Well, I don't know about anyone else, but I'm convinced. Your enthusiastic use of the word "WRONG!" has totally won me over. The fact that you only offered the weakest of excuses for your anti-Javascript bias does not matter. You yelled "WRONG!" louder than your opponent. Therefore you have convinced me.
I have *no* control over what browsers visit my site and if, say, Firefox3 broke a lot of my code because of an API change
Firefox 3 doesn't break your code because of an API change. It's based on web standards that remain frozen once implemented. Prototype 1.5 -> 1.6 will change like you mentioned, but you have just as much control there. In fact, you have MORE control because you're not at the whim of the plugin/browser maker to continue supporting the old plugin. One fellow I was talking to here on Slashdot actually kept a separate copy of APIs like prototype for each module. He simply didn't upgrade them unless there was a clear and solid need to do so.
I can't say I agree with such a draconian approach, but there's nothing inherent in web development that causes the problems you describe. If anything, web development is less susceptible to upgrade problems. Unless, of course, you're still doing browser version checking? (In which case it's your own damn fault.) PLEASE tell me you're doing feature checking instead?
There are a lot of things you can do with plain Javascript, but we still need Flash
So wrong, it's not even funny.
- How can you rotate an image with Javascript?
You call "rotate" on the canvas context before drawing the image to the screen.
- How can you draw a diagonal line with Javascript?
lineTo(<coords>)
- How can you access the webcam and microphone from Javascript?
You don't. Hopefully not in Flash or Javascript. (Just because the APIs exist in Flash doesn't make them a good idea.) There's some discussion going on over at WHATWG about adding support. I hope it doesn't get very far...
I recommend you start your research into modern browsers (read: NOT Internet Exploder) here. Then nip over to WHATWG.org and read the current specs for modern browsers.
You've just described why I have a deep-seated hate for frameworks. If these frameworks really wanted to help, they'd focus only on APIs that make sense. But don't cram me into your idea of how Javascript APIs should look. The DOM/Javascript APIs exist for a reason, and most are quite good. Until the rest of the industry gets with the program, I'll roll my own toolkit-independent widgets.
As for Silverlight, you don't have compatibility problems now. But just wait a little bit. Microsoft is famous for incompatibly changing APIs from version to version. It happened with Access VBA from 97->2000, it happened to.NET, it happened with VB6->VB.NET, it happens with every version of Windows. Betting on anything Microsoft is a good way to find a stake through your back once you outlive your usefulness to them.
but: how does one work the kinds of things flash does, without flash?
The technology is all there as part of the HTML 5 spec. (Look it up over on the W3C or at WHATWG.org.) Canvas, Audio, SVG, and Video all provide alternatives to what Flash does. Even the ability to keep track of complex state information exists in HTML 5. And the API is significantly improved over the simple SharedObjects Flash offers.
Does environment (x) have the UI so that people can get their work done quickly and easily?
That's a problem for the tool creators. HTML 5 is merely the technology. The first company to make a Flash Studio-like tool for HTML 5 will probably make quite a bit of money. In the meantime, individual technologies can be addressed with tools like Inkscape.:-)
Say you needed to use the YUI calandar control on a page that also uses Prototype (for lightbox2). Now the two libraries will "fight" over the browser's onload.
That's because "framework" developers refuse to get with the times.
function done1() { alert("All done!"); } function done2() { alert("All done!"); }
Some people who are otherwise very smart with Javascript (e.g. Douglas Crockford) can't seem to figure out why you might need more than one listener for an event. Sure, you could chain the events, but that's ugly. DOM 2 Events already exists, so why not use it?
And for the record, the conditional code wouldn't be necessary if Microsoft wasn't a bunch of tools. God help us all if they ever actually decide to... oh, I dunno... implement a standard they helped create. But that's just my opinion.
If browsers were a good application framework, we wouldn't need Flash, Air, Silverlight, Java applets, XBAP apps, XUL, etc, etc etc.
Newsflash! We don't.
Flash was never welcome on the web. It was responsible for some of the most horrific, unusable sites known to man. For the most part it has disappeared from common UI use. However, it did manage to find two major niches:
1. A standard for Web Video (because no one can friggin' agree on a standard)
2. Online Games
#1 may eventually be taken care of by the new HTML5 <video> tag. Unfortunately, the powers that be still can't agree.
#2 *is* taken care of. Javascript games already exist:
XUL is a Mozilla technology primarily used to construct Mozilla apps. It is not a web language per se.
