You don't need to "target" people with controllers... a controller in Android is just another input device. You can use a controller in Android with ANY game that supports keyboard input.
Anything that's more complicated than "plug it into the power socket and the TV and turn it on" doesn't work in the consumer space, and that includes buying two distinct pieces of electronics you have to combine yourself. Even that people have to set up WiFi is a huge problem at the moment. Don't forget that being an Android fanatic also means that you have a lot more knowledge than the target market.
Touch screen and keyboard/controller input are totally different from a game developer point of view, and need different approaches very early in development. If you would just publish for Google Play or on Amazon, you'd have to support both (since you can't assume that they have more than the standard device), which means a lot of additional work.
I think you're narrowing your view a bit too much. I agree that UK is going down the same insanity route as the US (dunno about Australia, haven't followed that too much), but there are hundreds of other countries on the planet. For example, I liked Amsterdam very much when I visited it this year, although this city might be a huge culture shock for typical US citizens.
Bullshit. I've been using Linux for ten years and never once opened vim or modified a config file.
Then you were very lucky.
Modern distros all have Windows-like "control panel" programs. In short, buddy, I'm calling you a damned liar.
Two years ago I developed some software using CUDA on Ubuntu. This required the latest driver that's not available via the official Ubuntu support system, so I had to use the official one by Nvidia. This resulted in a broken Xorg every time the kernel was updated (automatically by the Ubuntu updater, which was about once every two weeks). I had to drop down into console to download the Nvidia driver (via lynx) and install it manually.
You don't even have a Linux box or you'd know that software installation takes about two clicks of a mouse and you're done.
You sure? How do you think I can do mouse clicks on a VPS?
The system is too old, the packages don't exist on the server any more. I can't update to a never version, because the VPS hoster's only option of updating the system is by completely wiping it and installing a new system (which takes a while to configure).
THAT is the freedom being discussed here. I can't just decide one day that I am dissastisfied with the windows file copy dialog box's estimated time to completion algorithm, bust open the source code, and tinker on it.
I *CAN* do that on linux.
That has not been my experience with GNU/Linux at all. Whenever I try to use it, I end up in an all-night vim-session, trying to fix all the text file configurations, because something doesn't work as it's supposed to. I *have* to tinker with GNU/Linux to actually use it.
On my Mac, I'm productive right after installing the OS (and Xcode), with no configuration at all (other than my Apple ID login, so I can get Xcode).
At the moment, I have some very urgent software installation to do on my Linux VPS, but that has been delayed for a week, because I simply don't have a whole day to spare for that. On a Mac, this would take a few minutes maximum.
My argument for these kind of questions (Why are the surroundings exactly right for life?) is always:
If they weren't exactly how they are now, there would be nobody to ask this question.
The universe itself is like a huge laboratory. There are an uncountable number of suns and an uncountable number of planets surrounding them.
The way I grasped just how huge the universe is was when I looked at this image made by the Hubble telescope closely. Remember our galaxy, the Milky Way? The star closest to our solar system is so far away that we couldn't reach it in our lifetime. When looking at an image of our galaxy, our sun is just lost in the huge sea of stars anyways. Now look at that picture Hubble shot. How many galaxies can you count? Every single galaxy of these is about the same size as ours (for human proportions anyways). They are just hanging around there randomly, and those are just the ones we can see with our current technology.
Every single planet in all of the galaxies has unique properties that might or might not be suitable for life. For the tiny number of planets of these that are suitable for life (which probably is still an uncountable number), there is a tiny tiny chance that life will actually happen. For those where life actually happens, on only a tiny tiny amount of them a species develops that is sophisticated enough to actually ask these questions. However, since there is such a large pool of potential planets, this is still a viable number (just how large this number is, is still under discussion in science).
For me personally, alien life is a fact (based on my knowledge of statistics). The only question is whether we can actually communicate with any of them, due to the huge distances.
I will admit I am not smart enough to see how a single-cell organism can ever become a fish.
It's easy to understand, it might just take you a few billions of years.
The problem with understanding this is that these processes happen on a timescale that is far beyond human imagination, just like the vastness of space is far beyond human imagination. You might think that a 100 years lifespan is a long time, but in evolution's terms it's not even a blip on the radar. The evolutionary change between generations is far too small to be noticeable in macroscopic lifeforms, but it piles up over the tens of thousands of years.
The only way to see these processes in a regular human's life span is to look at smaller lifeforms with a much higher rate of change. This part is easily visible to everyone who follows the issue with antibiotics, and why they have to be modified every year.
To get back to your fish-related question, there are a bazillion number of factors that lead from bacteria to fish, and we don't know the vast majority of them. You're skipping a lot of intermediary steps there as well. You can't observe how it happened (because you don't have the right environment and enough time), you can only observe the processes behind it.
