Video inputs. I have 3 CRT NTSC TVs at home, ranging in size from 13" to 29" and in age from 5-10 years. Two of them have composite inputs, one only has cable RF.
Maybe new TVs come standard with S-Video now, but as I said a low-end VGA monitor would be just as cheap and offer at least double the resolution.
Sorry, but digg is awful in my opinion. It takes Firefox 1.5.0.2 around 5 seconds on a 3.2GHz Intel machine to re-render a tab opened to digg.com whenever I switch back to it from another tab (slashdot is instant). It also doesn't look as aesthetially pleasing as slashdot; for some reason it reminds me of the way squatter portals look.
Maybe the underlying implementation is "cooler" in a technical sense, but the end result just isn't as nice in my opinion.
My guess is that it's due to a combination of factors:
- Games are a lot more complex these days, with a lot more places that things can go wrong. More and better testing is required to assure the same level of product quality as in yesterday's games. This testing isn't happening; perhaps because schedules haven't changed with the games to reflect the additional required testing time.
- Games don't have as long of a shelf life these days, especially PC games (which, incidentally, are easier to release patches for), and every aspect of their development is probably managed with this fact in mind. Unless you make a smash hit game of the year best seller, your game isn't going to be in the public eye long enough for people to care about the bugs. At least, that's what the publishers are hoping when they throw deadlines at the developers.
- Publishers these days own so many labels that they are able to assign various publishing labels to games depending on their level of market risk. This means that they don't have to worry about sacrificing brand loyalty on a crap game. If it's a smash hit, they can re-release it or release a sequel under a more respected label that they own. My point? Less accountability for quality on the publisher's part, which allows them to put heavier pressure on developers to release games before they're finished.
Same here. First pen-and-paper RPG I played was Heroes Unlimited. I found their rule system impossible to grasp as a first RPG, however, and even more frustrating was that they simply copied-and-pasted the core rules into every book they published, instead of revising them to be more coherent with each new book. Even better would have been to publish an independent core rule manual that would be required as a base for use with the individual setting books (Robotech, Rifts, TMNT, etc.), which they then could have revised over time.
Alternatively, they could/should have jumped on the d20 system when it became popular.
My guess is that they got enough returns, emails, and support calls from dissatisfied customers that they finally figured they were losing more money on that than on pirates. Still, it makes me feel a lot better about the idea of buying games from them.
A true classic, but worth reviving? I dunno.
on
Revisiting Another World
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Another World (known to me as Out of this World) was a truly great game. The graphics were something vastly different from anything else at the time, and were beautiful and immersive in an odd way. The game also unfolded a story without a single line of dialogue; you really felt like you were running through some alien world where you had no idea what was going on, but were too busy trying to stay alive to stop and figure it out.
Then there was the frustration. Many parts of the game are so frustrating that I remember wanting to smash my monitor with my keyboard. Being able to continue an unlimited number of times just meant that I had to perform an intricate series of jumps or combat moves hundreds of times just to get *to* the part where I kept dying. In the end it was worth it (the late part of the game and the ending music were pretty cool, although the open ending was a little bit of a letdown after the effort involved), but you can bet your ass I've never tried to seriously play the game since.
I'm not sure what I think of the idea of bringing this game back in an enhanced form. I looked at the screenshots and they weren't what I was hoping for. Something much more detailed is currently possible; the screenshots look like they just touched up the background art and rendered the flat polygon foreground models in a higher resolution, and it looks like something that would have run on Windows 95. What they really ought to do is render the game world in 3D from the same perspective, and place even higher-res, shaded flat polygon models into the scene. They could still easily retain the abstract polygon look of the original (I've seen it done in 3D console games) while achieving a much more immersive and higher quality effect. Unfortunately the current "touch up" will probably kill any chance of that, unless they turn this game into another Myst by releasing new versions every couple of years for the next decade (which I think is not feasible due to the game's more frustrating aspects, which will undoubtedly limit its mass appeal).
One final thought: I hope they also remember to touch up the sound and music. Some additional ambient background music during the actual game would be really really nice.
Of course, formal computer science eduaction usually entails at least some post-calculus level math education, but I think this is mostly to try to get you to pick up on the logic skills needed for both, while also gaining some analytical tools.
Now if someone could just explain why the hell I had to take a year of physics, especially from research professors who couldn't speak English and weren't very interested in teaching the material...
Of course it does; I'm not sure what you're saying. In both software engineering and math, logic is used as a problem-solving tool. This does not mean that math itself is necessarily used in software engineering or vice versa.
Slashdot Mirror
Science can't prove anything, it can only disprove. I hate when popular media word things like that.
On a related note, what the heck does "clinically proven" mean?
I'm not sure what indicates that it's a DSP. I'm not much of a hardware guy, but aren't DSPs intended to operate on a stream of data? I don't think that's what's going on here.
It looks like the way they're setting it up is that they're building a physics engine that can offload some of its processing to this card. Apparently this is reflected in these initial games in the form of additional dynamic objects in the game environments.
I also remember that in its day Glide was faster and resulted in higher quality 3d than OpenGL or DirectX.