Air and Silverlight are solutions looking for problems. The latter is supposed to be a Flash killer at a time when Flash is already at the end of its life. Smooth move, Microsoft.
XBAP is effectively the heavy-weight daddy of Silverlight. Except that it's not really a web app.
The sooner we realize that trying to build an "application" directly in html+javascript+whatever-server-side-tech-you-like is a losing strategy, the sooner we can move onto something better.
So what you're saying is, the sooner we shut down GMail, Yahoo! Mail, Google Docs, Google Maps, Digg, Meebo, and every other DHTML app in existence, the better off we'll be*?
* Ok, maybe in the case of Digg we would be, but that's the exception that proves the rule!
I foresee API-based web development, and web pages/apps are done programatically, rather than as text markup.
You forgot to add "I have a dream!" in your one-liner.
Let me get out my crystal ball here... *clunk* *crash* *bang* sorry *oof* *whump* haven't *whim* *whim* *whim* used it *whack!* in awhile. So where was I? Ah yes. I am staring DEEP into the past. Looking at the days when UIs were programmatic. I see when UIs caused long lengths of repetitive and ugly code. I see resource files being invented! It's a miracle! UI programmers no longer have to keep their layout in their code! These resource files appear to be getting more complex... they are supporting graphical layout... productivity is improving!
Wait, what's this? Some silly person on Slashdot is attempting to derail the web form of resource files! He thinks that the DOM should be constructed... programmatically? Has he ever tried building a UI 100% programtically? It's a nightmare!
Levity aside, it can be done, but it's far from the ideal solution. New document formats like XUL may pop up, but suggesting that we move away from keeping layouts separate from our code simply smacks of inexperience.
"Those that fail to learn from history, are doomed to repeat it." - Winston Churchill
So here's an idea: Your Web browser window is a View. Maybe it's high time we stopped trying to force it to be a Controller, too.
Here's an even better idea: The HTML DOM would be the View, the Javascript would be the Controller, and the server would be the Model! I'll bet I'm the first one to think of that...
So if nobody ever managed to come up with the ultimate, perfect language for systems programming, what makes us think we can do it for the Web?
The browser model allows for languages other than Javascript. (e.g. VBScript is somewhat popular in IE-only applications.) It's just that no one has come up with a better language. If no one comes up with a better language, why reinvent the wheel?
Ever since the early days of Web browsers we've had this language, JavaScript. Over the years, we've demanded more and more of it, to the point that we're now talking about using it to build entire applications. The simple truth, however, is that JavaScript will never be good for everything.
That's one person's opinion. My opinion (and the opinion of many others) is that Javascript is a very powerful LISP-like langauge capable of far more than its given credit for. Part of the reason for abandoning ECMAScript 4 is that v3 already supports most everything we need. It's not perfect, mind you, but it doesn't actually NEED the features of v4. Most of those features are syntactic sugar that makes the language more comfortable to Java programmers.
Behind the scenes, nothing really changes with the common features of v4. There's some type checking and a few other minor additions going on, but otherwise the objects are translated into Javascript objects.
Strong typing, packages, and namespaces may make it a lot easier to maintain large applications, but they're virtually useless to any Web coder who just wants to bash out a little bit of UI glitz.
And there-in lies the problem. People think of Javascript as being for "UI Glitz". That's the real issue to tackle. Not the imagined lack of MVC.
Does your shunt run even on non-x86 devices that are limited to Flash Player 7, not Flash Player 9, such as Internet Channel on Wii?
The Internet Channel doesn't need a shunt. The Wii Internet Channel is based on Opera 9.x, which means that it fully supports the Canvas tag. You can see the Tetris demo I linked to running on the Wii here: YouTube Video
The only browser that needs the shunt is Internet Explorer. (At this point, dirt supports the standards better than IE.:-/) Users using Internet Explorer are likely to have Flash 9 installed. Flash 7 would be a poor choice for a shunt because it lacks the sophisticated image drawing and back-buffering features introduced in Flash 9.
Java is already installed on most OEM computers. And as I mentioned in the last sentence, Flash can be used to create a similar shunt. Flash has even greater market penetration than Java. It's not 100%, but it's about as close as you can get. As a bonus, most users without Flash would be savvy enough to be using FireFox anyway. (Given that one has to actively AVOID having Flash installed these days.)
FYI, Screaming Monkey was already discussed in an earlier story.
