Is there any comparison between how fast games and other flash apps run between PC and Wii?
You can try running most of the games on WiiCade on both the PC and the Wii to see how they compare. I'm sorry to say that the Wii's performance levels are not great, but a well-optimized game is more than playable. Try playing NG Rumble on both the Wii and the PC. You'll notice that its performance on the Wii varies somewhat, while it remains constant on the PC.
On the other hand, you can't exactly have four friends duking it out on the Desktop. (Something which you CAN do on the Wii!) So there are some advantages to games that target the Wii.
Also, what the heck am I supposed to do in cave 1-8? The cryptic hint in the previous cave is too cryptic for me..
The Newgrounds reviews discuss the answer in detail, but I'll repeat it here. Basically, you need to press Left + Up + Camera Change to defeat the level. On a keyboard, that's A + W + 1. On the Wii, it is < + ^ + -.
Shockwave Director == Lame. You might as well make QuakeGL a browser plugin for all that buys you. In any case, Jake2 (Java Applet) preceded Rasterwerks by several years.
There are a lot of good games they didn't mention. Someone already mentioned Portal Flash Edition, and I already mentioned Key to Adventure. A few others are:
Hey now. I think this is the first time in history that one of these MyMiniCity links has actually been on topic. Still a bit trollish, but otherwise amusing.:-)
To add a disclaimer to my post, I am associated with WiiCade, so take my post with a grain of salt. That being said, the game really is good. Feel free to check out the NewGrounds reviews (I am NOT associated with them) or just play the game for yourself.:-)
With all the animosity surrounding those stupid links, I don't think joking about MyMiniCity non-anonymously is such a good idea...
*AKAImBatman envisions FredFredrickson's Freak list growing at hundreds of links per second, while hackers trace back his IP address and "put him out of business".
Predicted energy expenditure was at least 51% greater during active gaming than during sedentary gaming. This equates to an increase in energy expenditure of 250 kJ (60 kcal) an hour during active gaming compared with sedentary gaming. In a typical week of computer play for these participants, active gaming rather than passive gaming would increase total energy expenditure by less than 2%; although this figure is trivial it might contribute to weight management.
The emphasis is mine. Taken as a whole, here's what the study says:
1. You burn 51% more energy playing the Wii over the XBox 360.
2. If you always played the Wii rather than the 360, you'd increase your caloric burn for a given WEEK by 2%.
The study also says:
[T]he monitor does not detect arm movements well. Energy expenditure may therefore have been underestimated during active gaming, which involves arm movements.
The conclusion?
Activity promoting new generation active computer games significantly increased participants' energy expenditure compared with sedentary games
Now please mod this story -1 WRONG. Thank you, have a nice day.:-)
The Nintendo DS has two ARM cores paired with one 2D/3D accelerator core and one 2D accelerator core. This gives it two separate rendering pipelines with a maximum output of 120,000 triangles per second on the top screen and a touch-sensitive 2D framebuffer on the other. That's not really comparable with a single 200MHz ARM trying to perform OpenGL ES computations.
I've recently benchmarked EP9301 (167MHz) with Nbench, and integer performance rating was 1.8 of Pentium-90.
OpenGL ES supports floating point or fixed point math. Using floating point is going to severely reduce your performance if you don't have a Floating Point Co-Processor. And fixed point math is incredibly inaccurate, leading to a lot of graphical glitches in pre-accelerator games. (And is *still* slower than pure integer computations.)
Now remember Doom-I running on a 33 MHz i386-SX.
Doom was a 2.5D raycaster, not a true 3D engine. Quake is a better comparison. Quake did run on a 90MHz processor, but it also ran in 256 color mode with rather small textures. Model meshes consisted of a handful of polygons wrapped with a single (low-res) texture. Visibility and lighting were pre-calculated using a modified BSP Tree structure that took HOURS to generate.
Android phones lack such a luxury. Graphics will be produced real-time using high-color, high-resolution textures. Scaling, rotation, and lighting are expected to be smooth and responsive. Graphical output should be crisp with little to no blurring. (Poor rendering quality is VERY bad for on-screen text.) In these situations, a 200MHz processor becomes barely adequate. In fact, it still remains to be seen if it will be able to handle the load.
