'Standard OpenGL/D3D blend modes' my arse. It doesn't do SRC*DEST, pretty much the most standard blendfunc there is, and vital for lightmapping.
I understand Unreal Tournament has to use a workaround that requires 4(!) passes over the geometry.
Re:Enough with the polygons - lets get some physic
on
Nvidia's NV20
·
· Score: 1
Your point about the horribly complicated code for doing matrices is totally backwards - this is exactly the kind of operations that would be perfect for implementing in hardware.
I'm not sure you grasp what's involved here. I suggest you go and research what's involved in
- collision detection
- constrained rigid-body dynamics
- soft-body dynamics
CPUs cannot be accelerators by definition
Sure they can. If you're so intent on hardware-accelerated physics, get a 2nd CPU, rip off the Pentium sticker, write 'Phys-o-Mat 2000' on it and write yourself a multi-threaded physics library.
Re:Enough with the polygons - lets get some physic
on
Nvidia's NV20
·
· Score: 1
This has absolutely nothing to do with graphics cards, but what the hell, I'll bite.
There are physics accelerators out there. They're called CPUs. Drawing a large 3D scene is a simple, repetitive operation that makes it a natural for hardware acceleration. Doing physics involves large Jacobian matrices and all kinds of horribly complicated code, making it a natural for software.
a 1GHz CPU is more than enough to do realistic physics - take a look at the 'Actor' demo (on the MathEngine website, I think) for an example of the physics you can do on a CPU.
The article starts really badly.
on
Nvidia's NV20
·
· Score: 1
I read the first line of the article about nVidia being the creators of the worlds first GPU, and that's where I stopped. Of course they created the worlds first GPU, because the invented the term GPU and defined it in terms of their product.
Anyone who swallows marketting stuff like that whole isn't qualified to have an opinion on the subject.
Same goes for PSX2 - as soon as an article mentions how it will enable the portrayal of emotion in games, I know I'm reading a press-release which hasn't been filtered through a informed human brain.
10 PRINT "You are in a small room. There is a glowing lantern on the floor. You have a broadsword and a piece of cheese."
20 PRINT "What will you do?"
30 INPUT $A
40 PRINT "You cannot ";$A
50 GOTO 10
Sony has a long history of being secretive
Actually, Sony had an amateur-oriented dev-kit for the Playstation called Net Yaroze. It enabled anyone with £500 and sufficient skill to have a go at writing honest-to-god PSX software.
I hate to disillusion you, but the vast, vast majority of games coders couldn't care less about the DMCA or the MPAA. As for shameful capitalism, it's so deeply rooted in western society that pointing your accusing finger at the PS2 is laughably blinkered. Get some perspective man.
IIRC, the PPro did significantly worse than the Pentium in benchmarks for executing 16bit code. We'll start seeing representative benchmarks when Win64 shows up.
There's no L sound in Japanese.
The O is there because almost all the basic syllables of Japanese are made up of either a vowel or a consonant followed by a vowel. The only time you have two consonants together is when the second one is an N, so Tlinity isn't possible.
At 60fps, it takes an absolute minimum of 1/60th of a second for your input to make the round trip from the mouse, through the game simulation, onto the screen and thence into eyes. As your framerate increases, that latency drops off to almost nothing. 1/60th of a second of latency between input and feedback on that input quite definitely is perceptible - introduce an additional frame of latency (eg by using triple buffering) and the controls definitely feel more laggy.
So the reason you get that millisecond jump on someone running at a lower framerate is that you're effectively seeing a few tens of milliseconds into his future.
Sure, but as long as the source to a released build of windows exists, that constitutes a stable interface. If Samba and WINE strictly adhere to that interface, there's nothing MS can do to break Samba that won't also break at least one version of Windows.
What a lot of people perceive as antialiasing problems on PSX2 are in fact (at least partially) the result of bad mipmapping. Although the hardware will (if you ask nicely) select a miplevel based on vertex Z, it will NOT take into account the polygon slope. That means that a polygon that's sloped with respect to the viewer does not correctly drop to a lower miplevel. The result is that silhouette polys (which are typically at a sharp angle to the viewer) get a badly pixellated/sparkly look.