Unfortunately, scripted manipulation of VML is too slow to be used for highly interactive web applications. Mozilla's solution is to bake its own native Canvas implementation into an ActiveX plugin that can be integrated directly into Internet Explorer.
The only problem is getting people to install the plugin. My own solution was to use the market penetration of Java Applets to develop a shunt that would render Canvas using Java APIs. (Note that the events system has not been completed in that demo. Make sure you click outside the block falling area so that the browser receives the keyboard commands.)
The same sort of shunt could be done with Flash 9 or Silverlight. Which would do a nice end-run around the problem of getting plugins installed.
Good games for the Wii have been around for a while. They just don't get a lot of attention. Certainly, there are the first party games, but -- while they are high quality -- I actually find them to be less interesting than some of the third party titles.
Let me pull a few examples from my shelf/drive:
Pinball Hall of Fame: The Williams Collection
Zack and Wiki
Toki Tori
Wild West Guns
Geometry Wars Galaxies
Ghost Squad
Metal Slug Anthology
Guitar Hero III
Defend Your Castle
Star Soldier R
Lost Winds
Red Steel (Yeah, I liked this, hated Raving Rabbids. Go figure.)
That's just what I can remember off the top of my head. If you include second part titles, you can also throw in some great games like Excite Truck, Super Paper Mario, and several other strong contenders. A few other third party titles I'm excited about that I haven't gotten yet include:
Elebits
Blast Works
Boom Blox (of course)
Though one interesting problem I've noticed is that third parties tend to price their games WAY too high. Games that cost $20 or less on the PS2 (e.g. The Star Trek game) cost $30 on the Wii. Almost no one values such budget titles that highly. I honestly think that's what happened to Boom Blox as well. Great game, but overpriced for the market. Everyone wants it, no one shells out the dough.
That's probably why Majesco (smartly) slashed prices on Blast Works and Taito decided to make Space Invaders: Get Even only 500 points. Of course, the latter is actually a ripoff in disguise, so I imagine the market will get cautious and not buy even the good titles once they're affordable. (Thanks a lump, Taito.)
half the time when doing the 'remove a block' game types, it isn't able to determine where you're pointing, so the cursor will flicker erratically across the screen.
It sounds like you have a problem with your sensor bar. There are two common issues/fixes:
1. The sensor bar is too far back on the television. When you move the remote in certain directions, it can no longer "see" the IR LEDs. Try moving the sensor bar such that the black "glass" (for lack of a better term) is protruding over the edge of your TV.
2. There are other IR sources in your room. Some lightbulbs cause this problem, as do decorative lights like Christmas lights. (Dude, what are those still doing up in August?!?!:-P) Try turning off the lights in the room (especially decorative lights) and see if that helps. If it does, use the "Sensitivity" setting in the Wii settings menu to adjust how well the remotes "see" IR.
When rendered at 60fps in a fast paced car game, are you going to ever notice those minute details? Would you even care?
Actually, you care MORE about the shadows then, not less. Shadows provide visual cues that transmit everything from depth to orientation to backface information. e.g. When a car suddenly swerves, you see the result in the shadow just as much as you see it in the object itself. When cars are passing each other, the shadows cue their relative position regardless of the perspective. And as they pass light sources causing the shadows to swing around the vehicle? Well, that's just cool!:-P
For the record, I think the quality of the images are pretty poor.
There's no denying that the scene is overly simplistic. But that's okay. It shows off the key advantages of raytracing. Adding additional texturing, detail, soft shadows and other features are all possible, and in fact probable. But this isn't a 10 million dollar game. This is a simple demo. And for what it is, I think it looks great.:)
And for the record, ambient occlusion is not what you want in a raytraced scene. Such occlusion is a form of illumination "cheating" that gives decent, but not spectacular results. There are far better shading models available for ray tracing.
But you do see that.:) Everything casts shadows on everything (unless it's been specifically disabled by the artist).
If that's true, then wherearethey? I have yet to see a gameplay example where a soldier casts a shadow on himself. You can see a soldier's shadows on the ground, plants, buildings, and in other areas, but never on the soldier himself.
Crysis has completely uniform shadow mapping.
I don't think that means what you think it means. A uniform shadow map is a shadow map that's effectively fixed regardless of perspective. This is inferior to raytraced results.
This is exactly the same as ray traced shadows, the only difference is quality and power requirement.
