Doesn't matter how many. Matters whether or not you can defend your policies in court. Shareholders don't control corporate policy by threatening lawsuits they can't win, or I'd buy a share of RJR and have them stop selling tobacco.
Most games don't use UDP for the simple reason that many routers drop UDP heinously, and any user stuck behind such a router is SOL. The margin of performance improvement from UDP generally just isn't worth the risk of alienating or no-saleing all those gamers.
The unfortunate truth is that video game design is very popular. Most people who get those jobs start in another branch, either art or development, and move into the position on their second or later project. There just aren't that many pure design jobs to go around. If you want to get seriously into the game industry, you'll probably need to be either a dev or an artist first.
You have to remember that the Developer teams for D2 and WOW were entirely made up of different people, and not necessarily all of the same level of expertise.
I'll side with one of the other responders: this question isn't interesting, the answer is obviously one of volume tied to venue. There are also a different set of people at blizzard when you consider who develops the code, versus who is responsible for answering forum questions. One is the developers, the other is the Tech Support group. Let's mod this down and get more interesting questions to the devs.
He's not suggesting they've lost the 64bit war, but that they've lost the 64bit format war. Which it does look like they have. They have adopted AMD x86-64, and EPIC has probably never reached even 10,000 desktops. x86-64 has won for the next few years at least.
Ok, clearly the;-) at the end of my post was too hard to spot. I'm arguing the very point you are: that AI is very difficult to write because people want it to play blind and with power equity (without precise knowledge of the state of the game, or manipulating the state of the game in a way unavailable to the player) as if it were a human being. The given pong AI is invincible precisely because it manipulates the game in a way unavailable to the player (moves the paddle to precisely the ball's position, even if the paddle can't be moved that fast by the human player).
The problem is, that with no cheats whatsoever available to the computer, it has to act nearly as smart as a human in order to be competitive. AI techniques are no where near human intelligence right now, and won't be for at least 40 years, barring some surprising advance.
Well, if you're trained in AI, chances are good you're not going to be writing AI for games because that's a pretty small number of jobs compared to the overall market.
Most of the AI people in the games industry I know were general CS background, and much like any task, read some books and some research before diving into the work. Same for the 3d programmers: not specialists in 3d in school, but instead something you learn when you need to/want to for a game project you're working on.
Nearly everybody in the game industry is or tries to be a generalist, that's how you stay employable.
There are actually fairly fundamental computer science limits that suggest that this is probably not the case.
Consider the checkers playing program. How small, in terms of bytes, can the description of the AI that plays a game such as checkers possibly be? The AI for checkers uses n-square in the number of tiles on the board (64x64 = 4096), and uses more than one byte per node. It took an enormous amount of computing power to train those nodes. Suppose you could get it down to linear, so only 64 nodes, of one byte each. You've only bought yourself perhaps a thousandfold decrease in the computing power required, and that's still just to play checkers.
I think it's pretty clear that even given massive advances in our understanding of AI, we'll still need huge improvements in computing power before we see big improvements to the AI behavior we see in games. Good AI is currently in the millions to billions of times of the computing resources available, and I think at best we can hope to reduce that to thousands. That kind of computing power might be available in twenty years, barring a major breakthrough in hardware.
No flames, you're totally right on. Except I'll say that we're considerably more than 10 years away from really seeing decent AI in games. The problem is that games are much too computationally intensive for an AI to analyze effectively. Have a look at this paper for the kind of computational horsepower that went into teaching a neural network to play checkers .
In the game industry, we used to write our AIs like this. They worked beautiful. Then some whiners came along and said 'The AI is only beating me because it's cheating!'
And that's the reason AI is a tough subject today.
I'm sorry, but base-e is the obvious choice for real mathgeeks. Why restrict yourself to an integer system that doesn't work well for most math researchers?
And balanced base-3? Why pick a base incompatible with the vast majority of computational systems available today? If you're going to go in that direction you obviously have to pick binary or quaternary, trinary is just wasteful!
There are businesses that operate 9-5, regardless of when 9-5 fall. If more of 9-5 occur during daylight hours, they turn on less lights, use less heating than if they fall during night hours.
They also demand that their employees work during 9-5. If that means that their commute falls in the dark, the accident rate goes up. If it falls during light hours, the accident rate goes down. This saves lives.
There are a lot of good reasons for DST, most of which have to do with saving people from the stupidity of businesses that insist on operating 9-5.
