The Jak 2 thing is a fair comment. Much of it is really quite horrible - the intro movie, for instance. I'd feel really bad if I'd got this for a kid's christmas present. It's bloody hard too.
It's a good game, but I was really disappointed to not be getting a Jak and Daxter sequel.
You had better believe that Asia is going to start kicking ass real soon.
We had a trade delegation from Taiwan round here (New Zealand) the other day. They were from the "Digital Content Industry Promotion Office, Ministry of Economic Affairs". They talked a bit about how their IT industry is trying to move away from 'race to the bottom' motherboard manufacturing, and how they are looking to move towards digital content. They showed us some lame arse XBox game and a worse animation, of which they were very proud. Honestly, it looked like a siggraph demo from 1992.
So we asked them what we could do for them - what they wanted from New Zealand. "Training". Yeah, I bet you fucking do. They've looked at their lame-o work, they've looked at Lord of the Rings and thought "Bollocks. Let's chuck these sheep shaggers somewhere between ten and twenty million bucks to show us how it's done. Then... fukkem"
These people have a mission, a big one, and while the US chucks it's money away on invading countries, massive corporate fraud and generally speaking screwing up left right and centre they are quietly working out how to kick all our arses.
Nah, that's bollocks. At one end of the spectrum you have a vast number of people with solid, dependable online porn habits - and proud of it. And at the other end of the spectrum are people who are unaware that there is porn, or indeed any other activities worth lying about on the Internet.
I don't see both Darwin and the Hurd surviving in the long run
Errrm, why not? The Hurd seems to have survived the onslaught of Linux over the past few years, and Darwin is the core of a widely commercially deployed *nix. I can't see a good reason for either to fall over, to be honest.
I just finished Jak and Daxter. It was about the right length - the game unfolded nicely over the couple of months it took me to play it; it never seemed to hard to get into during the later stages (GTA3); I even went back and did the bits I didn't do the first time round - a first for me.
So I went and bought Jak 2. Good game, BTW. Not absurdly great, but some really fun bits. However, I'm a bit gutted that one of the design goals for the game appears to be to make it much longer. It appears that to finish Jak 2 I'm going to lose many more of my actually increasingly scarce hours, the danger of monotony in getting there is much higher, and I may not finish it at all.
So, yeah, I think I'd be up for shorter video games in general. I liked the "quick bang, small buck" approach of the croteam games but wonder how well it would fit in with the PlayStation distribution model.
I'm not sure it does have a slightly better video card. And before we mention screen spanning, I'm typing this on a happily spanned 12" iBook.
Of course, they may have fixed that now...
I'll still be buying a 12" PB next. I'm wanting to run at *least* a 1GHz G4 and my only choices are the PB or the 14" iBook. Personally, I don't get on with the larger iBooks.
Y'know, I don't think it is. Certainly when C# was introduced I was like, "yeah, whatever" who's going to swap from Java to this?
But the point is the frameworks. Finally Microsoft have solved the 'framework that sucks' problem by... ahhh... doing a Borland one. For the sanity of those who still have to code for this sack of shit platform, I wish it the best of luck.
SVG exposes it's object model to DHTML, or whatever it's called. The thing you use to Javascript annoying trails of letters that follow the mouse around etc.
It's XML, so it's easy for automated stuff to make.
It's a standard.
It's not patent encumbered.
It's a lot better than GIF for a whole bunch of things that GIF's do.
It's also one of those things that joins my list of "shit that would rule the world if only Netscape 2 had shipped with it instead of Java".
It means that you and your task force have to run around hosing down fires twice a week instead of using that same talent to find ways that the company can make more money using Information Technology.
Like, wouldn't that be more fun? Wouldn't it be better for the company? Would it be better for *everyone*?
the fight for gaming hardware supremacy is between the Xbox, PC, and PS2, why isn't the Xbox outselling the Gamecube?
Because it has - and I think this is becoming clearer over time - absolutely nothing to do with hardware.
Modern PC's are vastly more powerful than any of the above. The PC as a platform, however, is screwed. Really. I'm a really typical maturing gamer: Software engineer for a living; Own home; Recently had first child. My PC doesn't even have a hard drive in it right now. Between using an iBook for "computer" tasks, gaming on the PS2 and the rapidly declining (for me) LAN party scene - I'm done. The upgrade for HL2 and Doom3 is going to be somewhere in the vicinity of NZ$2k. I can get Jak and Daxter 2 for $120, or GT4. Hell I played an hour and a half of GT3 this morning - two years after getting it. It's an amazing value proposition.
