Please, at least try to recognize that we need that sort of creativity in our games.
Creativity? That's different. Blindly dropping "driving round the city because it's cool" as a way of getting between the interesting bits of Jak 2 was not, even remotely, creative. They just copied.
Never played Metroid, nor Mario Sunshine - both, I suspect, to my detriment. Very tempted by a game cube, it has to be said... but we are then looking at a "second" console.
For those who haven't been following, this is bad news. Jak 1 was spectacular, from start to finished. Jak 2 had some good bits, but they were surrounded by interminable crap - driving around the city and crappy f*cking "shoot the crap out of the baddies" stage. I can't see 3 being any better, and I can't see me buying it either.
FFS. Stick to one genre. GTA is GTA. Platform games are platfom games. Shoot em ups are shoot em ups. By mixing genres all you end up with is something to piss off everybody.
BTW. Prince of Persia - sands of time suffers from the enormously. Quite why someone would take such a wonderful platformer and interlace it with a shitty zombie game, I do not know.
Intel makes MMX, AMD makes 3DNow! and it spanks MMX, so Intel has to make SSE.
Not really. Intel botched MMX. Motorla made AltiVec. AltiVec spanks, ahh, everything. Intel made SSE then finally got it right with SSE2.
I' *just* started working with AltiVec and with the very conspicuous exception that you _have_ to align everything on 16 byte boundaries - it just plain rocks.
That the economics of PC gaming are already starting to look a bit "touch and go" for most titles. Add another mill or so for additional art and development to support bottom end processors and you're starting to have a bit of a problem justifying the investment. Not to mention the schedule risk.
Hopefully PC gaming will turn into a proving ground for the up and comers...
Ah, this is factually incorrect on a number of levels.
I agree, mostly, that Win2003 server has probably more than 90% of code that wasn't in NT3.1. However, I think this is more bloat than anything - there was (and, actually, is) very little wrong with the NT kernel. It's the ludicrous crap that goes on in userland that's the problem.
Likewise, I found Win2003 server to be an interesting experience. I am an ex Microsoft developer (i.e. not for Microsoft, but on their OS), have spent a few years doing BSD and Linux, administering a few lightly loaded Linux boxes and now work on OS X. So I hadn't used a Windows box in anger for quite a while when I was suddenly called upon to administer two of them for a short term project. _Very_ windows. Installation was painless, setting up services easy, long term maintenance was an absolute nightmare, as was doing anything that billyware hadn't thought you might want to do. It really does go for the "don't think too clearly crowd".
Within the Mac world, OS9 was indeed dead in the water. However, OS X is not the ground up rewrite you think it is. It's built on the Mach kernel (and not really BSD at all), it has chunks of BSD userland, but mostly it's NextStep, Carbon (A 'later' Mac API) and Quicktime welded together.
It was, by the time Apple bought it, already a very mature OS - as were the parts they glued on to make it OSX.
Who is actually buying these things to run Windows on them?
Big arse exchange boxes? They eat power like there's no tomorrow and they're *bitches* to cluster.
Dave
Re:But I have many brands of tools...
on
Mac v. Microsoft TCO
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
BTW, Mac Halo - is there a downloadable demo around?
Consider the tradeoffs you make when you actively choose a Windows machine over an OS X machine.
I have both, but haven't upgraded the Windows machine in at least 18 months and maybe two years. Actually, that's not quite true. It sat on the floor without a hard disk for about three months before I got round to dropping a new disk in and making it my better half's computer. I also bought a panaflow fan to try and make the thing quieter.
In the interviening time I've owned an iBook and now a PowerBook (as well). By playing with Cocoa my company landed some development gigs for the creative industry and is managing to grow as a result. I know all about Mac/Windows tradeoffs, and am pretty happy with where I've ended up.
why not spend some of that $5bn on a top games company, just Like MS did with Bungie for the XBox?
I think they want to do the music industry first:)
I was a bit confused by the decision to include Firewire in this machine. I know it is an apple kind of penchant, but surely a server won't need firewire. Who wants to use a firewire hard disk with a server?
The creative industry regularly moves data from A to B by dropping it onto a firewire hard drive then physically shipping it to wherever it needs to be. Astounding bandwidth from a quarter terabyte drive on the back of a motorbike, see?