Yeah, good thing there were no terrorist actions on US soil during the clinton administration, or we'd no doubt have had all of this same legislation that much earlier!
I'm sorry, but what serious gamer is going to care how fast openGL runs? Hardly any games are implemented on OpenGl, and most of the few that are also have directx paths.
Not every good programmer has a degree in computer science. In fact, there seems to be some evidence that a skewed portion of that population can't stand the boredom of finishing school. Unfortunately, there are plenty of programmers who didn't finish school who suck too.
As to whether you can train someone to 'good' i'd have to say i've never seen it. You can definitely train all the way up to competent, though, and that's worth doing because there aren't ever going to be enough 'good' to go around.
It's not that you need to become a corporation to have constitutional rights, it's that corporations need to become individual legal entities in order to enjoy most of the same individual rights as we mere humans.
There are definitely advantages to editors beyond emacs, particularly since most of them support emacs key maps. When I want to know the type of a variable, I just mouse hover over it. Definitely try out eclipse.. though it's not the best, it is free, and it can automate an amazing amount of work.
Certainly postfixing something like pct makes sense, that's contextual information about the variable that clarifies its undocumented meaning.
Prefixing m for member and f for float though is inviting error in my opinion, particularly when someone less careful than you comes along and starts working with your code. Far better to do your code development on an editor that can give you that information straight from the declaration (vc, eclipse, idea and i'm sure many others can all do this in context). I would also tend to think that the given error would most likely be discovered when the value turns out to be zero, if you've already managed to make the mistake of doing integer division in the wrong order. It seems possible it might rescue you from making the mistake in the first place, but that's not a very typical type of error for people to have problems with (IMO).
Slashdot Mirror
Doesn't matter how many. Matters whether or not you can defend your policies in court. Shareholders don't control corporate policy by threatening lawsuits they can't win, or I'd buy a share of RJR and have them stop selling tobacco.
Most games don't use UDP for the simple reason that many routers drop UDP heinously, and any user stuck behind such a router is SOL. The margin of performance improvement from UDP generally just isn't worth the risk of alienating or no-saleing all those gamers.
The unfortunate truth is that video game design is very popular. Most people who get those jobs start in another branch, either art or development, and move into the position on their second or later project. There just aren't that many pure design jobs to go around. If you want to get seriously into the game industry, you'll probably need to be either a dev or an artist first.
Actually, all they need is a good faith belief that do no evil maximizes shareholder value in the long run. Which conceivably it does.
You have to remember that the Developer teams for D2 and WOW were entirely made up of different people, and not necessarily all of the same level of expertise.
I'll side with one of the other responders: this question isn't interesting, the answer is obviously one of volume tied to venue. There are also a different set of people at blizzard when you consider who develops the code, versus who is responsible for answering forum questions. One is the developers, the other is the Tech Support group. Let's mod this down and get more interesting questions to the devs.
He's not suggesting they've lost the 64bit war, but that they've lost the 64bit format war. Which it does look like they have. They have adopted AMD x86-64, and EPIC has probably never reached even 10,000 desktops. x86-64 has won for the next few years at least.
They clearly mean new architecture in the sense of P5. In context:
8086, 80286, 80386, 80486, Pentium, P2, P3, P4, P4Mobile, P4Multicore, P5.
They're talking about introducing P5.
Ok, clearly the ;-) at the end of my post was too hard to spot. I'm arguing the very point you are: that AI is very difficult to write because people want it to play blind and with power equity (without precise knowledge of the state of the game, or manipulating the state of the game in a way unavailable to the player) as if it were a human being. The given pong AI is invincible precisely because it manipulates the game in a way unavailable to the player (moves the paddle to precisely the ball's position, even if the paddle can't be moved that fast by the human player).
The problem is, that with no cheats whatsoever available to the computer, it has to act nearly as smart as a human in order to be competitive. AI techniques are no where near human intelligence right now, and won't be for at least 40 years, barring some surprising advance.
Well, if you're trained in AI, chances are good you're not going to be writing AI for games because that's a pretty small number of jobs compared to the overall market.
Most of the AI people in the games industry I know were general CS background, and much like any task, read some books and some research before diving into the work. Same for the 3d programmers: not specialists in 3d in school, but instead something you learn when you need to/want to for a game project you're working on.
Nearly everybody in the game industry is or tries to be a generalist, that's how you stay employable.
There are actually fairly fundamental computer science limits that suggest that this is probably not the case.