All this fails mention that my upgrade fee will include feeding our friends in Redmond, feeling sick about it, and suffering the resulting security hell... not to mention the debugging shitfight that LAN parties have managed to devolve into. Honestly, why bother? This was supposed to be fun.
Looking purely at console hardware I think it has become clear that the PS2 is, at it's core, phenomenally weedy. Almost exactly a 300MHz MIPS core bolted onto a Voodoo3. Where it shines, of course, is when the vector engines get going... but it's a fucker to code for.
I believe, based on very few actual facts, that the GC has a lot more grunt than we give it credit for.
What I find more intriguing is the relationship between the three companies and the software development community. Do we, as developers on the fringes of the industry, matter? Microsoft certainly think so, and the "piece of piss" portability from DX8 to the XBox has lead to the development of maybe half their games.
Sony think so, a bit. PS2 Linux is a step in the right direction, and I imagine that gaining a PS2 development license is made significantly easier by having the basics of your stuff going on Linux before you even ask.
Nintendo really don't give a shit and are quite open about it.
Should they care about us? Given that it's a million dollars just in artwork to ship an FPS now, are any blockbusters really about to appear out of the back bedrooms? Is it the Halo's and GT4's that are responsbile for the majority of earnings, or does the enormous library of "b league" playstation games have an equally important part to play?
IBM/AMD (opteron) - required twice the number of processors and was twice the price in the desired configuration; had no chassis available
Y'know, I saw this presentation a few days ago. I wasn't there, I saw it on the net. Anyway, this bullet point stuck out then - like, what are they talking about?
For one, how come it required twice the number of processors? From the benchmarks I've seen Opterons normally whup the G5, or are at least very competitive on paticularly G5 optimised code. Certainly not out by a factor of two, anyway.
And no chassis? What the hell does this mean? You can get 1U, 2U and 4U beast Opteron boxes from the likes of, well, IBM for one. As mentioned above.
It's not even like the kinda ropey nature of 64 bit Linux comes into play either because, well, there is no 64 bit OS X - unless VT know something we don't (which is always possible).
So, yeah, I think someone decided to buy all the G5's made for a month and just set up the project to make it happen. This "achitectural options" thing is horseshit.
I see where you're coming from, but I still think PCMCIA is about ready for the jump. The cigarette lighter analogy is pretty well right, only we have perfectly adequate cigarette lighters already and they're called USB ports. Or firewire ports. But increasingly they're not being PCMCIA ports for exactly the reasons you've illustrated.
Personally I think SDIO is about to walk off with the "PC Card for the future" market, but this isn't based on any particularly great quantity of knowledge.
You use OpenGL, have to write a different core sound driver for each platform you target, different installers, maybe a few other tweaks, and that's it. Now, this only brings in a possible 5% of the market place, like you stated
More to the point it's a market place that isn't sitting at home playing HL2 because they can't.
But I think that's not the point. I imagine by asking Billyware politely you can get a big chunk of your development costs upfront in return for not using OpenGL. If anything they're more interested in locking out the PS2 than anything else.
I was recently doing something similar but lightweight, moving some code between Linux, OS X and Windows. The way that worked for me was to just use a central CVS repository then check out on to the relevant platforms. Three Windows "killer apps" in this were: cygwin, which doesn't suck nearly as much as it used to and has a way handy gui package installer; Tortoise CVS which is how CVS should be done; and Dev C++ which, if nothing else, is the most convenient way of getting gcc, free software Win32 API's and all the other dependencies up and going on Windows.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, look. You can get SCO to ring you up and discuss buying a license:
a ll .html
http://www.sco.com/solution_builder/request_a_c
Isn't there a US white pages on CDROM somewhere?
Dave
The Jak 2 thing is a fair comment. Much of it is really quite horrible - the intro movie, for instance. I'd feel really bad if I'd got this for a kid's christmas present. It's bloody hard too.
It's a good game, but I was really disappointed to not be getting a Jak and Daxter sequel.
Dave
Isn't this how house construction works?
Yes, and it's flawed. Apartments are starting to be pre-constructed in factories. They're cheaper, and have much lower defect rates.
Personally, bring it on.
Dave
You had better believe that Asia is going to start kicking ass real soon.
We had a trade delegation from Taiwan round here (New Zealand) the other day. They were from the "Digital Content Industry Promotion Office, Ministry of Economic Affairs". They talked a bit about how their IT industry is trying to move away from 'race to the bottom' motherboard manufacturing, and how they are looking to move towards digital content. They showed us some lame arse XBox game and a worse animation, of which they were very proud. Honestly, it looked like a siggraph demo from 1992.