For a while, since 3dfx was the only one innovating for a while. Once they got hold of the market, nobody else could because the games only supported Glide, and nobody else was able to make Glide-supported hardware due to it being a proprietary API.
Then nVidia came along with superior cards that only supported Direct3D and OpenGL because Glide was 3dfx proprietary. Game developers were forced to switch to D3D/OpenGL to support the new wider array of hardware. Since 3dfx cards were overly-optimized for Glide, this resulted in games that ran crappy on 3dfx hardware but great on nVidia. The rest is history.
EAX is a similar story. Creative owns it, but what has happened is that many game developers don't bother to take advantage of it, instead relying on DirectSound3D or OpenAL as the lowest-common-denominator. The widespread use of SDKs suck as Miles Sound System do also help to allow transparent use of various sounds API features though, so mileage varies. Personally, I've been without Creative products for years now and haven't missed them one but. I'm currently waiting for the next generation of DDL/DTS Connect sound cards to come out, and then I'll give those a shot.
The same thing is likely to happen here; competitors will make their own products, but because they won't be able the use the PhysX engine they will make their own. It will be an open API because they'll have to band together to get game developers to support their cards. Ageia will be forced to add driver support for the standard API, but it won't perform as well on their cards. If they're smart, they'll either open the API early on, or else release new hardware built around the open API. This is all assuming the PPUs even catch on, of course.
The problem with the PC gaming hardware market is that when there's only one company making a certain type of product, they tend to stop innovating. Then, when someone else develops a competing product they try to use marketing to stay ahead instead of coming up with more competitive products. Sometimes gamers see through the marketing (3dfx) and sometimes they have a harder time doing so (EAX). It will be interesting to see how it turns out this time.
Ever heard of OpenGL? If your don't have a card, the software driver will do the same thing, but slower. Same deal over here. I doubt it will be unoptimized anyway, developpers wouldn't put up with that.
Yes, except that OpenGL was and is an open standard. It's not controlled by one company who is trying to push a product that accelerates software which uses their API.
From what I was able to read of the article before it got slashdotted, it sounds like games that can take advantage of it require installation of the Ageia drivers whether you have the card or not. This leads me to believe that without the card installed, those games will use a software physics engine written by Ageia, which is likely to be unoptimized in an attempt to encourage users to buy the accelerator card.
Also, it's likely to use a proprietary API (remember Glide? EAX?) that will make it difficult for competitors to create a wider market for this type of product. I really can't see myself investing in something that has limited support and is likely to be replaced by something designed around a non-proprietary API in the case that it does catch on.
Ah, you're right - I must have been thinking about the AO (Adults Only) ESRB rating. Here's a link to Wal-Mart's official policy: http://www.wal-martfacts.com/keytopics/merchandisi ng.aspx#a162
Really, does it weight that heavily on the sales if it ends up rated M?
Yes. Apparently many large game retailers (e.g. Wal-Mart, whose influence is evidenced in the standardized, small game box size that is now omnipresent) don't stock rated-M games in efforts to maintain a family-friendly image or somesuch.
Why would someone drop Microsoft as a publisher in favor of SoE? That's almost as ridiculous as Valve leaving Vivendi for EA.
Why not try something simple, like showing a picture of someone's face melting off while touching a glowing rock? Scary skull/skeleton images are pretty universal as well, I'd think.
Reminds me of the awesome song from Full Throttle:
"The population is greatly decreased,
and now the odds are greatly increased
that I may someday get a chance
to kiss your lips.
I thank the lo-o-o-o-rd each day,
for the apocalypse.
Folks are mostly disfigured or dead,
but sugar I won't let it go to my head.
My momma's face has dripped down
into the dirt.
But I'm still chasin'
chitlins, whiskey, and skirt."
No thanks, I think I'll go loose my mind instead.
;)
Keep your mind to yourself, please.
When I went with my roommates to see Revenge of the Sith in the theater, they showed a trailer for the Spielberg remake of "War of the Worlds". I launched into my typical rant, asking one of my roommates a rhetorical question: "why does the movie industry have to keep making remakes of everything? Why can't they make movies based off of original ideas?"
The following trailer was for the movie "Stealth". We laughed and shook our heads at the absurdity of it, and when it finished my roommate said (in reply to my previous questions): "that's why."
And this why you need Turbo Virtual Tax 2006 NOW! Only $29.95.
How many gold coins is that? Better yet, how many Rugged Armor Kits is that?
One of the most annoying things to me about TV ads is seeing the same ones repeated 3 or 4 (or more) times during a one hour show. Even if the ad itself isn't particularly annoying, it becomes so after I've seen it enough times over a short enough period of time.
What I'm driving at is that I think live TV commercials *would* be interesting, at least at first. No doubt they would become just as normal and familiar as everything else shown on TV in the past 50+ years, but at least we wouldn't have to see the same thing over and over and over again.
On the other hand, considering how much money is currently spent on pre-recorded commercials, I somehow doubt that we'd see more than a few live ones, only during prime-time, and only on major networks.
Maybe in Japan, but there's no way they'll market it with a name like that in the U.S. First, nobody will know how to pronounce it: why-eye? why? whee? Hell, my mom still says "Intendo" instead of "Nintendo".