The focus would be way off though (always at close to infinity, no matter how close the surrounding really is). I can't even guess at what that does to your brain when you're using it for more than a few minutes.
The Google glasses don't have this issue, but they do have the problem that you have to switch focus to look at the overlay, which is probably pretty uncomfortable as well.
Chris roberts is harder to say, Freelancer might have been his game, but I'm not sure how much of the same studio. One person does not a game make. They're using Unreal, which helps tremendously, but they're still hard to know the future on.
They're using the CryEngine3 (as stated on their FAQ). The free version of the engine is a huge PITA due to the fairly obvious bugs and complete lack of documentation, but I guess they'll get some very special treatment by CryTek.
Something like the Oculus Rift + head mounted cameras? Sure. Google Glass in it's current form? No chance.
Besides being a giant device to be carried around all day, the thing you lose with the Oculus Rift is that the eyes can't focus on anything any more, since the focus is fixed on near-infinity. Thus, you lose an important depth cue for the brain. This is a huge problem for long-time use, especially in AR.
Newtonian physics. This will *suck*. This has been tried many times. It usually makes for a painful game to play. Its realistic but usually makes for a pinball machine sort of gameplay.
From his descriptions, he's found a cheap way out of that: The physics are real, but your ship has so much intelligence of its own, that you tell to what you want to do, and it will fire the correct thrusters at the correct time for the correct duration to do it. Thus, steering is still easy to do.
This is even dynamic, so if one of your thrusters gets shot down, the computer tries to compensate for that as far as it is possible.
1) Kickstarter. Sign of a project doomed to failure when it concerns hardware, really. Especially where they are talking on the scale of producing hardware boards with en-masse dozens of cores on them from a few hundred thousand dollars.
That's just prejudice on your part. There are many amateurs doing Kickstarter projects they don't fully understand, but there are also some professionally done ones on there. The hard task of backing something there is to find out which of these two types the creator is.
2) No OS support - it seems to be a number-cruncher with an ARM-controller, not a generic computer with lots of software already ported. Nobody will rewrite their software to take advantage of it unless it's MADLY to their advantage (i.e. number crunchers, not generic machines).
It supports OpenCL, which is the standard for this kind of thing across many device types. Of course, if you're talking about web servers and databases, you might have a problem.
Actually, I can't think of anything in a web server that could benefit from OpenCL... In databases, there might be a lot of things. The core issue with those processors is that it's only really efficient when you operate on a rather small dataset that can be kept local memory.
Of course, as you said, there's nothing off-the-shelf here, you need to adapt the code to that kind of architecture. The cheap trick to spread the workload on multiple cores by simply handling every request on its own thread doesn't work with it. The point though is that you still aren't stuck on a single device when adapting it, since OpenCL is supported for many architectures, including the Intel and AMD processors. They also benefit from data locality due to their caches, although it is not that huge of a requirement.
I read an article a while ago that stated that the ARM processors were so efficient by accident. They started from scratch with the design, not having the experience of Motorola, IBM, Intel and AMD of what a fully-fledged processor requires, and so it became a very simple one. This happens to be an important element for power efficiency.
A good UI also comes at a price (mostly in R&D though). I suspect that there was no budget for copiers where this was factored into the device's development costs.
It's basically a way to downsize without paying benefits and screwing over investors, while management walks away with nothing's changed. Probably a very creative loophole in the law.
Well, but by doing that, they've gotten rid of all trust and confidence by investors and customers alike, which is their most important asset. Short-term gains over long-term viability.
Apple will NEVER advance if they keep trying to emulate Jobs. Jobs was not Apple, and Apple can and will survive without him. But now, they have the opportunity to change.
While I agree with you, the last time Apple tried to change post-Jobs, it went horribly wrong. There's a huge difference when career managers are in the driver's seat, compared to the ones that founded the company and defined its core values. I think Steve Jobs wanted to avoid that when he nurtured his successors (Tim Cook & Jony Ive) early, but that also means they're probably reluctant to change too much of his success strategy. We'll see how long they will be in control, but I'm afraid of what will come afterwards.
Slashdot Mirror
You don't need to "target" people with controllers... a controller in Android is just another input device. You can use a controller in Android with ANY game that supports keyboard input.
Anything that's more complicated than "plug it into the power socket and the TV and turn it on" doesn't work in the consumer space, and that includes buying two distinct pieces of electronics you have to combine yourself. Even that people have to set up WiFi is a huge problem at the moment. Don't forget that being an Android fanatic also means that you have a lot more knowledge than the target market.
Touch screen and keyboard/controller input are totally different from a game developer point of view, and need different approaches very early in development. If you would just publish for Google Play or on Amazon, you'd have to support both (since you can't assume that they have more than the standard device), which means a lot of additional work.
Maybe they realized that they'd have to keep the servers running forever, without any subscription payments.