So we asked them what we could do for them - what they wanted from New Zealand. "Training". Yeah, I bet you fucking do. They've looked at their lame-o work, they've looked at Lord of the Rings and thought "Bollocks. Let's chuck these sheep shaggers somewhere between ten and twenty million bucks to show us how it's done. Then... fukkem"
These people have a mission, a big one, and while the US chucks it's money away on invading countries, massive corporate fraud and generally speaking screwing up left right and centre they are quietly working out how to kick all our arses.
Dave
Nah, that's bollocks. At one end of the spectrum you have a vast number of people with solid, dependable online porn habits - and proud of it. And at the other end of the spectrum are people who are unaware that there is porn, or indeed any other activities worth lying about on the Internet.
Really. You may even know some of them.
So, not everybody.
Dave
I control the router. I read the logs.
You have a bowel movement only 2-3 times a week, right?
Bowel movement, read the logs, geddit?
Sorry.
Dave
I don't see both Darwin and the Hurd surviving in the long run
Errrm, why not? The Hurd seems to have survived the onslaught of Linux over the past few years, and Darwin is the core of a widely commercially deployed *nix. I can't see a good reason for either to fall over, to be honest.
Dave
Little known fact: This is the same Simonyi who invented hungarian notation.
Google for "the tactical nuclear weapon of code obfuscation" to receive further enlightenment
Dave
I just finished Jak and Daxter. It was about the right length - the game unfolded nicely over the couple of months it took me to play it; it never seemed to hard to get into during the later stages (GTA3); I even went back and did the bits I didn't do the first time round - a first for me.
So I went and bought Jak 2. Good game, BTW. Not absurdly great, but some really fun bits. However, I'm a bit gutted that one of the design goals for the game appears to be to make it much longer. It appears that to finish Jak 2 I'm going to lose many more of my actually increasingly scarce hours, the danger of monotony in getting there is much higher, and I may not finish it at all.
So, yeah, I think I'd be up for shorter video games in general. I liked the "quick bang, small buck" approach of the croteam games but wonder how well it would fit in with the PlayStation distribution model.
Dave
I'm not sure it does have a slightly better video card. And before we mention screen spanning, I'm typing this on a happily spanned 12" iBook.
Of course, they may have fixed that now...
I'll still be buying a 12" PB next. I'm wanting to run at *least* a 1GHz G4 and my only choices are the PB or the 14" iBook. Personally, I don't get on with the larger iBooks.
Dave
Oh my god.
A Radeon 9800 on a 2.4GHz P4 is *required* to get even halfway decent performance. I'm done with PC gaming.
Dave
Y'know, I don't think it is. Certainly when C# was introduced I was like, "yeah, whatever" who's going to swap from Java to this?
... ahhh ... doing a Borland one. For the sanity of those who still have to code for this sack of shit platform, I wish it the best of luck.
But the point is the frameworks. Finally Microsoft have solved the 'framework that sucks' problem by
Dave
the estimated market value of the HL2 source code is almost one million dollars
Don't know where you got a figure that low.
Dave
SVG exposes it's object model to DHTML, or whatever it's called. The thing you use to Javascript annoying trails of letters that follow the mouse around etc.
It's XML, so it's easy for automated stuff to make.
It's a standard.
It's not patent encumbered.
It's a lot better than GIF for a whole bunch of things that GIF's do.
It's also one of those things that joins my list of "shit that would rule the world if only Netscape 2 had shipped with it instead of Java".
Dave
No man, it means your job is crap.
It means that you and your task force have to run around hosing down fires twice a week instead of using that same talent to find ways that the company can make more money using Information Technology.
Like, wouldn't that be more fun? Wouldn't it be better for the company? Would it be better for *everyone*?
Dave
the fight for gaming hardware supremacy is between the Xbox, PC, and PS2, why isn't the Xbox outselling the Gamecube?
... not to mention the debugging shitfight that LAN parties have managed to devolve into. Honestly, why bother? This was supposed to be fun.
... but it's a fucker to code for.
Because it has - and I think this is becoming clearer over time - absolutely nothing to do with hardware.
Modern PC's are vastly more powerful than any of the above. The PC as a platform, however, is screwed. Really. I'm a really typical maturing gamer: Software engineer for a living; Own home; Recently had first child. My PC doesn't even have a hard drive in it right now. Between using an iBook for "computer" tasks, gaming on the PS2 and the rapidly declining (for me) LAN party scene - I'm done. The upgrade for HL2 and Doom3 is going to be somewhere in the vicinity of NZ$2k. I can get Jak and Daxter 2 for $120, or GT4. Hell I played an hour and a half of GT3 this morning - two years after getting it. It's an amazing value proposition.