Second, it's not catchy. In fact, "Nintendo Why" sounds like a rhetorical question that is trying to talk people OUT of buying one.
I had no interest in buying one (I'm not a console gamer) but I don't see what was so bad about "Nintendo Revolution".
None of my TVs have S-Video inputs. I have 3 CRT NTSC TVs at home, ranging in size from 13" to 29" and in age from 5-10 years. Two of them have composite inputs, one only has cable RF.
Maybe new TVs come standard with S-Video now, but as I said a low-end VGA monitor would be just as cheap and offer at least double the resolution.
Plus, who can afford a TV with S-Video inputs but can't afford a low-end VGA monitor?
Sorry, but digg is awful in my opinion. It takes Firefox 1.5.0.2 around 5 seconds on a 3.2GHz Intel machine to re-render a tab opened to digg.com whenever I switch back to it from another tab (slashdot is instant). It also doesn't look as aesthetially pleasing as slashdot; for some reason it reminds me of the way squatter portals look.
Maybe the underlying implementation is "cooler" in a technical sense, but the end result just isn't as nice in my opinion.
Nah, it won't be usable until Linux for Workgroups 3.11
Personally, I'm going to hold out for Linux 95.
My guess is that it's due to a combination of factors:
- Games are a lot more complex these days, with a lot more places that things can go wrong. More and better testing is required to assure the same level of product quality as in yesterday's games. This testing isn't happening; perhaps because schedules haven't changed with the games to reflect the additional required testing time.
- Games don't have as long of a shelf life these days, especially PC games (which, incidentally, are easier to release patches for), and every aspect of their development is probably managed with this fact in mind. Unless you make a smash hit game of the year best seller, your game isn't going to be in the public eye long enough for people to care about the bugs. At least, that's what the publishers are hoping when they throw deadlines at the developers.
- Publishers these days own so many labels that they are able to assign various publishing labels to games depending on their level of market risk. This means that they don't have to worry about sacrificing brand loyalty on a crap game. If it's a smash hit, they can re-release it or release a sequel under a more respected label that they own. My point? Less accountability for quality on the publisher's part, which allows them to put heavier pressure on developers to release games before they're finished.
Same here. First pen-and-paper RPG I played was Heroes Unlimited. I found their rule system impossible to grasp as a first RPG, however, and even more frustrating was that they simply copied-and-pasted the core rules into every book they published, instead of revising them to be more coherent with each new book. Even better would have been to publish an independent core rule manual that would be required as a base for use with the individual setting books (Robotech, Rifts, TMNT, etc.), which they then could have revised over time.
Alternatively, they could/should have jumped on the d20 system when it became popular.
Saw this one a loooong time ago:
http://www.peepresearch.org/smoking.html
Way to step up to the plate, Ubisoft!
My guess is that they got enough returns, emails, and support calls from dissatisfied customers that they finally figured they were losing more money on that than on pirates. Still, it makes me feel a lot better about the idea of buying games from them.
Another World (known to me as Out of this World) was a truly great game. The graphics were something vastly different from anything else at the time, and were beautiful and immersive in an odd way. The game also unfolded a story without a single line of dialogue; you really felt like you were running through some alien world where you had no idea what was going on, but were too busy trying to stay alive to stop and figure it out.
Then there was the frustration. Many parts of the game are so frustrating that I remember wanting to smash my monitor with my keyboard. Being able to continue an unlimited number of times just meant that I had to perform an intricate series of jumps or combat moves hundreds of times just to get *to* the part where I kept dying. In the end it was worth it (the late part of the game and the ending music were pretty cool, although the open ending was a little bit of a letdown after the effort involved), but you can bet your ass I've never tried to seriously play the game since.
I'm not sure what I think of the idea of bringing this game back in an enhanced form. I looked at the screenshots and they weren't what I was hoping for. Something much more detailed is currently possible; the screenshots look like they just touched up the background art and rendered the flat polygon foreground models in a higher resolution, and it looks like something that would have run on Windows 95. What they really ought to do is render the game world in 3D from the same perspective, and place even higher-res, shaded flat polygon models into the scene. They could still easily retain the abstract polygon look of the original (I've seen it done in 3D console games) while achieving a much more immersive and higher quality effect. Unfortunately the current "touch up" will probably kill any chance of that, unless they turn this game into another Myst by releasing new versions every couple of years for the next decade (which I think is not feasible due to the game's more frustrating aspects, which will undoubtedly limit its mass appeal).
One final thought: I hope they also remember to touch up the sound and music. Some additional ambient background music during the actual game would be really really nice.
Of course, formal computer science eduaction usually entails at least some post-calculus level math education, but I think this is mostly to try to get you to pick up on the logic skills needed for both, while also gaining some analytical tools.
Now if someone could just explain why the hell I had to take a year of physics, especially from research professors who couldn't speak English and weren't very interested in teaching the material...
Of course it does; I'm not sure what you're saying. In both software engineering and math, logic is used as a problem-solving tool. This does not mean that math itself is necessarily used in software engineering or vice versa.