No, it probably won't... Marvin's death wouldn't make any sense without a significant amount of story to establish how many times the poor guy has to live through the entire life of the Universe.
Really, the resilience of those diodes down his left side which were never replaced is quite impressive. Perhaps the manufacturers could put a sticker on the box saying
'Guarenteed to last thirty-seven times longer than the Universe itself'
And of course the special effects will be better than the BBC version's were. That was made in 1981, after all, and on about the same budget that Doctor Who had at the time, so it's not exactly unexpected is it?
The DVD release of it is, of course, wonderful, because the TV series' animated sequences still stand out as some of the best I've ever seen. Hand-drawn too. I hope they preserve that look for the film, although no doubt these days it'd be done on a computer.
Music will be critical for the atmosphere too. Fingers crossed...
Copying DVDs without DeCSS is possible, yes... copying them into other formats is a lot easier with DeCSS though. And that's all the MPAA see:-(
Yahoo could pull something with the DMCA, but hopefully it would be shot down in court. Interoperability is essential! Although if everyone thought that, Microsoft would have open file formats.
Because, as I understand it, CSS is a device intended to restrict access to copyrighted material. DeCSS gives unrestricted access to said material, and so counts as a 'circumvention device', allowing you to make DivXs or whatever of the original and distribute them illegally.
Or just watch them in Linux, but then that's not important at all is it.
If p2p file sharing does reach the kind of proportions which is capable of putting the record companies out of business (or into serious trouble), there will be a very rocky period, but then we might actually see a new kind of music distribution... one where the artists get rewarded properly for their work.
Shock! horror!
I can see the RIAA quaking in their boots at the very thought.
I'm rather tempted to send them some empty banana skins or something, just for the looks on their faces... but I'd hate to subject the postal services to the smell of rotting banana skins by the time they made their way over the atlantic (by boat, of course).
Then again, there's a small SCO office not far from where I live in England...
I think what was meant is something like KDE's dialogue to configure the colours of the current widget theme, not from program code. GTK/GNOME don't have one of these yet (which is a shame).
Yeah, that lack of NPC models affects all Bioware games though. I guess it's just not worth developing them!
Although Neverwinter Nights has a rather startlingly large number of them, they still get repeated, and so do the character portraits. They really should make a game where it's impossible to select one of the NPC character portraits as your own.
Beginning to get rather annoyed with people getting upset about now PS2 ports for things. Wake up and smell the coffee - it's outdated hardware! Someone get them a PC!
...although I suppose after a moment's thought it's not really that odd, because IVF is all over the world and used every day.
But from my perspective it seems to be. My mother works at Bourn Hall Clinic in England, which is one of the locations involved in the original development of IVF and the birth of the first test-tube baby. To celebrate the 25 years thing, they're having a big party (tomorrow) where lots of IVF children and their families are coming back to the clinic to... well, not sure what really. Irritate those of us foolish enough to volunteer to help with the car parking, I'm sure.
So it's big news, but from my perspective, so caught up in Mum's accounts of their preparations for the party, it's hard to remember this is a world-wrapping thing. And it's marvellous really. Tomorrow there'll be about three thousand people there who are either IVF-conceived, or the parents of an IVF child, or some other relative, or one of the people responsible for bringing it about. It could be very impressive.
The only thing that bothers me is where we're going to tell them to park their cars.
Surplus IVF embryos provide a legal source of stem cells for research in the UK... being historically Protestant and increasingly unspecifically-religious-or-not-depending-on-who-y ou-talk-to, I'm not sure that it bothers as as much.
That's in a very general way of course. There are always individuals who don't like it.
Maybe, but they would also make themselves very vulnerable to any other race outside their conversion field who happened to get hold of a lot of disposable matter and chuck it through their galaxy. Might take a while, but you could annihilate every significant installation if you wanted to. If you assume that one race develops the technology to perform such an anti-matter conversion, it seems reasonable that some other race would be able to develop the technology to use stars as projectile weaponry.
One condition for the possible existance of an anti-matter galaxy in a region of matter galaxies: some crackpot alien race built the thing.
I have no idea why they might want to, and very little conception of where they'd get the energy to do it, but these silly thoughts occur to me sometimes.
Doom 3 engine will be very successful. Some very impressive technical achievements in there.
Source engine (Half-Life 2) will also be very successful. Interesting how what is essentially a fork of an old Quake engine can end up looking so good next to the development of the original branch.
