You are missing the point. People want to joing a GLBT-friendly guild so they can play with people who won't spend their time gay-bashing. It is not about sex. It is about having an environment in which I can have an enjoyable experience.
Nothing takes me out of the game like having some player run by me yelling "fag" or "gay" in a negative way. If I can't join a guild where I can avoid this, what is the point of playing. If I am going to play alone, then I'll just go get out my copy of Neverwinter Nights and cancel my WoW membership.
I have a book at home called "Practical Electrical Illumination", written in the early 20th century (1906 or so IIRC). The whole book is based on the hypothosis that there is an Aether. I'd not made the connection between dark matter/energy and the Aether. Good to know we "got it right" so early on! It is a fun read just to see how we will twist and create what we need to explain the world at large.
Conincidently it sits on the shelf next to my copy of "The Descent of Man". Good to know at least one of those book might be considered correct by the Kansas School Board. Guess which one...
As for shielding against gravitons, I guess that depends on whether or not the graviton is behaving as a particle or a wave...
Having worked for Electronic Arts on a next-gen title, I don't think HD will play a large role for this generation of consoles, especially during the first 3-5 years. The Xbox 360 Devkit, which was a PowerMac G5 with the M$ dev software installed, touted a lot of power, but our game brought it to its electronic knees.
Consider textures. There is a lot of talk about dynamic lighting for next-gen consoles. Say you want to use normal maps. Now you go from one texture map to 3 or 4 (the base texture map, the normal map, possibly a specular map, and maybe a depth map). That will result in a 3-4X increase in texture space. And that is not even considering that you would probably want to up-rez the textures. Heck, you would need to up-rez to support HD. So you double the resolution. You now have a 4X increase in the size of each texture. Not looking good.
There are things that can be done to save some of this space, such as folding different texture types into one texture by being cleaver with how you use the RGBA channels. Still, it will be on average a 4-6X increase in overall texture space. Processor speed and memory aside, how to you pull that data in from disk fast enough? Your code it going to have to get really smart to do the kinds of predictive loading/unloading it needs to do to get those textures where they need to be at exactly the right time (otherwise you quickly run out of texture memory).
From just this simple example concerning one area of game production, the problems caused by HD are many. You also have to render more screen space at higher densities. HD is just flat out computationally expensive. It is expensive for the productions since artwork has to be developed to support HD resolutions. That impacts production pipelines because the datasize has increased. It just keeps going. How many developers do you think will flock to HD when the problems it causes are large and the financial gains are small?
And that is the rub. It is going to take developers 2-4 years just to get down the basics of making next-gen games. Until then, you are going to see a lot of ports. That is exactly what I was working on. Taking an existing game, art content and all, and porting it to Xbox 360. We worked to up-rez textures. We had to change completely how characters got modeled because we wanted lots of photo real char stuff that doesn't mesh well with current methods for modeling. Games involve lots of "cheats" in both tech and art. Many of those "cheats" are incompatible with next-gen content creation.
So Nintendo made the right choice. While Sony (who none of us should be considering buying from) and Microsoft (ditto) chase after the bleeding edge of tech, Nintendo will trail a short way behind making games the other 90% of the world might enjoy. I love my WoW as much as the next geek, but that experience does not minimize what Nintendo continues to do for the gaming world. It brings in new customers. That can only be good for all of us.
Slashdot Mirror
You are missing the point. People want to joing a GLBT-friendly guild so they can play with people who won't spend their time gay-bashing. It is not about sex. It is about having an environment in which I can have an enjoyable experience.
Nothing takes me out of the game like having some player run by me yelling "fag" or "gay" in a negative way. If I can't join a guild where I can avoid this, what is the point of playing. If I am going to play alone, then I'll just go get out my copy of Neverwinter Nights and cancel my WoW membership.
Oh wait, that is what I am doing.
I have a book at home called "Practical Electrical Illumination", written in the early 20th century (1906 or so IIRC). The whole book is based on the hypothosis that there is an Aether. I'd not made the connection between dark matter/energy and the Aether. Good to know we "got it right" so early on! It is a fun read just to see how we will twist and create what we need to explain the world at large.
Conincidently it sits on the shelf next to my copy of "The Descent of Man". Good to know at least one of those book might be considered correct by the Kansas School Board. Guess which one...
As for shielding against gravitons, I guess that depends on whether or not the graviton is behaving as a particle or a wave...
Having worked for Electronic Arts on a next-gen title, I don't think HD will play a large role for this generation of consoles, especially during the first 3-5 years. The Xbox 360 Devkit, which was a PowerMac G5 with the M$ dev software installed, touted a lot of power, but our game brought it to its electronic knees.
Consider textures. There is a lot of talk about dynamic lighting for next-gen consoles. Say you want to use normal maps. Now you go from one texture map to 3 or 4 (the base texture map, the normal map, possibly a specular map, and maybe a depth map). That will result in a 3-4X increase in texture space. And that is not even considering that you would probably want to up-rez the textures. Heck, you would need to up-rez to support HD. So you double the resolution. You now have a 4X increase in the size of each texture. Not looking good.
There are things that can be done to save some of this space, such as folding different texture types into one texture by being cleaver with how you use the RGBA channels. Still, it will be on average a 4-6X increase in overall texture space. Processor speed and memory aside, how to you pull that data in from disk fast enough? Your code it going to have to get really smart to do the kinds of predictive loading/unloading it needs to do to get those textures where they need to be at exactly the right time (otherwise you quickly run out of texture memory).
From just this simple example concerning one area of game production, the problems caused by HD are many. You also have to render more screen space at higher densities. HD is just flat out computationally expensive. It is expensive for the productions since artwork has to be developed to support HD resolutions. That impacts production pipelines because the datasize has increased. It just keeps going. How many developers do you think will flock to HD when the problems it causes are large and the financial gains are small?
And that is the rub. It is going to take developers 2-4 years just to get down the basics of making next-gen games. Until then, you are going to see a lot of ports. That is exactly what I was working on. Taking an existing game, art content and all, and porting it to Xbox 360. We worked to up-rez textures. We had to change completely how characters got modeled because we wanted lots of photo real char stuff that doesn't mesh well with current methods for modeling. Games involve lots of "cheats" in both tech and art. Many of those "cheats" are incompatible with next-gen content creation.
So Nintendo made the right choice. While Sony (who none of us should be considering buying from) and Microsoft (ditto) chase after the bleeding edge of tech, Nintendo will trail a short way behind making games the other 90% of the world might enjoy. I love my WoW as much as the next geek, but that experience does not minimize what Nintendo continues to do for the gaming world. It brings in new customers. That can only be good for all of us.
--kev