The solution is to switch off the auto-mipmapping and calculate the mipmapping parameters yourself. Although the vector-units are nice and fast at this sort of thing, it's certainly not free.
Am I right in thinking that there's a lot of undocumented / occult stuff in Windows hindering the development of things like Samba and WINE?
I imagine having a copy of the W2K souce would help with that somewhat.
Actually, the guy is only half wrong - the DC's PVR chip has to store the entire scene on-chip before it can render it, the PS2 doesn't. Kind of makes the opposite point to what he intended. However, this is slightly made up for by the fact that the PVR doesn't need a zbuffer and the PS2 does.
However muddled and biased the article is, it's still basically correct about the DC making better use of VRAM. The texture-compression is especially good; a lot better than S3TC and the like, and miles better than the PS2's only comperable option (4bit palettised textures, ugh).
As long as you urge a Sony boycott, it seems strange that you don't urge a boycott of all products from companies supporting the MPAA and RIAA. I'm thinking mainly of movies and music here.
And by the way, I found your rant somewhat grating and patronising. If you're going to bark about commercialism overriding morality then consider:
If you could measure the human misery caused by spending $300 in a shop, you would score a *lot* higher buying (eg) sportswear than you could with a PS2.
maybe thats cos the games are all in japanese???? Nope, the games we got are mainly English. And do you honestly think Tekken and Ridge Racer are text-heavy games? Idiot.
and you wonnt be able to play any american games on it??? Although you will be able to play imports on it well in advance of US release. And you'll be able to get it chipped soon enough anyway. Idiot.
and you need a pal compatable tv to use it??? No you don't. Japan, like the US uses NTSC. Idiot.
would that possibly be the reson the ppl in the office havent borrowed it???? Nope. I just asked around the office and it was unanimous: It's because the games are crap. The most fun anyone's had on it so far has been watching The Matrix on DVD. Idiot.
I played PS2 DOA and it wasn't the quantum leap over DC DOA or Soul Calibur that it needed to be. From what I've heard, the US version of TTT is not much different from the Japanese one; although there are undoubtably a lot of polys flying around, it just looks gaudy and a bit tacky. And of course it plays basically identically to Tekken 3.
The thing is, Sony has been pushing PS2 as an infinitely powerful system, but 1st-generation PS2 games aren't much more impressive than 3rd-gen Dreamcast games. Anyone who's believed Sony's hype and is expecting Metal Gear Solid 2 quality *will* be disappointed in the short-term. I do like the sound of Armoured Core 2 though...
I'm a little confused. What sort of gamer WOULD queue up for hours in the cold in the middle of the night, but WOULDN'T pay a little extra to get an import which they could have been playing for the last few months?
We've had one at work since the Japanese launch, and it's come out of the cupboard a grand total of *five* time. Four times for Tekken, once for Ridge Racer. Only three people have bothered to borrow it. That's in an office full of gamers.
I rather pity the people who'll be getting their brand new PSX2s home and spending a few sad hours desperately trying to enjoy Tekken TT and Ridge Racer 5. Great games are certainly in the pipeline for the PS2, but they ain't here yet and without them, the box is a bit of a dud.
Ok, we appear to disagree a little on our usage of the word 'original'. I'm not suggesting these games each defined a new genre, but almost all of them had unique features and original gameplay concepts.
Virtua Tennis: I've seen a 5 year old play her grandad at this, just having fun batting the ball backwards and forwards using a single button (and not even the D-pad). I've also seen the two most hardcore gamers I know (both ex-game-testers) play the game to death, and they've still not worn it out. That range of gameplay is original as far as I'm concerned - the game has NO learning curve.
Crazy Taxi: Get past the fact that it's NOT Driver, and you'll find a scoring system that makes for pretty compulsive high-score chasing. Yes, the physics were terrible but if you played the game as intended that wasn't an issue.