It's possible that the phone manufactures who use the 200MHz chip with no 3D accelerator will keep the graphical effects to a minimum. (Obviously, a non-rotated 2D image with GL_ORTHO is going to be WAY faster to render than a full-3D scene with rotation matrices.) But that would tend to put the phone at a disadvantage in the market. The hardware is powerful enough to demand a higher price, but doesn't appear to be a good value when stacked against other smart phones.
is there any exchange integration currently, or planned?
Google is offering prizes to application developers who come up with cool new Android apps. Sounds like you may have stumbled upon a good candidate for submission. Give Android the best Exchange/Phone integration to date and I bet you'll make a pretty penny off of it.;-)
While open source provides the heart of Android, its brain is a surprisingly modest ARM 9-series processor running at 200MHz.
This ignores the fact that most handset manufacturers will probably include a 3D accelerator to improve graphical performance. Google claims that Android has a "highly optimized 3D software rasterizer", but it remains to be seen if a mere 200MHz processor is capable of sustaining the necessary graphical power to provide a smooth experience.
In any case, it's likely that a 3D Accelerator could save on battery power. Application specific chips tend to be able to do more work with fewer cycles and less silicon. Which means that a phone manufacturer can make the choice of a faster CPU + lower battery life, or a slower CPU + 3D accelerator + higher battery life.
It is not very suprising that this system was ultimately replaced soon after electrical telegraphs had become available.
Actually, it wasn't. The electrical telegraph had a very rocky start. Both France and Britain had optical telegraphs in place and were uninterested in investing in this new "electric" form of telegraph. Especially since those who worked on electric telegraphs were often untrained quacks.
It took a relatively new nation that lacked a telegraph (i.e. the United States) to cause the electric version to catch on. Even there, it took a while before the possibilities were really explored. Once it caught on, though, it caught on like wildfire. Didn't take long for an international telegraph to get setup, and for ticker-tape machines to appear.
For those interested in the topic, I highly recommend the book The Victorian Internet. It is well written, well researched, and tells a fascinating tale of the telegraph development that parallels the development of the Internet. On top of that, it sheds light on how the telegraph affected computer design and the communications protocols we use today. (e.g. ASCII is derived from the telegraph codeset called "Baudot Codes". Named for the inventor, Émile Baudot. He also has a measure of transmission speed named after him called "Baud". As in, a "300 Baud Modem". )
this virtual Stang comes tricked out with a supercomputer that can hack almost any system; a very capable weapons system; and a body--thanks to nanotechnology--that's able to shape-shift and change color at will.
For the love of all things Holy, can we please stop making shows with impossible (or at least highly improbable) technology? KITT was really fun in the 80's, primarily because of a misconception about AI. It was felt at the time by the public (and to a lesser degree by actual AI researchers) that the only thing holding a computer back from sentience was enough computing power. 20+ years of research has since disavowed us of that notion.
Otherwise the original show was reasonably good about keeping the tech on the level. KITT was powered by Gas Turbines (good!), had laser weaponry (okay), was capable of computer graphics (actually, that's almost amusingly primitive at this point), and had an ultra-strong "Molecular Bonded Shell". (Unlikely, but at least within the realm of possibility.)
The show tried doing the "ridiculous tech-thing of the week" when they brought on the April character, but that didn't go over all that well. Eventually they dropped it and got back to showing solutions that didn't involve Deus-Ex Machina plot devices.
While I understand the need for suspending disbelieve, I just can't help but think that it would make a more enjoyable show if they simply tried to ground and enhance what was already presented in the original show. Updated with modern communications technology, satellite data, reconnaissance methods (could you see KITT launching UAVs?:P), eves dropping tech, weapons technology, and computer control, KITT could be pretty damn cool without crossing the line into unbelievable territory. Which would, of course, force the writers to write rather than relying on the gadget of the moment.;-)
No, basic scientific principles told me this. While the Drake Equation is not accepted by all scientists as a valid computation, the Fermi Paradox is still a difficult problem to solve.
We are not so special. There are 10^21 stars out there - there must be many civilizations out there.
To throw an equally unfounded accusation back at you, you're a fan of Carl Sagan, right?
