Okay, I'll believe you that far. Now, I'm a college undergrad sitting in a dorm suite with about 5 20-something people in it.
We have every game console known to man, including GameCube and Xbox. We've really been playing Xbox for the most part of the past week, even though we got both systems at about the same time. The 3 games we got (Luigi's Mansion, WR:BS, and Rogue Leader) just haven't been able to catch our attention as well as DOA3 and Halo.
I'm an avid gamer and have been forever, so I know what good games feel like, and most of the games I've played (as well as my suitemates) in the past week just seem to say that at the moment, Xbox has the better games.
When Super Smash Brothers comes out, that'll probably change:)
Yes, this is entirely true. However, having worked on Xbox, I know for a fact that developers use such an API call to lock the amount of time spent drawing scenes.
Of course, as you said, it's up to the developer to do this. But then again, MS has specific constraints about framerates of games (as does Sony and Nintendo). Basically, if you can't guarantee your game will run at 60fps all the way through, then you'll have to run at 30. This is so that players do not gripe about visual quality due to framerate (because when it's locked, it's always the same).
Most people would want to overclock a system for higher framerates, but it's pointless on Xbox, because the framerate is tied to the refresh rate of the display. This is why you will get a constant 60 or 30 frames per second on most games, rather than massively varying framerates like in PC games.
The reason to lock the framerate is that this frees up processing time for other threads in your application to do things like physics simulation, collision detection, etc.
Okay, this is just sad...
on
XBox Released
·
· Score: 2
In reference to the "green screen of death" linked to in the article, since *when* is a simple error message the same as the machine dieing?
Here, try this: place a single jpeg file in your home directory. Do `chmod +x file.jpg` Now do./file.jpg
Doesn't work? Oh, too bad. Well guess what? It's the *SAME THING HERE*.
Get a clue, Michael. Just because someone doesn't use plain text on a console terminal to show error messages doesn't mean that the machine has crashed.
It was reported last year that someone ported MAME to the Xbox. Unfortunately, since it is not an approved Microsoft title of any sort, it will never be made available for general use.
[Yes this is a duplicate post, I hit the wrong link when replying last time]
It was reported last year that someone ported MAME to the Xbox. Unfortunately, since it is not an approved Microsoft title of any sort, it will never be made available for general use.
I am not talking about the screenshot linked to in the Slashdot article. I am talking about the screenshot pointed to by the comment that is the parent of mine above (#2466971).
This is not a green screen of death. Heck, imagine running an executable from the commandline of a linux box:
chmod +x textfile.txt
./textfile.txt
You'll get an error that the format was unknown.
This is the same deal. Someone tried to load an xbox executable with a bad format. It was likely that the executable was compiled with a different Xbox Development Kit version than the previously loaded executable.
If the Xbox really did crash, what would happen is that the framebuffer would lock up and you would see the same screen forever.
Man, I don't know what you do to your drives, but my IBM's have never failed. I own four Deskstars that are all put to use in my server. I've never really had a problem with them, except for maybe losing some partition information once.
When I bought my first Deskstar, they were the best performers out there. And even though they come at a slight premium with respect to other drives, I won't buy anything but a Deskstar any more because they have never failed on me, whereas I've had a Maxtor that totally crapped out on me once.
Anyway, I just think you ran into some bad luck with these drives. They are really top quality in my opinion.
There's a model called the PSOne. It is, in all due respect, a portable Playstation. Sony is even releasing a small LCD screen with speakers that attaches onto the PSOne, so you can actually play on the go. You can see the thing here.
Buy a Ferrari! Seriously, my friend was having some bad times at work, and was thinking about leaving. His bosses convinced him to stay, but he still hated it - especially his commute. So he asked himself, "What can I do to make my commute more enjoyable?" and voila... he bought a nice car:)
Local weirdness is determined by the developers, not the manufacturer. Granted, the manufacturer is the one that approves titles to be released. However, it is ironic that a manufacturer should nix any title (because it just means more royalties - remember, the loss of the console itself is made up on software royalties).