Also, I've yet to see any BD live addon that brought real value to the product.
I think you're narrowing your view a bit too much. I agree that UK is going down the same insanity route as the US (dunno about Australia, haven't followed that too much), but there are hundreds of other countries on the planet. For example, I liked Amsterdam very much when I visited it this year, although this city might be a huge culture shock for typical US citizens.
Anywhere in Australia can be dangerous if you get stranded, because it's hot and dry.
... and animals that are trying to eat you everywhere, as far as I've heard.
The creative industries are probably the last ones to be replaced by automation, but that's also just a matter of time.
T-shirts. Kickstarter people always want t-shirts.
Bullshit. I've been using Linux for ten years and never once opened vim or modified a config file.
Then you were very lucky.
Modern distros all have Windows-like "control panel" programs. In short, buddy, I'm calling you a damned liar.
Two years ago I developed some software using CUDA on Ubuntu. This required the latest driver that's not available via the official Ubuntu support system, so I had to use the official one by Nvidia. This resulted in a broken Xorg every time the kernel was updated (automatically by the Ubuntu updater, which was about once every two weeks). I had to drop down into console to download the Nvidia driver (via lynx) and install it manually.
You don't even have a Linux box or you'd know that software installation takes about two clicks of a mouse and you're done.
You sure? How do you think I can do mouse clicks on a VPS?
W: Failed to fetch http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/karmic/main/binary-i386/Packages.gz 404 Not Found [IP: 91.189.92.177 80]
The system is too old, the packages don't exist on the server any more. I can't update to a never version, because the VPS hoster's only option of updating the system is by completely wiping it and installing a new system (which takes a while to configure).
If I WANT to tinker, *I CAN*.
THAT is the freedom being discussed here. I can't just decide one day that I am dissastisfied with the windows file copy dialog box's estimated time to completion algorithm, bust open the source code, and tinker on it.
I *CAN* do that on linux.
That has not been my experience with GNU/Linux at all. Whenever I try to use it, I end up in an all-night vim-session, trying to fix all the text file configurations, because something doesn't work as it's supposed to. I *have* to tinker with GNU/Linux to actually use it.
On my Mac, I'm productive right after installing the OS (and Xcode), with no configuration at all (other than my Apple ID login, so I can get Xcode).
At the moment, I have some very urgent software installation to do on my Linux VPS, but that has been delayed for a week, because I simply don't have a whole day to spare for that. On a Mac, this would take a few minutes maximum.
My argument for these kind of questions (Why are the surroundings exactly right for life?) is always:
If they weren't exactly how they are now, there would be nobody to ask this question.
The universe itself is like a huge laboratory. There are an uncountable number of suns and an uncountable number of planets surrounding them.
The way I grasped just how huge the universe is was when I looked at this image made by the Hubble telescope closely. Remember our galaxy, the Milky Way? The star closest to our solar system is so far away that we couldn't reach it in our lifetime. When looking at an image of our galaxy, our sun is just lost in the huge sea of stars anyways. Now look at that picture Hubble shot. How many galaxies can you count? Every single galaxy of these is about the same size as ours (for human proportions anyways). They are just hanging around there randomly, and those are just the ones we can see with our current technology.
Every single planet in all of the galaxies has unique properties that might or might not be suitable for life. For the tiny number of planets of these that are suitable for life (which probably is still an uncountable number), there is a tiny tiny chance that life will actually happen. For those where life actually happens, on only a tiny tiny amount of them a species develops that is sophisticated enough to actually ask these questions. However, since there is such a large pool of potential planets, this is still a viable number (just how large this number is, is still under discussion in science).
For me personally, alien life is a fact (based on my knowledge of statistics). The only question is whether we can actually communicate with any of them, due to the huge distances.
random mutations?
Mutations are a big part of evolution.
I will admit I am not smart enough to see how a single-cell organism can ever become a fish.
It's easy to understand, it might just take you a few billions of years.
The problem with understanding this is that these processes happen on a timescale that is far beyond human imagination, just like the vastness of space is far beyond human imagination. You might think that a 100 years lifespan is a long time, but in evolution's terms it's not even a blip on the radar. The evolutionary change between generations is far too small to be noticeable in macroscopic lifeforms, but it piles up over the tens of thousands of years.
The only way to see these processes in a regular human's life span is to look at smaller lifeforms with a much higher rate of change. This part is easily visible to everyone who follows the issue with antibiotics, and why they have to be modified every year.
To get back to your fish-related question, there are a bazillion number of factors that lead from bacteria to fish, and we don't know the vast majority of them. You're skipping a lot of intermediary steps there as well. You can't observe how it happened (because you don't have the right environment and enough time), you can only observe the processes behind it.
You can't patent an idea, otherwise software would be patentable!
Oh, wait.