Consider the checkers playing program. How small, in terms of bytes, can the description of the AI that plays a game such as checkers possibly be? The AI for checkers uses n-square in the number of tiles on the board (64x64 = 4096), and uses more than one byte per node. It took an enormous amount of computing power to train those nodes. Suppose you could get it down to linear, so only 64 nodes, of one byte each. You've only bought yourself perhaps a thousandfold decrease in the computing power required, and that's still just to play checkers.
I think it's pretty clear that even given massive advances in our understanding of AI, we'll still need huge improvements in computing power before we see big improvements to the AI behavior we see in games. Good AI is currently in the millions to billions of times of the computing resources available, and I think at best we can hope to reduce that to thousands. That kind of computing power might be available in twenty years, barring a major breakthrough in hardware.
I assumed slashdot was getting paid for the linking, and that they link to whoever pays them this month?
No flames, you're totally right on. Except I'll say that we're considerably more than 10 years away from really seeing decent AI in games. The problem is that games are much too computationally intensive for an AI to analyze effectively. Have a look at this paper for the kind of computational horsepower that went into teaching a neural network to play checkers .
s .nott.ac.uk/~gxk/courses/g5baim/papers/checkers-00 2/TNNKChellapillaAndDBFogelText.pdf
http://scholar.google.com/url?sa=U&q=http://www.c
Then consider what will be required to learn to play a game with a complexity level like age of empires. Dynamically.
In the game industry, we used to write our AIs like this. They worked beautiful. Then some whiners came along and said 'The AI is only beating me because it's cheating!'
And that's the reason AI is a tough subject today.
A round of applause, that is the funniest post I've read in a month. If I wasn't banned from moderation, you'd be getting overmoderated for funny.
I'm sorry, but base-e is the obvious choice for real mathgeeks. Why restrict yourself to an integer system that doesn't work well for most math researchers?
And balanced base-3? Why pick a base incompatible with the vast majority of computational systems available today? If you're going to go in that direction you obviously have to pick binary or quaternary, trinary is just wasteful!
There are businesses that operate 9-5, regardless of when 9-5 fall. If more of 9-5 occur during daylight hours, they turn on less lights, use less heating than if they fall during night hours.
They also demand that their employees work during 9-5. If that means that their commute falls in the dark, the accident rate goes up. If it falls during light hours, the accident rate goes down. This saves lives.
There are a lot of good reasons for DST, most of which have to do with saving people from the stupidity of businesses that insist on operating 9-5.
Yeah, good thing there were no terrorist actions on US soil during the clinton administration, or we'd no doubt have had all of this same legislation that much earlier!
Interesting that they sought these powers all through the clinton administration, yet didn't receive them until the bush administration.
I'm sorry, but what serious gamer is going to care how fast openGL runs? Hardly any games are implemented on OpenGl, and most of the few that are also have directx paths.
Not every good programmer has a degree in computer science. In fact, there seems to be some evidence that a skewed portion of that population can't stand the boredom of finishing school. Unfortunately, there are plenty of programmers who didn't finish school who suck too.
As to whether you can train someone to 'good' i'd have to say i've never seen it. You can definitely train all the way up to competent, though, and that's worth doing because there aren't ever going to be enough 'good' to go around.
It's not that you need to become a corporation to have constitutional rights, it's that corporations need to become individual legal entities in order to enjoy most of the same individual rights as we mere humans.
Oh wait, they already passed that law.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporation
Well if you do, you can start with these excellent resources:
http://bunnyherolabs.com/adopt/
http://byjoni.com/blueunicorn.html
There are definitely advantages to editors beyond emacs, particularly since most of them support emacs key maps. When I want to know the type of a variable, I just mouse hover over it. Definitely try out eclipse .. though it's not the best, it is free, and it can automate an amazing amount of work.
Certainly postfixing something like pct makes sense, that's contextual information about the variable that clarifies its undocumented meaning.
Prefixing m for member and f for float though is inviting error in my opinion, particularly when someone less careful than you comes along and starts working with your code. Far better to do your code development on an editor that can give you that information straight from the declaration (vc, eclipse, idea and i'm sure many others can all do this in context). I would also tend to think that the given error would most likely be discovered when the value turns out to be zero, if you've already managed to make the mistake of doing integer division in the wrong order. It seems possible it might rescue you from making the mistake in the first place, but that's not a very typical type of error for people to have problems with (IMO).