All this fails mention that my upgrade fee will include feeding our friends in Redmond, feeling sick about it, and suffering the resulting security hell
Looking purely at console hardware I think it has become clear that the PS2 is, at it's core, phenomenally weedy. Almost exactly a 300MHz MIPS core bolted onto a Voodoo3. Where it shines, of course, is when the vector engines get going
I believe, based on very few actual facts, that the GC has a lot more grunt than we give it credit for.
What I find more intriguing is the relationship between the three companies and the software development community. Do we, as developers on the fringes of the industry, matter? Microsoft certainly think so, and the "piece of piss" portability from DX8 to the XBox has lead to the development of maybe half their games.
Sony think so, a bit. PS2 Linux is a step in the right direction, and I imagine that gaining a PS2 development license is made significantly easier by having the basics of your stuff going on Linux before you even ask.
Nintendo really don't give a shit and are quite open about it.
Should they care about us? Given that it's a million dollars just in artwork to ship an FPS now, are any blockbusters really about to appear out of the back bedrooms? Is it the Halo's and GT4's that are responsbile for the majority of earnings, or does the enormous library of "b league" playstation games have an equally important part to play?
If anyone knows, I'd be interested to find out.
Dave
It's also not exactly US bandwidth, is it? From memory it's two places on the west coast, a stop off in Hawaii, then Auckland and Sydney.
Trust me, we need it, not the US. That's what southern hemisphere corporations are doing owning the thing.
Dave
IBM/AMD (opteron) - required twice the number of processors and was twice the price in the desired configuration; had no chassis available
Y'know, I saw this presentation a few days ago. I wasn't there, I saw it on the net. Anyway, this bullet point stuck out then - like, what are they talking about?
For one, how come it required twice the number of processors? From the benchmarks I've seen Opterons normally whup the G5, or are at least very competitive on paticularly G5 optimised code. Certainly not out by a factor of two, anyway.
And no chassis? What the hell does this mean? You can get 1U, 2U and 4U beast Opteron boxes from the likes of, well, IBM for one. As mentioned above.
It's not even like the kinda ropey nature of 64 bit Linux comes into play either because, well, there is no 64 bit OS X - unless VT know something we don't (which is always possible).
So, yeah, I think someone decided to buy all the G5's made for a month and just set up the project to make it happen. This "achitectural options" thing is horseshit.
Dave
Look, I too use OS X but this is a bit fanboy'y, even by mac fanboy standards.
How long, for instance, to connect to a laser printer shared off a windows machine? Or even browse the local network?
OS X has a way to go yet.
Dave
I see where you're coming from, but I still think PCMCIA is about ready for the jump. The cigarette lighter analogy is pretty well right, only we have perfectly adequate cigarette lighters already and they're called USB ports. Or firewire ports. But increasingly they're not being PCMCIA ports for exactly the reasons you've illustrated.
Personally I think SDIO is about to walk off with the "PC Card for the future" market, but this isn't based on any particularly great quantity of knowledge.
Dave
You use OpenGL, have to write a different core sound driver for each platform you target, different installers, maybe a few other tweaks, and that's it. Now, this only brings in a possible 5% of the market place, like you stated
More to the point it's a market place that isn't sitting at home playing HL2 because they can't.
But I think that's not the point. I imagine by asking Billyware politely you can get a big chunk of your development costs upfront in return for not using OpenGL. If anything they're more interested in locking out the PS2 than anything else.
Dave
HL2 is a totally new engine and is pure DirectX 9
Oh, damn. Count me educated, and disappointed.
dave
Be glad the new books have the nifty Mobility Radeon 9600
Indeed. Shader programs running on FP, and more to the point the very real possibility of Half Life 2 on a Powerbook.
mmmmmMMMMMMMMMmmmmmmm!!
Dave
Heh! Where *are* my mod points when I need them :)
Dave
I was recently doing something similar but lightweight, moving some code between Linux, OS X and Windows. The way that worked for me was to just use a central CVS repository then check out on to the relevant platforms. Three Windows "killer apps" in this were: cygwin, which doesn't suck nearly as much as it used to and has a way handy gui package installer; Tortoise CVS which is how CVS should be done; and Dev C++ which, if nothing else, is the most convenient way of getting gcc, free software Win32 API's and all the other dependencies up and going on Windows.
:)
Worked for me
Dave