From what I've seen of both of them, there's no much to choose between them, they each have strengths in differing areas. Doom 3 will probably win on pure graphical fidelty, it's absolutely jaw-dropping - all that work on rendering pathways does show. Source, however, looks like it might win on the game environments, the materials system and physics engine look fantastic. And that facial expression/lipsync thing.
So of course what we really want is an engine that does all these things in one product. And a supercomputer to run it on.
One thing is for sure though - Unreal Warfare engine really doesn't look good by comparison. Unless of course it's just suffering from a lack of games which use it properly. It will be interesting to see how Deus Ex 2: Invisible War stacks up on that engine, with a better physics engine, interesting AI code and that new sound propogation model, because without enhancements like that, Unreal doesn't stand a chance.
Most of the time I take the opinion that RMS has some good ideas but is too uncompromising with them. However, it would seem in this case he was right. If the BK people are willing to do that kind of thing, then people should definitely be looking at making a Free replacement which can do everything BK can, preferably being able to at least import from BK repositories without information loss to enable the kernel maintainers to switch over easily.
Although this would only be a problem if someone did try and replace BK with something BK-compatible... no reason for them to do it if they don't feel commercially threatened. But then I suppose having the Linux kernel use BK is a bit kudo to them, so they'd want to keep it.
I don't think Linus would stand for much of that though, somehow.
Subject line says it all really. I suppose recreational programming doesn't count does it? I suppose I'll stop doing that soon enough when I've been programming all day at work for a week.
Formal specification helps you avoid that kind of thing in the first place though... if you do your spec right that is! It's still down to the programmer in the end, even an insanely high-level language like Haskell can't protect you from everything (even out-of-bounds errors, you can still try and request element 50 from a 20-element list if you like, and it's not going to like it).
So although they can be very useful, you have to do the spec right in the first place. Which can be easier than getting it right in something like C first, because Z uses pretty much mathematical notation and is thus more ameanable to use in proofs and verification, and also expresses only what you're doing, not how you're doing it, which stuff gets impossibly bogged down with in something like C or Perl or whatever.
Then of course if you have an automatic Z-to-implementation-language generator (I know a B-to-Ada one exists, they used it on some mass transit project in Paris I think and it rocked) you've got a very good chance of the actual functionality of the program working properly, and just need to add the UI etc. That's worth it - just not for every program you ever write.
Intel also got their paws on Enter the Matrix, there are various points in the game with big Pentium 4 advert posters in (such as the airport). Thankfully they left out that irritating tune.
Yes, it is, unless you use focus properly... then accuracy goes way up and you get to kill lots of things very quickly. Although aiming the sniper rifle is a bit of a nightmare.
Driving is worse
I've only done one driving level where I had to drive so far, as I'm playing through as Ghost so he's normally doing the shooting. But the car handled like a hovercraft or something stupid like that. Not a patch on the fighting levels.
The acting is crap, the dialogue stilted, the camera work boring
Has your copy got the same video in it that mine has? Also, go back and check the first film... outside the fight scenes, is there anything absolutely amazing about the acting, camerawork and dialogue? No!
The special effects are non-existant
Have you used focus mode at all? Valid point about departing via hardline though, I'm surprised they didn't do it more like the films.
Crap DX7 graphics
And everyone has a DX9-era card, sure...
Clipping and texturing problems all over the show
This is the worst thing I have to say about the game... the character models show clipping problems quite frequently, and it can be very irritating.
Shadows also buggy
They're... odd...
Low poly count
I'm quite grateful for this, it keeps it running fast. Not that I've really noticed... sure it's nothing compared to Doom 3, but then my computer couldn't run Doom 3 without melting.
crappy camera "AI"
Very irritating at times. Have I ever met a 3D non-FPS game which didn't have this problem though? No, I don't think I have.
Having said all that, as in one of my other comments around, I am really quite happy with the game, and provided some things get fixed with patches (soon, please, especially the clipping problems) I'll stay happy. Yes, the game does appear to have been rushed to get it out with the franchise - which was a mistake. Another fortnight could have made quite a difference to the overall finish.
It's got spoilers in it in a way, as the plot intermingles with that of the movie, so you get some kind of general idea of some of the plot... but not all of it, and the game is clearly meant as an addendum to the movie, because the primary plot feels very much like it's wrapped round something that's missing. That would, of course, be the movie's plot, so I'm glad I've booked tickets for the 21st so I can see it as soon as possible.