You keep repeating that, but it's simply not true. Shadow maps only compete with raytracing if you spend the computational power to project a shadow for every polygon in the scene for nearly every frame. Game don't do that. It's far too expensive.
Ah, so when you said game engines can't do it, you really meant they can, it just doesn't look very good?
Well... more or less.:-P
More specifically, I mean that they can't internally shadow the way you'd expect real objects to shadow. When a soldier moves his leg far forward during a sneaky walk, you don't see a shadow of his weapon and arm cover his leg. That is realistic internal shadows. Placing shadows on obvious overhangs is just more beating the player over the head with depth perspective.
Not to say that the artists don't do a good job. The models and textures have a lot of shading already built into them that hides the lack of, say, neck shadows. Similarly, the use of standard shading based on the angle from the light source hides many of the missing shadows. But at the end of the day, you simply don't have a number of shadows that should be there. And those missing shadows contribute to the instinctive "wrongness" of the scenes.
You'd hit the similar limitations using ray traced shadows if you try to do them in real time.
Yes and no. You'd miss a lot of shadows based on secondary or tertiary reflections (e.g. the sun bounces off the glass of the building, which then strikes the car, which creates interesting shadows as well as reflections), but the primary shadows would all be correct.
Secondary shadows have issues anyway as dust from the air has "dirtying" effects that are computationally expensive to figure out.
Do the shadows in Toy story look bad for example?
Toy Story is a difficult comparison as they did not try to render in real time. Rendering was done on expensive render farms. As a result, you did get a lot better shading and shadow effects. (e.g. Woody's nose cast a shadow on his face.) None the less, these shadows were a long way from realistic. Scenes were far too strongly lit, with shadows missing all over the place. Shadows were added were it was artistically pleasing, but artistically pleasing does not equate to "realistic".
That's why Toy Story was done in the style of a cartoon; because the Renderman technology of the day could not produce convincingly realistic scenes. But it could compete with the animation industry, where almost all the work was artistic anyway.
But either way, if you honestly think the shadows in the Nvidia demo looks closer to real shadows (not necessarily more accurate) than the ones in Crysis, I'll leave you to it. I strongly disagree though.
Fair enough.
BTW, apologies if I got heated. I now remember why I stopped posting so much. I'm way too excitable.:-)
Crysis has self shadowing, just like any other moderately recent game. The screenshot you posted is in one of the lower quality modes in which it may be disabled.
It's not disabled. Look at the upper right corner of the ship, just to the left of the right wing. You will see a minor shadow cast by the ship onto the ship. Look at the superstructure to the left. The overhang is casting a shadow onto the lower part of the tower.
Both look like crap.
Crysis also has shadows from a number of light sources simultaneously, but the number is limited (4 IIRC) for performance/quality reasons.
And you think the NVidia demo wasn't limited? The sun-lit effects of the NVidia demo don't look like there are very many light sources to me. Yet the results are easily superior. Reflections off of glass, internal shadows, internal reflections, realistic refraction, etc.
I suggest you look up what shadow mapping actually is before you spout off nonsense.
I suggest you pay more attention to what I wrote. Existing game engines can't hold a candle to what NVidia has demonstrated here. Shadow mapping can do a lot better if you're willing to spend the cycles, but then you get into a computational frenzy that starts to make raytracing look pretty darn good.
Rasterization has moved forward since Quake 3 you know.
And Raytracing has moved forward since the days of Myst. What's your point?
Slashdot Mirror
Sun NeWS and DHTML are nearly the exact same methodology. All that has changed is the document format and the controller language.
Well, I don't know about anyone else, but I'm convinced. Your enthusiastic use of the word "WRONG!" has totally won me over. The fact that you only offered the weakest of excuses for your anti-Javascript bias does not matter. You yelled "WRONG!" louder than your opponent. Therefore you have convinced me.
Truly a masterful stroke.
Firefox 3 doesn't break your code because of an API change. It's based on web standards that remain frozen once implemented. Prototype 1.5 -> 1.6 will change like you mentioned, but you have just as much control there. In fact, you have MORE control because you're not at the whim of the plugin/browser maker to continue supporting the old plugin. One fellow I was talking to here on Slashdot actually kept a separate copy of APIs like prototype for each module. He simply didn't upgrade them unless there was a clear and solid need to do so.
I can't say I agree with such a draconian approach, but there's nothing inherent in web development that causes the problems you describe. If anything, web development is less susceptible to upgrade problems. Unless, of course, you're still doing browser version checking? (In which case it's your own damn fault.) PLEASE tell me you're doing feature checking instead?