Let me put this in simple terms: The size of the universe is known to be at least 93 billion light years across, and is estimated to be ~13.7 billion years old. In a universe that big and that old, there is a strong chance that any other civilization(s) that may have formed are extremely far apart from one another. So far apart that there is a good chance that the civilization(s) will "miss" each other's existence.
Like it or not, if there was a civilization coexisting in our neck of our galaxy, we'd have some inkling of it already. Unnatural radio transmissions would stand out against the background radiation and give us a sense that another civilization is there. We have been scanning the skies with powerful equipment and so far have come up with little to no evidence of such transmissions.
The long and short of it is that from what we know today, there's an infinitesimal chance that we humans will ever meet another civilization. The best we can hope for is that we find planets that support more basic forms of life.
But you've got to wonder why some other super advanced civilization didn't move some stars around to circle themselves or something and make it really obvious where they lived.
Impracticality? I mean, moving a star takes a tremendous amount of energy. Either that, or a massive gravitational mass that can be moved through more conventional means. (One of the drawbacks of stars is that you can't exactly setup thrusters on the surface of a flaming, gaseous body.) If they were even close to such technology, it would actually be easier to send out explorers than to muck around with the position of stars.
Assuming that such a civilization could even exist. Which is (unfortunately) somewhat doubtful. Everything we know so far suggests that life is exceedingly rare in the universe. Rare enough to make it difficult to find another civilization that used to exist, much less one that you can actually contact. (Don't even get me started on the incredible time scales by which the older civilization would be long dead before we could even see each other.)
In his defense, I did say to myself several times during play "Now THIS is how 3D Sonic should have been done." Which isn't to say that it's all that similar to existing Sonic games, but it does have a feel that would lend itself well to that franchise.:-)
Have you actually played the game you're criticizing? Because if you haven't, then you have no idea how similar/dissimilar Mario is from Sonic. (I've played both, and I can assure you that Mario Galaxy is extremely fresh and new.) Unless you're going to tell me that Sonic involved ghost suits, bee suits, balancing the controller to roll a pinball the right direction, using the boss's own seeking bullets against him, working out patterns of disappearing tiles, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
You can try running most of the games on WiiCade on both the PC and the Wii to see how they compare. I'm sorry to say that the Wii's performance levels are not great, but a well-optimized game is more than playable. Try playing NG Rumble on both the Wii and the PC. You'll notice that its performance on the Wii varies somewhat, while it remains constant on the PC.
On the other hand, you can't exactly have four friends duking it out on the Desktop. (Something which you CAN do on the Wii!) So there are some advantages to games that target the Wii.
The Newgrounds reviews discuss the answer in detail, but I'll repeat it here. Basically, you need to press Left + Up + Camera Change to defeat the level. On a keyboard, that's A + W + 1. On the Wii, it is < + ^ + -.
Sorry, I'm mildly confused. This is what I was thinking about:
http://dzzd.net/demo/QUAKE/
Jake2 is a standalone app.
There also used to be a Quake III based engine over on http://www.jpct.net./ I don't know what ever happened to that.
Shockwave Director == Lame. You might as well make QuakeGL a browser plugin for all that buys you. In any case, Jake2 (Java Applet) preceded Rasterwerks by several years.
There are a lot of good games they didn't mention. Someone already mentioned Portal Flash Edition, and I already mentioned Key to Adventure. A few others are:
NewGrounds Rumble (Wii Version - For that Super Smash Bros. fix while waiting for SSBB.
Fancy Pants Adventures - Kind of like classic Sonic, but with its own appeal.
Unreal Flash - Sort of like Portal Flash Edition. Except that it's an Unreal Shoot'em Up rather than a platform/puzzle game.
Artillery Live - Simple, yet amazingly fun multiplayer take on Scorched Earth.
I see your Nethack and raise you a Netrek.
Hey now. I think this is the first time in history that one of these MyMiniCity links has actually been on topic. Still a bit trollish, but otherwise amusing.