I'm not the first to say it, but if this seems interesting, you should try fink. I had it on my old 10.2 machine and spent a chunk of this morning installing it onto my 10.3 machine and had a few hassles. Words to the wise:
* Install the X11 SDK since lots of things need it to build against. Do this *first*. It's on the XCode disk, or the file you're looking to download is X11SDK.pkg.
* Then just use the binary installer to get Fink going. 19 meg and worth every byte.
In the case of RH5.2, security. I hope you've been doing the furious quantity of patching necessary to keep that secure. If not, I'd seriously consider moving to Debian. You still have to secure it, but it's really easy to do.
The small performance boost, according to this paper, is large. Huge, much the same as the scalability boosts that came in as a result of the mindcraft benchmarks. However, they are for the most part improvements in SMP. There are also some "responsiveness" improvements in the scheduler.
Should you move to 2.6? Probably not. As far as I can tell the gains are on big iron, really really small iron, and the desktop. I'm sure as hell not moving off 2.4 any time soon.
Slashdot Mirror
Please, at least try to recognize that we need that sort of creativity in our games.
... but we are then looking at a "second" console.
Creativity? That's different. Blindly dropping "driving round the city because it's cool" as a way of getting between the interesting bits of Jak 2 was not, even remotely, creative. They just copied.
Never played Metroid, nor Mario Sunshine - both, I suspect, to my detriment. Very tempted by a game cube, it has to be said
Cheers,
Dave
For those who haven't been following, this is bad news. Jak 1 was spectacular, from start to finished. Jak 2 had some good bits, but they were surrounded by interminable crap - driving around the city and crappy f*cking "shoot the crap out of the baddies" stage. I can't see 3 being any better, and I can't see me buying it either.
FFS. Stick to one genre. GTA is GTA. Platform games are platfom games. Shoot em ups are shoot em ups. By mixing genres all you end up with is something to piss off everybody.
BTW. Prince of Persia - sands of time suffers from the enormously. Quite why someone would take such a wonderful platformer and interlace it with a shitty zombie game, I do not know.
Dave
Intel makes MMX, AMD makes 3DNow! and it spanks MMX, so Intel has to make SSE.
Not really. Intel botched MMX. Motorla made AltiVec. AltiVec spanks, ahh, everything. Intel made SSE then finally got it right with SSE2.
I' *just* started working with AltiVec and with the very conspicuous exception that you _have_ to align everything on 16 byte boundaries - it just plain rocks.
Dave
I'm not sure what it is, what it's supposed to do or if it even exists, but it's very important.
Which, Plone or LDAP?
Dave
Prince of Perisa *is* a sequel, it's just a sequel to the Tomb Raider games on the PS1.
Dav
Oh, for fucks' sake. Sooner or later somebody doing this - anonymous or not - is going to get Slasdot sued.
Fucking stop it. It's a copyrighted piece of work, it belongs to someone else, it is their right to control it.
Dave
Yeah, quite. It was this very shitfight that had me over to Debian about two years back.
Haven't looked back since.
Dave
Tried running iTunes under Wine?
Not that I'm guaranteeing that it will work or anything.
Dave
That the economics of PC gaming are already starting to look a bit "touch and go" for most titles. Add another mill or so for additional art and development to support bottom end processors and you're starting to have a bit of a problem justifying the investment. Not to mention the schedule risk.
Hopefully PC gaming will turn into a proving ground for the up and comers...
Hopefully.
Dave
Apparently, MS is single-threaded in fact
Ah, no. Actually MS's support for threading blows pthreads out of the water. Totally.
Not that it actually matters.
Dave
Ah, this is factually incorrect on a number of levels.
I agree, mostly, that Win2003 server has probably more than 90% of code that wasn't in NT3.1. However, I think this is more bloat than anything - there was (and, actually, is) very little wrong with the NT kernel. It's the ludicrous crap that goes on in userland that's the problem.
