Unless it does everything one of the existing crypto algorithms does 10 times faster, or with 10 times less memory, who cares? Why would anybody bother using some new, untested algorithm when there are plenty of good alternatives already, some of them FREE??? Even if it was infinitely more secure than Blowfish, so what? Blowfish is PLENTY secure...
A new crypto algorithm makes a very nice PhD dissertation. But it's commercial value is pretty much zilch.
Yeah, your standard PC comes with a powerful 3D graphics card these days. One of the big problems for VRML was that none of the PC graphics cards were designed for graphics-in-a-window, they were ALL designed for games that took over the entire screen.
Has that changed? I dunno, I haven't done 3D stuff in ages. But I don't see any 3D-in-a-window apps out there. 3D on the web is a whole lot less interesting if you can't mix it in with all the rest of the stuff a standard Web browser can do, and consumer-level graphics cards weren't up to displaying 2D content mixed with 3D content last I checked.
Then again, I keep on hearing rumors that a future Microsoft OS will draw EVERYTHING via the 3D graphics pipeline.... maybe that will trigger an explosion of 3D on the web. Yeah, right.
Re:Well, it's hardly surprising...
on
Quake For the Blind
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· Score: 2, Informative
I disagree that "in realistic digital environments, those with sensory limitations are going to have an increasingly hard time." You'll have a harder time excelling in games that require split-second decisions after processing audio and visual (and maybe eventually olfactory and tactile) input.
But I think most games won't require you to have 20/20 vision, lightning-fast reflexes, perfect hearing, a keen sense of smell, and six fingers on each hand to have fun. There will probably always be games for hard-core gamers that are incredibly difficult for most of us mortals to play, but as more and more people play online games I predict they'll become less important over time.
But in general, the richer the sensory environment, the EASIER it is for everybody to interact. Especially when you throw a tera-hertz CPU into the loop. Hard of hearing? No problem, run speech recognition in real time to translate everything into text for you. Blind? That's ok, run an AI guide dog to help you find your way...
The current crop of MMORPG's (EverQuest, Dark Age of Camelot, etc) could be completely accessible to blind folks reasonably easily. Personally, I think it would be pretty fun to play a blind, but powerful, wizard, who used his magic and other senses to detect and defeat his foes.
It wasn't an accident; see the third design note at http://www.best.com/~rikk/Book/ch2-210.htm#2.10.2 for a full description of why we chose the event architecture we did for VRML.
We were designing VRML97 before there was a standard Document Object Model (DOM) and scripting language (JavaScript) for web pages. If I were designing a 3D language for the web today, I'd borrow the W3C's DOM and specify JavaScript as the scripting language. I'd keep sensors (you need the 3D equivalent of hyperlinks, and they really need to be embedded inside the 3D world description because they need to be affected by the same coordinate transformation hierarchy), but I'd get rid of Routes and Script nodes. Instead, I'd use a hierarchical naming scheme accessible by the enclosing web page (or whatever is loading the 3D geometry world). That would be a more traditional programming paradigm, and would let the VRML browser implementors concentrate on rendering the 3D world really fast.
Mr. Carmack has the luxury of re-inventing his technology every year or two.
Quake I is very different from Doom.
Which is somewhat different than Quake II, and very different from Quake III (the 3D technology, I mean; the gameplay is pretty much the same).
Doom/Quake/etc is fun because Mr. Carmacks colleagues spent a lot of time creating spiffy worlds, specifically tuned to run well using what was available at a specific snapshot in the evolution of 3D graphics technology on the PC.
So, lets say we took your advice and went back in time and codified DOOM as international standard ISO/IEC 14772-1 (aka VRML).
Instant success, right? We'd see DOOM worlds all over the web, and lots and lots of 3D content springing up all over, because we all know that DOOM is such a fantastic virtual reality technology, and virtual reality is such a killer application...
VRML didn't live up to expectations because the technology is lousy. You don't see more 3D stuff on the web for a bunch of reasons:
It is really, really hard to create 3D stuff. Much harder than creating mainly-text web pages.
What's the business model? Nobody has figured out how to make money with new web technologies. Microsoft controls the browser market, so Microsoft gets to decide what new browser technologies will succeed or fail. Their 3D browser effort (ActiveVRML) was even harder to create content for than more conventional technologies, and was rejected by the content creators.
The killer applications for 3D graphics are games (for consumers) and CAD/CAM/Architecture (for business). All of these applications get along perfectly fine with proprietary graphics formats and packages that don't really need a 3D web.
Eventually, WildTangent will get snarfed up by Microsoft, and somebody will figure out what the killer app for 3D graphics on the web is... but I'm not holding my breath.