So you may wish to wait until you get to see the movie.
I have no idea what version I have as I just installed whatever's on the retail disk in the UK, and it only came yesterday. My impressions:
Upsides: The running/fighting levels inside the Matrix are great fun so far, there is little more satisfying in a game I've played recently than taking down five or six SWAT troopers armed with MP5s without breaking a sweat or losing more than 3% health.
Health recharges, so you don't spend all week hunting for health packs. Fits in with the Matrix too - after all, you're as healthy as you think you are, right? Of course, they turn this off at critical moments...
Graphics are generally good, focus mode looks great.
Downsides:
Where the graphics aren't good, it looks like Z-buffering errors. I'm hoping the new patch will resolve these, as they're the only real detriment to the game's quality. Shadows look dreadful at the moment, it's like when you have two surfaces in precisely the same place in POV-Ray.
The first level (the only one I've played as both Ghost and Niobe so far) sees the same role for both characters. Sure, the routes are ever so slightly different, but why couldn't we get to play both sides of this mission? I was under the impression that was the point of having both characters. They'd better make sure they do that properly later.
4.3GB of disk space??????
Why doesn't it come on a DVD?
And can we please have a training construct?
The sound glitches from time to time. Popping noises etc, then some of the cinematics in-game go silent, so I have to have subtitles on to avoid missing anything. Restarting the game solves it, but it shouldn't happen.
Oh, and you can't change any settings except control settings without dropping out to the main menu or to Windows. Thus finding the right gamma setting was a very tedious business.
For reference, I'm running it on an AMD Athlon XP 2100+, under Windows XP Professional without SP1 (too lazy). 512MB RAM, GeForce3 Ti200 with 64MB of memory, made by Creative, using fairly old drivers (the early 4x series caused hang on boot, must check the new ones out).
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No, it probably won't... Marvin's death wouldn't make any sense without a significant amount of story to establish how many times the poor guy has to live through the entire life of the Universe.
Really, the resilience of those diodes down his left side which were never replaced is quite impressive. Perhaps the manufacturers could put a sticker on the box saying
'Guarenteed to last thirty-seven times longer than the Universe itself'
Douglas did of course write a few Doctor Who stories as well, although I have to admit I haven't seen any of them.
* mentally urges the BBC to release more Doctor Who DVDs *
If this isn't yet another false hope...
WAHOOOOOOO
And of course the special effects will be better than the BBC version's were. That was made in 1981, after all, and on about the same budget that Doctor Who had at the time, so it's not exactly unexpected is it?
The DVD release of it is, of course, wonderful, because the TV series' animated sequences still stand out as some of the best I've ever seen. Hand-drawn too. I hope they preserve that look for the film, although no doubt these days it'd be done on a computer.
Music will be critical for the atmosphere too. Fingers crossed...
Copying DVDs without DeCSS is possible, yes... copying them into other formats is a lot easier with DeCSS though. And that's all the MPAA see :-(
Yahoo could pull something with the DMCA, but hopefully it would be shot down in court. Interoperability is essential! Although if everyone thought that, Microsoft would have open file formats.
Because, as I understand it, CSS is a device intended to restrict access to copyrighted material. DeCSS gives unrestricted access to said material, and so counts as a 'circumvention device', allowing you to make DivXs or whatever of the original and distribute them illegally.
Or just watch them in Linux, but then that's not important at all is it.
If p2p file sharing does reach the kind of proportions which is capable of putting the record companies out of business (or into serious trouble), there will be a very rocky period, but then we might actually see a new kind of music distribution... one where the artists get rewarded properly for their work.
Shock! horror!
I can see the RIAA quaking in their boots at the very thought.
I'm rather tempted to send them some empty banana skins or something, just for the looks on their faces... but I'd hate to subject the postal services to the smell of rotting banana skins by the time they made their way over the atlantic (by boat, of course).
Then again, there's a small SCO office not far from where I live in England...
I think what was meant is something like KDE's dialogue to configure the colours of the current widget theme, not from program code. GTK/GNOME don't have one of these yet (which is a shame).
Yeah, that lack of NPC models affects all Bioware games though. I guess it's just not worth developing them!
Although Neverwinter Nights has a rather startlingly large number of them, they still get repeated, and so do the character portraits. They really should make a game where it's impossible to select one of the NPC character portraits as your own.