Likewise, I found Win2003 server to be an interesting experience. I am an ex Microsoft developer (i.e. not for Microsoft, but on their OS), have spent a few years doing BSD and Linux, administering a few lightly loaded Linux boxes and now work on OS X. So I hadn't used a Windows box in anger for quite a while when I was suddenly called upon to administer two of them for a short term project. _Very_ windows. Installation was painless, setting up services easy, long term maintenance was an absolute nightmare, as was doing anything that billyware hadn't thought you might want to do. It really does go for the "don't think too clearly crowd".
Within the Mac world, OS9 was indeed dead in the water. However, OS X is not the ground up rewrite you think it is. It's built on the Mach kernel (and not really BSD at all), it has chunks of BSD userland, but mostly it's NextStep, Carbon (A 'later' Mac API) and Quicktime welded together.
It was, by the time Apple bought it, already a very mature OS - as were the parts they glued on to make it OSX.
Dave
The decision to buy Rare always mystified me;
It was a "fuck you, Nintendo" move.
Dave
OK, So I've been out of the scene for too long. What's a TK?
Dave
every time I do a LAN party I do Serious Sam co-op.
Damn right. One of the best LAN party games is to get mashed then run around setting fire to your mates.
Dave
We want firmware! What's wrong with you!
Dave
Yellow river kingdom.
Now, who's *really* old school out there?
Dave
NetBSD had full support for the Hammer architecture before IT WAS EVEN BURNED ON SILICON.
Yeah, this was astounding.
Dave
Who is actually buying these things to run Windows on them?
Big arse exchange boxes? They eat power like there's no tomorrow and they're *bitches* to cluster.
Dave
BTW, Mac Halo - is there a downloadable demo around?
:)
Consider the tradeoffs you make when you actively choose a Windows machine over an OS X machine.
I have both, but haven't upgraded the Windows machine in at least 18 months and maybe two years. Actually, that's not quite true. It sat on the floor without a hard disk for about three months before I got round to dropping a new disk in and making it my better half's computer. I also bought a panaflow fan to try and make the thing quieter.
In the interviening time I've owned an iBook and now a PowerBook (as well). By playing with Cocoa my company landed some development gigs for the creative industry and is managing to grow as a result. I know all about Mac/Windows tradeoffs, and am pretty happy with where I've ended up.
why not spend some of that $5bn on a top games company, just Like MS did with Bungie for the XBox?
I think they want to do the music industry first
Dave
Likewise. Can we please have "NSFW" designations - or "Makes stupid noise"?
Dave
Your G4 is not an excellent gaming platform. I dropped the UT2004 demo on my PowerBook (1.25GHz, Radeon 9600) yesterday and it blew goats.
What you need is an Athlon 2500 and a 9600XT. And plenty of RAM.
Or a Playstation.
But Mac gaming is awful.
Dave
MS decided to go with its own language in place of Java.
Kind of. The decision was halfway made for them by a court, previous to this they were attempting to bastardise Java instead.
Dave
I was a bit confused by the decision to include Firewire in this machine. I know it is an apple kind of penchant, but surely a server won't need firewire. Who wants to use a firewire hard disk with a server?
The creative industry regularly moves data from A to B by dropping it onto a firewire hard drive then physically shipping it to wherever it needs to be. Astounding bandwidth from a quarter terabyte drive on the back of a motorbike, see?
Point 2 - who says this is a server?
Dave
I'm not the first to say it, but if this seems interesting, you should try fink. I had it on my old 10.2 machine and spent a chunk of this morning installing it onto my 10.3 machine and had a few hassles. Words to the wise:
* Install the X11 SDK since lots of things need it to build against. Do this *first*. It's on the XCode disk, or the file you're looking to download is X11SDK.pkg.
* Then just use the binary installer to get Fink going. 19 meg and worth every byte.
Also, use Sao's place as a quick reference.
Cheers,
Dave
In the case of RH5.2, security. I hope you've been doing the furious quantity of patching necessary to keep that secure. If not, I'd seriously consider moving to Debian. You still have to secure it, but it's really easy to do.
The small performance boost, according to this paper, is large. Huge, much the same as the scalability boosts that came in as a result of the mindcraft benchmarks. However, they are for the most part improvements in SMP. There are also some "responsiveness" improvements in the scheduler.
Should you move to 2.6? Probably not. As far as I can tell the gains are on big iron, really really small iron, and the desktop. I'm sure as hell not moving off 2.4 any time soon.
Dave