Sonic *was* original - you could replay most levels with several different characters, each of which would negotiate the levels in completely different ways. That aside it also had an awful lot of little gameplay elements I'd never seen anywhere else.
Virtual On 2 is obviously not an original game if you consider Virtual On 1. Otherwise, it unquestionably is.
Eternal Arcadia is pretty damn original-looking game. Check out the screenshots here.
If Samba de Amigo isn't original, please name another game you control with maracas.
House Of The Dead 2: Ok, busted. Not at all original. Qualitywise, however, it's the gold standard of lightgun games.
F355 is original in that no other developers have dared put such a 100% hardcore driving simulation onto a console - it doesn't have an external view because neither do Ferrari drivers. It does have difficulty controls in the driver assists though.
I found Shen Mue very strangely compulsive. I ended up really immersed in the game world; truly a very odd game indeed. Not fun in the arcade sense but very enjoyable. Incidentally, the combat engine is a stripped-down Virtua Fighter, not Dragon's Lair at all.
A person may be smart, but people are stupid
Oh dear. I was trying to cut back on cynicism but I have to agree with you here.
There's a world of difference between trying to schedule instructions on a superscalar CPU, and trying to get 3 seperate processors to run in harmony. On a single CPU, all the pipelines share a register file and an address space. Instructions get executed in the order they're issued (effectively if not literally).
As with all new systems, there's going to be a learning process. Go back to the launch of the PSX and look at some of the games you went WOW over, and compare them with the speed and complexity of new titles for exactly the same handware, now that developers have had a chance to work out how to squeeze every last drop out of the system.
A much more appropriate suggestion is this. Go back to the Sega Saturn launch and compare the games with todays. Oh, wait, there aren't any today.
The Saturn had 2 main CPUs, another CPU running the CDROM, a 68000 controlling a sound-chip, a 3D processor that executed basic stored programs, a seperate 2D processor that composited in background planes and a DMA controller that also executed microcode.
Sadly, the PS2 is much like the Saturn internally - lots of chips, lots of DMAs flying about the place, lots of power and no simple way to harness it.
Slashdot Mirror
'Standard OpenGL/D3D blend modes' my arse. It doesn't do SRC*DEST, pretty much the most standard blendfunc there is, and vital for lightmapping.
I understand Unreal Tournament has to use a workaround that requires 4(!) passes over the geometry.
Your point about the horribly complicated code for doing matrices is totally backwards - this is exactly the kind of operations that would be perfect for implementing in hardware.
I'm not sure you grasp what's involved here. I suggest you go and research what's involved in
- collision detection
- constrained rigid-body dynamics
- soft-body dynamics
CPUs cannot be accelerators by definition
Sure they can. If you're so intent on hardware-accelerated physics, get a 2nd CPU, rip off the Pentium sticker, write 'Phys-o-Mat 2000' on it and write yourself a multi-threaded physics library.
There are physics accelerators out there. They're called CPUs. Drawing a large 3D scene is a simple, repetitive operation that makes it a natural for hardware acceleration. Doing physics involves large Jacobian matrices and all kinds of horribly complicated code, making it a natural for software. a 1GHz CPU is more than enough to do realistic physics - take a look at the 'Actor' demo (on the MathEngine website, I think) for an example of the physics you can do on a CPU.
Same goes for PSX2 - as soon as an article mentions how it will enable the portrayal of emotion in games, I know I'm reading a press-release which hasn't been filtered through a informed human brain.
Oops...
Last time I looked at developer.intel.com there was no sign of a P4, so I just assumed IA64 was it.
10 PRINT "You are in a small room. There is a glowing lantern on the floor. You have a broadsword and a piece of cheese."
20 PRINT "What will you do?"
30 INPUT $A
40 PRINT "You cannot ";$A
50 GOTO 10
Sony has a long history of being secretive Actually, Sony had an amateur-oriented dev-kit for the Playstation called Net Yaroze. It enabled anyone with £500 and sufficient skill to have a go at writing honest-to-god PSX software.