So wrong, it's not even funny.
You call "rotate" on the canvas context before drawing the image to the screen.
lineTo(<coords>)
You don't. Hopefully not in Flash or Javascript. (Just because the APIs exist in Flash doesn't make them a good idea.) There's some discussion going on over at WHATWG about adding support. I hope it doesn't get very far...
I recommend you start your research into modern browsers (read: NOT Internet Exploder) here. Then nip over to WHATWG.org and read the current specs for modern browsers.
Ugh. The author forgot to cancel the default key commands. If it scrolls all over the place, paste this into your URL bar and hit enter:
That will prevent the scrolling. Otherwise, great demo!
You've just described why I have a deep-seated hate for frameworks. If these frameworks really wanted to help, they'd focus only on APIs that make sense. But don't cram me into your idea of how Javascript APIs should look. The DOM/Javascript APIs exist for a reason, and most are quite good. Until the rest of the industry gets with the program, I'll roll my own toolkit-independent widgets.
As for Silverlight, you don't have compatibility problems now. But just wait a little bit. Microsoft is famous for incompatibly changing APIs from version to version. It happened with Access VBA from 97->2000, it happened to .NET, it happened with VB6->VB.NET, it happens with every version of Windows. Betting on anything Microsoft is a good way to find a stake through your back once you outlive your usefulness to them.
You joke, but...
As a reminder, Composer was a part of the Netscape/Mozilla suite since nearly the beginning.
The technology is all there as part of the HTML 5 spec. (Look it up over on the W3C or at WHATWG.org.) Canvas, Audio, SVG, and Video all provide alternatives to what Flash does. Even the ability to keep track of complex state information exists in HTML 5. And the API is significantly improved over the simple SharedObjects Flash offers.
That's a problem for the tool creators. HTML 5 is merely the technology. The first company to make a Flash Studio-like tool for HTML 5 will probably make quite a bit of money. In the meantime, individual technologies can be addressed with tools like Inkscape. :-)
That's because "framework" developers refuse to get with the times.
Some people who are otherwise very smart with Javascript (e.g. Douglas Crockford) can't seem to figure out why you might need more than one listener for an event. Sure, you could chain the events, but that's ugly. DOM 2 Events already exists, so why not use it?
And for the record, the conditional code wouldn't be necessary if Microsoft wasn't a bunch of tools. God help us all if they ever actually decide to... oh, I dunno... implement a standard they helped create. But that's just my opinion.
Slashdot is so incredibly terrible that I turned off the DHTML. How about you?
Now if I could just find a way to get the @!#$! Idle stories off the front page...
Start at the source:
http://developer.mozilla.org/en/Core_JavaScript_1.5_Guide
That document may be nearly 15 years old (plus/minus revisions along the way), but it's still the definitive method of learning Javascript.
For those who actually take the time to read it, that is.
Good luck! :-)
ActionScript 3.0 == ECMAScript 4.0
Newsflash! We don't.
Flash was never welcome on the web. It was responsible for some of the most horrific, unusable sites known to man. For the most part it has disappeared from common UI use. However, it did manage to find two major niches:
1. A standard for Web Video (because no one can friggin' agree on a standard)
2. Online Games
#1 may eventually be taken care of by the new HTML5 <video> tag. Unfortunately, the powers that be still can't agree.
#2 *is* taken care of. Javascript games already exist:
PentriiX Online Multiplayer
DHTML Lemmings
Hull Breach Online
Tetris using Canvas
Pac Man using Canvas
XUL is a Mozilla technology primarily used to construct Mozilla apps. It is not a web language per se.
Air and Silverlight are solutions looking for problems. The latter is supposed to be a Flash killer at a time when Flash is already at the end of its life. Smooth move, Microsoft.
XBAP is effectively the heavy-weight daddy of Silverlight. Except that it's not really a web app.
So what you're saying is, the sooner we shut down GMail, Yahoo! Mail, Google Docs, Google Maps, Digg, Meebo, and every other DHTML app in existence, the better off we'll be*?
* Ok, maybe in the case of Digg we would be, but that's the exception that proves the rule!
You forgot to add "I have a dream!" in your one-liner.