To add a disclaimer to my post, I am associated with WiiCade, so take my post with a grain of salt. That being said, the game really is good. Feel free to check out the NewGrounds reviews (I am NOT associated with them) or just play the game for yourself. :-)
One of the best Flash games released this season is Key to Adventure. It's playable on the PC or Wii over on WiiCade, and currently holds a front-page spot over on NewGrounds. Perhaps even more interesting is the fact that WiiCade sponsored the game, meaning that it's now possible to get paid for creating Flash games for the Wii.
With all the animosity surrounding those stupid links, I don't think joking about MyMiniCity non-anonymously is such a good idea...
*AKAImBatman envisions FredFredrickson's Freak list growing at hundreds of links per second, while hackers trace back his IP address and "put him out of business".
I do. Do you?
1. You burn 51% more energy playing the Wii over the XBox 360.
2. If you always played the Wii rather than the 360, you'd increase your caloric burn for a given WEEK by 2%.
The study also says:
The conclusion?
Now please mod this story -1 WRONG. Thank you, have a nice day.
The Nintendo DS has two ARM cores paired with one 2D/3D accelerator core and one 2D accelerator core. This gives it two separate rendering pipelines with a maximum output of 120,000 triangles per second on the top screen and a touch-sensitive 2D framebuffer on the other. That's not really comparable with a single 200MHz ARM trying to perform OpenGL ES computations.
OpenGL ES supports floating point or fixed point math. Using floating point is going to severely reduce your performance if you don't have a Floating Point Co-Processor. And fixed point math is incredibly inaccurate, leading to a lot of graphical glitches in pre-accelerator games. (And is *still* slower than pure integer computations.)
Doom was a 2.5D raycaster, not a true 3D engine. Quake is a better comparison. Quake did run on a 90MHz processor, but it also ran in 256 color mode with rather small textures. Model meshes consisted of a handful of polygons wrapped with a single (low-res) texture. Visibility and lighting were pre-calculated using a modified BSP Tree structure that took HOURS to generate.
Android phones lack such a luxury. Graphics will be produced real-time using high-color, high-resolution textures. Scaling, rotation, and lighting are expected to be smooth and responsive. Graphical output should be crisp with little to no blurring. (Poor rendering quality is VERY bad for on-screen text.) In these situations, a 200MHz processor becomes barely adequate. In fact, it still remains to be seen if it will be able to handle the load.
It's possible that the phone manufactures who use the 200MHz chip with no 3D accelerator will keep the graphical effects to a minimum. (Obviously, a non-rotated 2D image with GL_ORTHO is going to be WAY faster to render than a full-3D scene with rotation matrices.) But that would tend to put the phone at a disadvantage in the market. The hardware is powerful enough to demand a higher price, but doesn't appear to be a good value when stacked against other smart phones.
Google is offering prizes to application developers who come up with cool new Android apps. Sounds like you may have stumbled upon a good candidate for submission. Give Android the best Exchange/Phone integration to date and I bet you'll make a pretty penny off of it.
This ignores the fact that most handset manufacturers will probably include a 3D accelerator to improve graphical performance. Google claims that Android has a "highly optimized 3D software rasterizer", but it remains to be seen if a mere 200MHz processor is capable of sustaining the necessary graphical power to provide a smooth experience.
In any case, it's likely that a 3D Accelerator could save on battery power. Application specific chips tend to be able to do more work with fewer cycles and less silicon. Which means that a phone manufacturer can make the choice of a faster CPU + lower battery life, or a slower CPU + 3D accelerator + higher battery life.
Actually, it wasn't. The electrical telegraph had a very rocky start. Both France and Britain had optical telegraphs in place and were uninterested in investing in this new "electric" form of telegraph. Especially since those who worked on electric telegraphs were often untrained quacks.
It took a relatively new nation that lacked a telegraph (i.e. the United States) to cause the electric version to catch on. Even there, it took a while before the possibilities were really explored. Once it caught on, though, it caught on like wildfire. Didn't take long for an international telegraph to get setup, and for ticker-tape machines to appear.
For those interested in the topic, I highly recommend the book The Victorian Internet. It is well written, well researched, and tells a fascinating tale of the telegraph development that parallels the development of the Internet. On top of that, it sheds light on how the telegraph affected computer design and the communications protocols we use today. (e.g. ASCII is derived from the telegraph codeset called "Baudot Codes". Named for the inventor, Émile Baudot. He also has a measure of transmission speed named after him called "Baud". As in, a "300 Baud Modem". )
It's Javascript running in the web browser. I'd recognize it anywhere. Try typing "alert('Hello World!');" and check out the output.