So could you just buy the Windows version and configure it yourself to save $50?
You wouldn't get any customer support for that configuration, which is where I guess the extra $50 go to.
The focus would be way off though (always at close to infinity, no matter how close the surrounding really is). I can't even guess at what that does to your brain when you're using it for more than a few minutes.
The Google glasses don't have this issue, but they do have the problem that you have to switch focus to look at the overlay, which is probably pretty uncomfortable as well.
Game was released and works fine, and has done decent Steam sales after the release. It's had pretty good reviews by the press too.
At one point it was featured with a huge banner on the main Steam store page, it'd better sell well with that kind of advertising :)
Chris roberts is harder to say, Freelancer might have been his game, but I'm not sure how much of the same studio. One person does not a game make. They're using Unreal, which helps tremendously, but they're still hard to know the future on.
They're using the CryEngine3 (as stated on their FAQ). The free version of the engine is a huge PITA due to the fairly obvious bugs and complete lack of documentation, but I guess they'll get some very special treatment by CryTek.
Something like the Oculus Rift + head mounted cameras? Sure. Google Glass in it's current form? No chance.
Besides being a giant device to be carried around all day, the thing you lose with the Oculus Rift is that the eyes can't focus on anything any more, since the focus is fixed on near-infinity. Thus, you lose an important depth cue for the brain. This is a huge problem for long-time use, especially in AR.
Yes, but now he's a shit bag without any power to cause harm, and thus can be ignored.
Newtonian physics. This will *suck*. This has been tried many times. It usually makes for a painful game to play. Its realistic but usually makes for a pinball machine sort of gameplay.
From his descriptions, he's found a cheap way out of that: The physics are real, but your ship has so much intelligence of its own, that you tell to what you want to do, and it will fire the correct thrusters at the correct time for the correct duration to do it. Thus, steering is still easy to do.
This is even dynamic, so if one of your thrusters gets shot down, the computer tries to compensate for that as far as it is possible.
Not really.
1) Kickstarter. Sign of a project doomed to failure when it concerns hardware, really. Especially where they are talking on the scale of producing hardware boards with en-masse dozens of cores on them from a few hundred thousand dollars.
That's just prejudice on your part. There are many amateurs doing Kickstarter projects they don't fully understand, but there are also some professionally done ones on there. The hard task of backing something there is to find out which of these two types the creator is.
2) No OS support - it seems to be a number-cruncher with an ARM-controller, not a generic computer with lots of software already ported. Nobody will rewrite their software to take advantage of it unless it's MADLY to their advantage (i.e. number crunchers, not generic machines).
It supports OpenCL, which is the standard for this kind of thing across many device types. Of course, if you're talking about web servers and databases, you might have a problem.
Actually, I can't think of anything in a web server that could benefit from OpenCL... In databases, there might be a lot of things. The core issue with those processors is that it's only really efficient when you operate on a rather small dataset that can be kept local memory.
Of course, as you said, there's nothing off-the-shelf here, you need to adapt the code to that kind of architecture. The cheap trick to spread the workload on multiple cores by simply handling every request on its own thread doesn't work with it. The point though is that you still aren't stuck on a single device when adapting it, since OpenCL is supported for many architectures, including the Intel and AMD processors. They also benefit from data locality due to their caches, although it is not that huge of a requirement.
£500 to the first person to supply a 1U filled to the brim with Raspberry Pi's (or equivalent)
I think the Parallella board would be perfect for this, much better than the Raspberry Pi.
I read an article a while ago that stated that the ARM processors were so efficient by accident. They started from scratch with the design, not having the experience of Motorola, IBM, Intel and AMD of what a fully-fledged processor requires, and so it became a very simple one. This happens to be an important element for power efficiency.
A good UI also comes at a price (mostly in R&D though). I suspect that there was no budget for copiers where this was factored into the device's development costs.
It's basically a way to downsize without paying benefits and screwing over investors, while management walks away with nothing's changed. Probably a very creative loophole in the law.
Well, but by doing that, they've gotten rid of all trust and confidence by investors and customers alike, which is their most important asset. Short-term gains over long-term viability.
Their internal mantra is that "Google is what, Microsoft is who, and we are _where_".
Ignoring Apple there tells so much about the company...
Apple will NEVER advance if they keep trying to emulate Jobs. Jobs was not Apple, and Apple can and will survive without him. But now, they have the opportunity to change.
While I agree with you, the last time Apple tried to change post-Jobs, it went horribly wrong. There's a huge difference when career managers are in the driver's seat, compared to the ones that founded the company and defined its core values. I think Steve Jobs wanted to avoid that when he nurtured his successors (Tim Cook & Jony Ive) early, but that also means they're probably reluctant to change too much of his success strategy. We'll see how long they will be in control, but I'm afraid of what will come afterwards.