Beginning to get rather annoyed with people getting upset about now PS2 ports for things. Wake up and smell the coffee - it's outdated hardware! Someone get them a PC!
You know, I was thinking of that as I hit 'submit'...
What I should have said was 'Not that I need more than 600K _at the moment_' as I'm sure I'll need more later!
Excellent!
Not that I need more than 600K, but it's nice to know that it's available if you want it!
You can? Who from?
600K/128K here and the same!! Can only go up to 1megabit in the UK.
Eight megabits!!! Why does anyone need eight megabits?
...although I suppose after a moment's thought it's not really that odd, because IVF is all over the world and used every day.
But from my perspective it seems to be. My mother works at Bourn Hall Clinic in England, which is one of the locations involved in the original development of IVF and the birth of the first test-tube baby. To celebrate the 25 years thing, they're having a big party (tomorrow) where lots of IVF children and their families are coming back to the clinic to... well, not sure what really. Irritate those of us foolish enough to volunteer to help with the car parking, I'm sure.
So it's big news, but from my perspective, so caught up in Mum's accounts of their preparations for the party, it's hard to remember this is a world-wrapping thing. And it's marvellous really. Tomorrow there'll be about three thousand people there who are either IVF-conceived, or the parents of an IVF child, or some other relative, or one of the people responsible for bringing it about. It could be very impressive.
The only thing that bothers me is where we're going to tell them to park their cars.
Surplus IVF embryos provide a legal source of stem cells for research in the UK... being historically Protestant and increasingly unspecifically-religious-or-not-depending-on-who-y ou-talk-to, I'm not sure that it bothers as as much.
That's in a very general way of course. There are always individuals who don't like it.
Maybe, but they would also make themselves very vulnerable to any other race outside their conversion field who happened to get hold of a lot of disposable matter and chuck it through their galaxy. Might take a while, but you could annihilate every significant installation if you wanted to. If you assume that one race develops the technology to perform such an anti-matter conversion, it seems reasonable that some other race would be able to develop the technology to use stars as projectile weaponry.
One condition for the possible existance of an anti-matter galaxy in a region of matter galaxies: some crackpot alien race built the thing.
I have no idea why they might want to, and very little conception of where they'd get the energy to do it, but these silly thoughts occur to me sometimes.
Doom 3 engine will be very successful. Some very impressive technical achievements in there.
Source engine (Half-Life 2) will also be very successful. Interesting how what is essentially a fork of an old Quake engine can end up looking so good next to the development of the original branch.
From what I've seen of both of them, there's no much to choose between them, they each have strengths in differing areas. Doom 3 will probably win on pure graphical fidelty, it's absolutely jaw-dropping - all that work on rendering pathways does show. Source, however, looks like it might win on the game environments, the materials system and physics engine look fantastic. And that facial expression/lipsync thing.
So of course what we really want is an engine that does all these things in one product. And a supercomputer to run it on.
One thing is for sure though - Unreal Warfare engine really doesn't look good by comparison. Unless of course it's just suffering from a lack of games which use it properly. It will be interesting to see how Deus Ex 2: Invisible War stacks up on that engine, with a better physics engine, interesting AI code and that new sound propogation model, because without enhancements like that, Unreal doesn't stand a chance.
Most of the time I take the opinion that RMS has some good ideas but is too uncompromising with them. However, it would seem in this case he was right. If the BK people are willing to do that kind of thing, then people should definitely be looking at making a Free replacement which can do everything BK can, preferably being able to at least import from BK repositories without information loss to enable the kernel maintainers to switch over easily.
Although this would only be a problem if someone did try and replace BK with something BK-compatible... no reason for them to do it if they don't feel commercially threatened. But then I suppose having the Linux kernel use BK is a bit kudo to them, so they'd want to keep it.
I don't think Linus would stand for much of that though, somehow.
Subject line says it all really. I suppose recreational programming doesn't count does it? I suppose I'll stop doing that soon enough when I've been programming all day at work for a week.
Formal specification helps you avoid that kind of thing in the first place though... if you do your spec right that is! It's still down to the programmer in the end, even an insanely high-level language like Haskell can't protect you from everything (even out-of-bounds errors, you can still try and request element 50 from a 20-element list if you like, and it's not going to like it).