Therefore, it makes perfect sense for Microsoft (and therefore Sony and Nintendo) to approve many 3rd party titles for release. Nintendo was pretty stuck up in the N64 days, taking the opinion that 3rd party support wasn't necessary to win against Sony and SEGA. Unfortunately, while their content was certainly good, it wasn't enough.
So, do I know if Microsoft will focus on American games? No.. but I don't think it's in their best interests to do so.
Well, if you've been keeping up on real gaming news (and I mean real gaming sites - not this Slashdot category BS), then you'd know that they are not going to release Halo simultaneously on Mac/PC/Xbox. It will be Xbox exclusive for a while, and the Mac/PC ports are planned at the moment (and being worked on, which I was told by a friend at Bungie).
Man, this guy has guts. On the other hand, you could call him a PHB too. From an administrative perspective, there's soooo many problems that are going to crop up, they may totally take away any usefulness of this project.
And it's not just going to be the random "I can't open my lab report" type of problem. It's going to be the "I dropped my laptop on the way to school, and it fell apart" type of problem. All of the state.
I'd hate to be the support staff for any school district up in Maine...
It's actually quite a serious thing to plug a company owned by your own parent corporation, without giving explicit notice of that fact, or making the plug an advertisement.
But this is Slashdot, where none of that applies...
Now, where does PS2 or Xbox come into play here about changing your graphics pipeline? I'm curious...
Of course, you have to change the API you're using. And in general, there are a few fundamental differences between OGL and D3D. However, I think that these are not *too* difficult for an experienced game engine coder(s) to work around.
Personally, I find D3D easier to understand (mainly because OGL's built-in matrix stack had me confused for a good while... who knows exactly why).
Could we please finally get a user's comment history to include all the comments that the user has posted? Personally, I'd also like an option to make that public info or have it to myself (where the public version would be "the last few weeks" or "the last 10")
Just having "the last 24 comments" sucks - I like to see what I've posted over the last year or two (or even ever since I started).
It shouldn't be too difficult, seeing as you've already done it for the story pipeline...
PocketPC is not Windows CE. They are two different operating systems. Windows CE (as far as I know) began from a Windows 9x codebase. PocketPC was written from scratch for portable computing devices.
Usually ARMs aren't used for higher scaled things because it lacks floating point. (Note: yes, I know ARM *just* announced floating point support in their newest cores, but even ARM7 is just an integer processor).
So, good luck even trying to do stuff like image analysis, physical simulation, etc. in an emulated FP environment.
I'm an intern for MS in the XBOX group. (Yes, it's XBOX. Not xbox; Not X-box; Not X-Box; just XBOX).
There will be no such thing as DX drivers, at least none that the user will ever know about. Microsoft is not that stupid people. Think about it - this is a gaming CONSOLE. Yes, it is certainly a CONSOLE, and not a PC. Sure, it's got the same brand name parts. However, it has a different architecture. It has certain constraints PCs do not have. It has certain benefits that PCs do not have (locked hardware, unified memory, etc.)
As was stated at a tech talk at MIT by J Allard, there is no real "operating system" for XBOX. All the code that drives the hardware is statically linked with a game executable. And since it's a Microsoft "OS," it has to be huge, right? As of now, this is under a megabyte.
There. It's a console. It's not a PC. It doesn't really have an OS. There's no such thing as drivers. And stop bitching about XBOX just because it comes from Microsoft. Look past the freakin' name for once and see that MS might just have something good on their hands.
There is a large gaping hole in the back of the PS2. This hole is where the (internal) harddrive plugs into. You can buy the internal one, or the external one which uses a USB port.
Hold on. CT sez: "So, if you want to write code under windows, you must use Passport. Or not use MSDN". That is blatant FUD. No one in the world is stopping you from using MSDN Online. In fact, most of the information ever used by developers is on that site absolutely, 100% free.
No one is stopping you from obtaining a subscription to MSDN. This gets MAILED RIGHT TO YOUR DOOR.
The ONLY thing the above is saying is "If you want to download some stuff that we've only made available on the web, you gotta get a Passport". This is like saying "If you want to use Hotmail, you gotta get a Passport".