Let me get out my crystal ball here... *clunk* *crash* *bang* sorry *oof* *whump* haven't *whim* *whim* *whim* used it *whack!* in awhile. So where was I? Ah yes. I am staring DEEP into the past. Looking at the days when UIs were programmatic. I see when UIs caused long lengths of repetitive and ugly code. I see resource files being invented! It's a miracle! UI programmers no longer have to keep their layout in their code! These resource files appear to be getting more complex... they are supporting graphical layout... productivity is improving!
Wait, what's this? Some silly person on Slashdot is attempting to derail the web form of resource files! He thinks that the DOM should be constructed... programmatically? Has he ever tried building a UI 100% programtically? It's a nightmare!
Levity aside, it can be done, but it's far from the ideal solution. New document formats like XUL may pop up, but suggesting that we move away from keeping layouts separate from our code simply smacks of inexperience.
"Those that fail to learn from history, are doomed to repeat it." - Winston Churchill
Here's an even better idea: The HTML DOM would be the View, the Javascript would be the Controller, and the server would be the Model! I'll bet I'm the first one to think of that...
The browser model allows for languages other than Javascript. (e.g. VBScript is somewhat popular in IE-only applications.) It's just that no one has come up with a better language. If no one comes up with a better language, why reinvent the wheel?
That's one person's opinion. My opinion (and the opinion of many others) is that Javascript is a very powerful LISP-like langauge capable of far more than its given credit for. Part of the reason for abandoning ECMAScript 4 is that v3 already supports most everything we need. It's not perfect, mind you, but it doesn't actually NEED the features of v4. Most of those features are syntactic sugar that makes the language more comfortable to Java programmers.
Behind the scenes, nothing really changes with the common features of v4. There's some type checking and a few other minor additions going on, but otherwise the objects are translated into Javascript objects.
And there-in lies the problem. People think of Javascript as being for "UI Glitz". That's the real issue to tackle. Not the imagined lack of MVC.
The Internet Channel doesn't need a shunt. The Wii Internet Channel is based on Opera 9.x, which means that it fully supports the Canvas tag. You can see the Tetris demo I linked to running on the Wii here: YouTube Video
The only browser that needs the shunt is Internet Explorer. (At this point, dirt supports the standards better than IE. :-/) Users using Internet Explorer are likely to have Flash 9 installed. Flash 7 would be a poor choice for a shunt because it lacks the sophisticated image drawing and back-buffering features introduced in Flash 9.
Java is already installed on most OEM computers. And as I mentioned in the last sentence, Flash can be used to create a similar shunt. Flash has even greater market penetration than Java. It's not 100%, but it's about as close as you can get. As a bonus, most users without Flash would be savvy enough to be using FireFox anyway. (Given that one has to actively AVOID having Flash installed these days.)
FYI, Screaming Monkey was already discussed in an earlier story.
The only problem is getting people to install the plugin. My own solution was to use the market penetration of Java Applets to develop a shunt that would render Canvas using Java APIs. (Note that the events system has not been completed in that demo. Make sure you click outside the block falling area so that the browser receives the keyboard commands.)
The same sort of shunt could be done with Flash 9 or Silverlight. Which would do a nice end-run around the problem of getting plugins installed.
Gateship. Because it's a ship, that goes through the gate.
Good games for the Wii have been around for a while. They just don't get a lot of attention. Certainly, there are the first party games, but -- while they are high quality -- I actually find them to be less interesting than some of the third party titles.
Let me pull a few examples from my shelf/drive:
That's just what I can remember off the top of my head. If you include second part titles, you can also throw in some great games like Excite Truck, Super Paper Mario, and several other strong contenders. A few other third party titles I'm excited about that I haven't gotten yet include:
Though one interesting problem I've noticed is that third parties tend to price their games WAY too high. Games that cost $20 or less on the PS2 (e.g. The Star Trek game) cost $30 on the Wii. Almost no one values such budget titles that highly. I honestly think that's what happened to Boom Blox as well. Great game, but overpriced for the market. Everyone wants it, no one shells out the dough.
That's probably why Majesco (smartly) slashed prices on Blast Works and Taito decided to make Space Invaders: Get Even only 500 points. Of course, the latter is actually a ripoff in disguise, so I imagine the market will get cautious and not buy even the good titles once they're affordable. (Thanks a lump, Taito.)
It sounds like you have a problem with your sensor bar. There are two common issues/fixes:
1. The sensor bar is too far back on the television. When you move the remote in certain directions, it can no longer "see" the IR LEDs. Try moving the sensor bar such that the black "glass" (for lack of a better term) is protruding over the edge of your TV.