Slashdot Mirror
Yawn.
Unless it does everything one of the existing crypto algorithms does 10 times faster, or with 10 times less memory, who cares? Why would anybody bother using some new, untested algorithm when there are plenty of good alternatives already, some of them FREE??? Even if it was infinitely more secure than Blowfish, so what? Blowfish is PLENTY secure...
A new crypto algorithm makes a very nice PhD dissertation. But it's commercial value is pretty much zilch.
Yeah, your standard PC comes with a powerful 3D graphics card these days. One of the big problems for VRML was that none of the PC graphics cards were designed for graphics-in-a-window, they were ALL designed for games that took over the entire screen.
Has that changed? I dunno, I haven't done 3D stuff in ages. But I don't see any 3D-in-a-window apps out there. 3D on the web is a whole lot less interesting if you can't mix it in with all the rest of the stuff a standard Web browser can do, and consumer-level graphics cards weren't up to displaying 2D content mixed with 3D content last I checked.
Then again, I keep on hearing rumors that a future Microsoft OS will draw EVERYTHING via the 3D graphics pipeline.... maybe that will trigger an explosion of 3D on the web. Yeah, right.
I disagree that "in realistic digital environments, those with sensory limitations are going to have an increasingly hard time." You'll have a harder time excelling in games that require split-second decisions after processing audio and visual (and maybe eventually olfactory and tactile) input.
But I think most games won't require you to have 20/20 vision, lightning-fast reflexes, perfect hearing, a keen sense of smell, and six fingers on each hand to have fun. There will probably always be games for hard-core gamers that are incredibly difficult for most of us mortals to play, but as more and more people play online games I predict they'll become less important over time.
But in general, the richer the sensory environment, the EASIER it is for everybody to interact. Especially when you throw a tera-hertz CPU into the loop. Hard of hearing? No problem, run speech recognition in real time to translate everything into text for you. Blind? That's ok, run an AI guide dog to help you find your way...
The current crop of MMORPG's (EverQuest, Dark Age of Camelot, etc) could be completely accessible to blind folks reasonably easily. Personally, I think it would be pretty fun to play a blind, but powerful, wizard, who used his magic and other senses to detect and defeat his foes.
It wasn't an accident; see the third design note at http://www.best.com/~rikk/Book/ch2-210.htm#2.10.2 for a full description of why we chose the event architecture we did for VRML.
We were designing VRML97 before there was a standard Document Object Model (DOM) and scripting language (JavaScript) for web pages. If I were designing a 3D language for the web today, I'd borrow the W3C's DOM and specify JavaScript as the scripting language. I'd keep sensors (you need the 3D equivalent of hyperlinks, and they really need to be embedded inside the 3D world description because they need to be affected by the same coordinate transformation hierarchy), but I'd get rid of Routes and Script nodes. Instead, I'd use a hierarchical naming scheme accessible by the enclosing web page (or whatever is loading the 3D geometry world). That would be a more traditional programming paradigm, and would let the VRML browser implementors concentrate on rendering the 3D world really fast.
Quake I is very different from Doom. Which is somewhat different than Quake II, and very different from Quake III (the 3D technology, I mean; the gameplay is pretty much the same).
Doom/Quake/etc is fun because Mr. Carmacks colleagues spent a lot of time creating spiffy worlds, specifically tuned to run well using what was available at a specific snapshot in the evolution of 3D graphics technology on the PC.
So, lets say we took your advice and went back in time and codified DOOM as international standard ISO/IEC 14772-1 (aka VRML).
Instant success, right? We'd see DOOM worlds all over the web, and lots and lots of 3D content springing up all over, because we all know that DOOM is such a fantastic virtual reality technology, and virtual reality is such a killer application...
VRML didn't live up to expectations because the technology is lousy. You don't see more 3D stuff on the web for a bunch of reasons:
- It is really, really hard to create 3D stuff. Much harder than creating mainly-text web pages.
- What's the business model? Nobody has figured out how to make money with new web technologies. Microsoft controls the browser market, so Microsoft gets to decide what new browser technologies will succeed or fail. Their 3D browser effort (ActiveVRML) was even harder to create content for than more conventional technologies, and was rejected by the content creators.
- The killer applications for 3D graphics are games (for consumers) and CAD/CAM/Architecture (for business). All of these applications get along perfectly fine with proprietary graphics formats and packages that don't really need a 3D web.
Eventually, WildTangent will get snarfed up by Microsoft, and somebody will figure out what the killer app for 3D graphics on the web is... but I'm not holding my breath.PS: It's Mark Pesce, not Piesce.