I hate to disillusion you, but the vast, vast majority of games coders couldn't care less about the DMCA or the MPAA. As for shameful capitalism, it's so deeply rooted in western society that pointing your accusing finger at the PS2 is laughably blinkered. Get some perspective man.
IIRC, the PPro did significantly worse than the Pentium in benchmarks for executing 16bit code. We'll start seeing representative benchmarks when Win64 shows up.
He is the 1x1.
There's no L sound in Japanese.
The O is there because almost all the basic syllables of Japanese are made up of either a vowel or a consonant followed by a vowel. The only time you have two consonants together is when the second one is an N, so Tlinity isn't possible.
At 60fps, it takes an absolute minimum of 1/60th of a second for your input to make the round trip from the mouse, through the game simulation, onto the screen and thence into eyes. As your framerate increases, that latency drops off to almost nothing. 1/60th of a second of latency between input and feedback on that input quite definitely is perceptible - introduce an additional frame of latency (eg by using triple buffering) and the controls definitely feel more laggy.
So the reason you get that millisecond jump on someone running at a lower framerate is that you're effectively seeing a few tens of milliseconds into his future.
Sure, but as long as the source to a released build of windows exists, that constitutes a stable interface. If Samba and WINE strictly adhere to that interface, there's nothing MS can do to break Samba that won't also break at least one version of Windows.
What a lot of people perceive as antialiasing problems on PSX2 are in fact (at least partially) the result of bad mipmapping. Although the hardware will (if you ask nicely) select a miplevel based on vertex Z, it will NOT take into account the polygon slope. That means that a polygon that's sloped with respect to the viewer does not correctly drop to a lower miplevel. The result is that silhouette polys (which are typically at a sharp angle to the viewer) get a badly pixellated/sparkly look.
The solution is to switch off the auto-mipmapping and calculate the mipmapping parameters yourself. Although the vector-units are nice and fast at this sort of thing, it's certainly not free.
...Microsoft reports that Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia.
My favourite was the line about email containing 'a hidden code'
Am I right in thinking that there's a lot of undocumented / occult stuff in Windows hindering the development of things like Samba and WINE?
I imagine having a copy of the W2K souce would help with that somewhat.
Actually, the guy is only half wrong - the DC's PVR chip has to store the entire scene on-chip before it can render it, the PS2 doesn't. Kind of makes the opposite point to what he intended. However, this is slightly made up for by the fact that the PVR doesn't need a zbuffer and the PS2 does.
However muddled and biased the article is, it's still basically correct about the DC making better use of VRAM. The texture-compression is especially good; a lot better than S3TC and the like, and miles better than the PS2's only comperable option (4bit palettised textures, ugh).
As long as you urge a Sony boycott, it seems strange that you don't urge a boycott of all products from companies supporting the MPAA and RIAA. I'm thinking mainly of movies and music here.
And by the way, I found your rant somewhat grating and patronising. If you're going to bark about commercialism overriding morality then consider:
If you could measure the human misery caused by spending $300 in a shop, you would score a *lot* higher buying (eg) sportswear than you could with a PS2.
maybe thats cos the games are all in japanese????
Nope, the games we got are mainly English. And do you honestly think Tekken and Ridge Racer are text-heavy games? Idiot.
and you wonnt be able to play any american games on it???
Although you will be able to play imports on it well in advance of US release. And you'll be able to get it chipped soon enough anyway. Idiot.
and you need a pal compatable tv to use it???
No you don't. Japan, like the US uses NTSC. Idiot.
would that possibly be the reson the ppl in the office havent borrowed it????
Nope. I just asked around the office and it was unanimous: It's because the games are crap. The most fun anyone's had on it so far has been watching The Matrix on DVD. Idiot.
Jeez, that was like shooting fish in a barrel.