2. There are other IR sources in your room. Some lightbulbs cause this problem, as do decorative lights like Christmas lights. (Dude, what are those still doing up in August?!?! :-P) Try turning off the lights in the room (especially decorative lights) and see if that helps. If it does, use the "Sensitivity" setting in the Wii settings menu to adjust how well the remotes "see" IR.
Hope that helps! :-)
Actually, you care MORE about the shadows then, not less. Shadows provide visual cues that transmit everything from depth to orientation to backface information. e.g. When a car suddenly swerves, you see the result in the shadow just as much as you see it in the object itself. When cars are passing each other, the shadows cue their relative position regardless of the perspective. And as they pass light sources causing the shadows to swing around the vehicle? Well, that's just cool! :-P
There's no denying that the scene is overly simplistic. But that's okay. It shows off the key advantages of raytracing. Adding additional texturing, detail, soft shadows and other features are all possible, and in fact probable. But this isn't a 10 million dollar game. This is a simple demo. And for what it is, I think it looks great. :)
And for the record, ambient occlusion is not what you want in a raytraced scene. Such occlusion is a form of illumination "cheating" that gives decent, but not spectacular results. There are far better shading models available for ray tracing.
If that's true, then where are they? I have yet to see a gameplay example where a soldier casts a shadow on himself. You can see a soldier's shadows on the ground, plants, buildings, and in other areas, but never on the soldier himself.
I don't think that means what you think it means. A uniform shadow map is a shadow map that's effectively fixed regardless of perspective. This is inferior to raytraced results.
You keep repeating that, but it's simply not true. Shadow maps only compete with raytracing if you spend the computational power to project a shadow for every polygon in the scene for nearly every frame. Game don't do that. It's far too expensive.
There's a good discussion on the Crysis shadowing technique over on the OGRE3D forums.
Shadow maps ARE a form of projected shadows. That's why they're also referred to as projective shadowing.
Well... more or less. :-P
More specifically, I mean that they can't internally shadow the way you'd expect real objects to shadow. When a soldier moves his leg far forward during a sneaky walk, you don't see a shadow of his weapon and arm cover his leg. That is realistic internal shadows. Placing shadows on obvious overhangs is just more beating the player over the head with depth perspective.
Not to say that the artists don't do a good job. The models and textures have a lot of shading already built into them that hides the lack of, say, neck shadows. Similarly, the use of standard shading based on the angle from the light source hides many of the missing shadows. But at the end of the day, you simply don't have a number of shadows that should be there. And those missing shadows contribute to the instinctive "wrongness" of the scenes.
Yes and no. You'd miss a lot of shadows based on secondary or tertiary reflections (e.g. the sun bounces off the glass of the building, which then strikes the car, which creates interesting shadows as well as reflections), but the primary shadows would all be correct.
Secondary shadows have issues anyway as dust from the air has "dirtying" effects that are computationally expensive to figure out.
Toy Story is a difficult comparison as they did not try to render in real time. Rendering was done on expensive render farms. As a result, you did get a lot better shading and shadow effects. (e.g. Woody's nose cast a shadow on his face.) None the less, these shadows were a long way from realistic. Scenes were far too strongly lit, with shadows missing all over the place. Shadows were added were it was artistically pleasing, but artistically pleasing does not equate to "realistic".
That's why Toy Story was done in the style of a cartoon; because the Renderman technology of the day could not produce convincingly realistic scenes. But it could compete with the animation industry, where almost all the work was artistic anyway.
Fair enough.
BTW, apologies if I got heated. I now remember why I stopped posting so much. I'm way too excitable. :-)
Back 'atcha.
It's not disabled. Look at the upper right corner of the ship, just to the left of the right wing. You will see a minor shadow cast by the ship onto the ship. Look at the superstructure to the left. The overhang is casting a shadow onto the lower part of the tower.
Both look like crap.
And you think the NVidia demo wasn't limited? The sun-lit effects of the NVidia demo don't look like there are very many light sources to me. Yet the results are easily superior. Reflections off of glass, internal shadows, internal reflections, realistic refraction, etc.
Crysis still looks like crap in comparison.
I suggest you pay more attention to what I wrote. Existing game engines can't hold a candle to what NVidia has demonstrated here. Shadow mapping can do a lot better if you're willing to spend the cycles, but then you get into a computational frenzy that starts to make raytracing look pretty darn good.
And Raytracing has moved forward since the days of Myst. What's your point?