So although they can be very useful, you have to do the spec right in the first place. Which can be easier than getting it right in something like C first, because Z uses pretty much mathematical notation and is thus more ameanable to use in proofs and verification, and also expresses only what you're doing, not how you're doing it, which stuff gets impossibly bogged down with in something like C or Perl or whatever.
Then of course if you have an automatic Z-to-implementation-language generator (I know a B-to-Ada one exists, they used it on some mass transit project in Paris I think and it rocked) you've got a very good chance of the actual functionality of the program working properly, and just need to add the UI etc. That's worth it - just not for every program you ever write.
Intel also got their paws on Enter the Matrix, there are various points in the game with big Pentium 4 advert posters in (such as the airport). Thankfully they left out that irritating tune.
Yes, it is, unless you use focus properly... then accuracy goes way up and you get to kill lots of things very quickly. Although aiming the sniper rifle is a bit of a nightmare.
Driving is worse
I've only done one driving level where I had to drive so far, as I'm playing through as Ghost so he's normally doing the shooting. But the car handled like a hovercraft or something stupid like that. Not a patch on the fighting levels.
The acting is crap, the dialogue stilted, the camera work boring
Has your copy got the same video in it that mine has? Also, go back and check the first film... outside the fight scenes, is there anything absolutely amazing about the acting, camerawork and dialogue? No!
The special effects are non-existant
Have you used focus mode at all? Valid point about departing via hardline though, I'm surprised they didn't do it more like the films.
Crap DX7 graphics
And everyone has a DX9-era card, sure...
Clipping and texturing problems all over the show
This is the worst thing I have to say about the game... the character models show clipping problems quite frequently, and it can be very irritating.
Shadows also buggy
They're... odd...
Low poly count
I'm quite grateful for this, it keeps it running fast. Not that I've really noticed... sure it's nothing compared to Doom 3, but then my computer couldn't run Doom 3 without melting.
crappy camera "AI"
Very irritating at times. Have I ever met a 3D non-FPS game which didn't have this problem though? No, I don't think I have.
Having said all that, as in one of my other comments around, I am really quite happy with the game, and provided some things get fixed with patches (soon, please, especially the clipping problems) I'll stay happy. Yes, the game does appear to have been rushed to get it out with the franchise - which was a mistake. Another fortnight could have made quite a difference to the overall finish.
It's got spoilers in it in a way, as the plot intermingles with that of the movie, so you get some kind of general idea of some of the plot... but not all of it, and the game is clearly meant as an addendum to the movie, because the primary plot feels very much like it's wrapped round something that's missing. That would, of course, be the movie's plot, so I'm glad I've booked tickets for the 21st so I can see it as soon as possible.
So you may wish to wait until you get to see the movie.
I have no idea what version I have as I just installed whatever's on the retail disk in the UK, and it only came yesterday. My impressions:
Upsides:
The running/fighting levels inside the Matrix are great fun so far, there is little more satisfying in a game I've played recently than taking down five or six SWAT troopers armed with MP5s without breaking a sweat or losing more than 3% health.
Health recharges, so you don't spend all week hunting for health packs. Fits in with the Matrix too - after all, you're as healthy as you think you are, right? Of course, they turn this off at critical moments...
Graphics are generally good, focus mode looks great.
Downsides:
Where the graphics aren't good, it looks like Z-buffering errors. I'm hoping the new patch will resolve these, as they're the only real detriment to the game's quality. Shadows look dreadful at the moment, it's like when you have two surfaces in precisely the same place in POV-Ray.
The first level (the only one I've played as both Ghost and Niobe so far) sees the same role for both characters. Sure, the routes are ever so slightly different, but why couldn't we get to play both sides of this mission? I was under the impression that was the point of having both characters. They'd better make sure they do that properly later.
4.3GB of disk space??????
Why doesn't it come on a DVD?
And can we please have a training construct?
The sound glitches from time to time. Popping noises etc, then some of the cinematics in-game go silent, so I have to have subtitles on to avoid missing anything. Restarting the game solves it, but it shouldn't happen.
Oh, and you can't change any settings except control settings without dropping out to the main menu or to Windows. Thus finding the right gamma setting was a very tedious business.
For reference, I'm running it on an AMD Athlon XP 2100+, under Windows XP Professional without SP1 (too lazy). 512MB RAM, GeForce3 Ti200 with 64MB of memory, made by Creative, using fairly old drivers (the early 4x series caused hang on boot, must check the new ones out).