I played PS2 DOA and it wasn't the quantum leap over DC DOA or Soul Calibur that it needed to be. From what I've heard, the US version of TTT is not much different from the Japanese one; although there are undoubtably a lot of polys flying around, it just looks gaudy and a bit tacky. And of course it plays basically identically to Tekken 3.
The thing is, Sony has been pushing PS2 as an infinitely powerful system, but 1st-generation PS2 games aren't much more impressive than 3rd-gen Dreamcast games. Anyone who's believed Sony's hype and is expecting Metal Gear Solid 2 quality *will* be disappointed in the short-term. I do like the sound of Armoured Core 2 though...
I'm a little confused. What sort of gamer WOULD queue up for hours in the cold in the middle of the night, but WOULDN'T pay a little extra to get an import which they could have been playing for the last few months?
We've had one at work since the Japanese launch, and it's come out of the cupboard a grand total of *five* time. Four times for Tekken, once for Ridge Racer. Only three people have bothered to borrow it. That's in an office full of gamers.
I rather pity the people who'll be getting their brand new PSX2s home and spending a few sad hours desperately trying to enjoy Tekken TT and Ridge Racer 5. Great games are certainly in the pipeline for the PS2, but they ain't here yet and without them, the box is a bit of a dud.
Ok, we appear to disagree a little on our usage of the word 'original'. I'm not suggesting these games each defined a new genre, but almost all of them had unique features and original gameplay concepts.
Virtua Tennis: I've seen a 5 year old play her grandad at this, just having fun batting the ball backwards and forwards using a single button (and not even the D-pad). I've also seen the two most hardcore gamers I know (both ex-game-testers) play the game to death, and they've still not worn it out. That range of gameplay is original as far as I'm concerned - the game has NO learning curve.
Crazy Taxi: Get past the fact that it's NOT Driver, and you'll find a scoring system that makes for pretty compulsive high-score chasing. Yes, the physics were terrible but if you played the game as intended that wasn't an issue.
Sonic *was* original - you could replay most levels with several different characters, each of which would negotiate the levels in completely different ways. That aside it also had an awful lot of little gameplay elements I'd never seen anywhere else.
Virtual On 2 is obviously not an original game if you consider Virtual On 1. Otherwise, it unquestionably is.
Eternal Arcadia is pretty damn original-looking game. Check out the screenshots here.
If Samba de Amigo isn't original, please name another game you control with maracas.
House Of The Dead 2: Ok, busted. Not at all original. Qualitywise, however, it's the gold standard of lightgun games.
F355 is original in that no other developers have dared put such a 100% hardcore driving simulation onto a console - it doesn't have an external view because neither do Ferrari drivers. It does have difficulty controls in the driver assists though.
I found Shen Mue very strangely compulsive. I ended up really immersed in the game world; truly a very odd game indeed. Not fun in the arcade sense but very enjoyable. Incidentally, the combat engine is a stripped-down Virtua Fighter, not Dragon's Lair at all.
A person may be smart, but people are stupid
Oh dear. I was trying to cut back on cynicism but I have to agree with you here.
An informed whore could also have riffed off the fact that the PS2 devbox runs Linux.
There's a world of difference between trying to schedule instructions on a superscalar CPU, and trying to get 3 seperate processors to run in harmony. On a single CPU, all the pipelines share a register file and an address space. Instructions get executed in the order they're issued (effectively if not literally).
As with all new systems, there's going to be a learning process. Go back to the launch of the PSX and look at some of the games you went WOW over, and compare them with the speed and complexity of new titles for exactly the same handware, now that developers have had a chance to work out how to squeeze every last drop out of the system.
A much more appropriate suggestion is this. Go back to the Sega Saturn launch and compare the games with todays. Oh, wait, there aren't any today.
The Saturn had 2 main CPUs, another CPU running the CDROM, a 68000 controlling a sound-chip, a 3D processor that executed basic stored programs, a seperate 2D processor that composited in background planes and a DMA controller that also executed microcode.
Sadly, the PS2 is much like the Saturn internally - lots of chips, lots of DMAs flying about the place, lots of power and no simple way to harness it.