For the love of all things Holy, can we please stop making shows with impossible (or at least highly improbable) technology? KITT was really fun in the 80's, primarily because of a misconception about AI. It was felt at the time by the public (and to a lesser degree by actual AI researchers) that the only thing holding a computer back from sentience was enough computing power. 20+ years of research has since disavowed us of that notion.
Otherwise the original show was reasonably good about keeping the tech on the level. KITT was powered by Gas Turbines (good!), had laser weaponry (okay), was capable of computer graphics (actually, that's almost amusingly primitive at this point), and had an ultra-strong "Molecular Bonded Shell". (Unlikely, but at least within the realm of possibility.)
The show tried doing the "ridiculous tech-thing of the week" when they brought on the April character, but that didn't go over all that well. Eventually they dropped it and got back to showing solutions that didn't involve Deus-Ex Machina plot devices.
While I understand the need for suspending disbelieve, I just can't help but think that it would make a more enjoyable show if they simply tried to ground and enhance what was already presented in the original show. Updated with modern communications technology, satellite data, reconnaissance methods (could you see KITT launching UAVs?
No, basic scientific principles told me this. While the Drake Equation is not accepted by all scientists as a valid computation, the Fermi Paradox is still a difficult problem to solve.
To throw an equally unfounded accusation back at you, you're a fan of Carl Sagan, right?
Let me put this in simple terms: The size of the universe is known to be at least 93 billion light years across, and is estimated to be ~13.7 billion years old. In a universe that big and that old, there is a strong chance that any other civilization(s) that may have formed are extremely far apart from one another. So far apart that there is a good chance that the civilization(s) will "miss" each other's existence.
Like it or not, if there was a civilization coexisting in our neck of our galaxy, we'd have some inkling of it already. Unnatural radio transmissions would stand out against the background radiation and give us a sense that another civilization is there. We have been scanning the skies with powerful equipment and so far have come up with little to no evidence of such transmissions.
The long and short of it is that from what we know today, there's an infinitesimal chance that we humans will ever meet another civilization. The best we can hope for is that we find planets that support more basic forms of life.
Impracticality? I mean, moving a star takes a tremendous amount of energy. Either that, or a massive gravitational mass that can be moved through more conventional means. (One of the drawbacks of stars is that you can't exactly setup thrusters on the surface of a flaming, gaseous body.) If they were even close to such technology, it would actually be easier to send out explorers than to muck around with the position of stars.
Assuming that such a civilization could even exist. Which is (unfortunately) somewhat doubtful. Everything we know so far suggests that life is exceedingly rare in the universe. Rare enough to make it difficult to find another civilization that used to exist, much less one that you can actually contact. (Don't even get me started on the incredible time scales by which the older civilization would be long dead before we could even see each other.)
Wow, there's just so much wrong with that statement.
1. There is absolutely no version of Linux that runs on the Wii at the moment.
2. The Webgames run on a stock Wii with the Opera Internet Channel. Available for 500 points (aka $5) from the Wii Shop Channel.
3. There are very few "open source" web games for the Wii. In fact, Deimos Lander is the only one I'm aware of.
The Iranians posing as insurgents are already doing a bang-up job.
In his defense, I did say to myself several times during play "Now THIS is how 3D Sonic should have been done." Which isn't to say that it's all that similar to existing Sonic games, but it does have a feel that would lend itself well to that franchise. :-)
Have you actually played the game you're criticizing? Because if you haven't, then you have no idea how similar/dissimilar Mario is from Sonic. (I've played both, and I can assure you that Mario Galaxy is extremely fresh and new.) Unless you're going to tell me that Sonic involved ghost suits, bee suits, balancing the controller to roll a pinball the right direction, using the boss's own seeking bullets against him, working out patterns of disappearing tiles, etc.
Actually, the 101st is being recalled. Much of it will now be available for reassignment.
</pedantic>
http://www.reuters.com/article/politicsNews/idUSL2469631420071124