Does this mean you have to have everything from your Mother's maiden name to your pet's favorite food in there? NO.
I'm an intern for MS, but I'm not trolling here. And since I'm an intern, I barely have an impact on my own group let alone MSDN.
I am currently an undergrad at CMU. I was also in the internship market this last semester (as I have been the past two or three years).
Overall, no matter what job market there has been, finding an internship has been damn easy for me. Here's what I think really helped me get those internships:
Find a job you're interested in. Sounds pretty easy, and it was for me - I'm interested in pretty much everything in computer science. However, I think this is the most critical thing to do, because of the next reason:
Know what you're talking about. This sounds pretty obvious at first glance. However, there are a lot of idiots out there that have no clue what the fuck they are talking about. If you followed my first piece of advice, then you have a better chance of having this part taken care of. Also, if you are interested in the job, and know what you're talking about, this really tends to come out during interviews.
Have a good resume. Well, this seems to be less important to me, but you should have a resume that's easily readable and gets straight to the damn point. HR people don't need your life story, but they need more than your last job and why you quit. I personally have had internships in the past, which have been pretty good for dressing up my resume. If you're looking for your first one, then highlight the best stuff you've done - contests you've done, community work you've done (at school or whatever), etc. Independent projects (ahem, open source projects) are especially good.
Go for it. I personally hate online job applications. The reason is that I feel my resume just gets lost in the sea of crap. I don't mean to sound better than everyone else, but that's the way I feel when I compare my skillz against other people applying to the same job. Find a way to make your resume stand out. Send it to a friend at the company, or if it's a startup, have the audacity to send it to one of the founders - I think they get a kick out of that.
Bleh, that's all I can say. I've interned for MetaCreations (graphics software), Akamai, and now I'm interning for Microsoft (hey - I couldn't pass up Xbox, would you?).
Also, I had three internship offers this year, so I don't see where all this "crappy job market" stuff is coming from. I think that all the idiots are being filtered out, for the most part.
Slashdot Mirror
Okay, I'll believe you that far. Now, I'm a college undergrad sitting in a dorm suite with about 5 20-something people in it.
:)
We have every game console known to man, including GameCube and Xbox. We've really been playing Xbox for the most part of the past week, even though we got both systems at about the same time. The 3 games we got (Luigi's Mansion, WR:BS, and Rogue Leader) just haven't been able to catch our attention as well as DOA3 and Halo.
I'm an avid gamer and have been forever, so I know what good games feel like, and most of the games I've played (as well as my suitemates) in the past week just seem to say that at the moment, Xbox has the better games.
When Super Smash Brothers comes out, that'll probably change
Yes, this is entirely true. However, having worked on Xbox, I know for a fact that developers use such an API call to lock the amount of time spent drawing scenes.
Of course, as you said, it's up to the developer to do this. But then again, MS has specific constraints about framerates of games (as does Sony and Nintendo). Basically, if you can't guarantee your game will run at 60fps all the way through, then you'll have to run at 30. This is so that players do not gripe about visual quality due to framerate (because when it's locked, it's always the same).
Most people would want to overclock a system for higher framerates, but it's pointless on Xbox, because the framerate is tied to the refresh rate of the display. This is why you will get a constant 60 or 30 frames per second on most games, rather than massively varying framerates like in PC games.
The reason to lock the framerate is that this frees up processing time for other threads in your application to do things like physics simulation, collision detection, etc.
In reference to the "green screen of death" linked to in the article, since *when* is a simple error message the same as the machine dieing?
./file.jpg
Here, try this: place a single jpeg file in your home directory. Do `chmod +x file.jpg` Now do
Doesn't work? Oh, too bad. Well guess what? It's the *SAME THING HERE*.
Get a clue, Michael. Just because someone doesn't use plain text on a console terminal to show error messages doesn't mean that the machine has crashed.
You mean this?
It was reported last year that someone ported MAME to the Xbox. Unfortunately, since it is not an approved Microsoft title of any sort, it will never be made available for general use.
[Yes this is a duplicate post, I hit the wrong link when replying last time]
this?
It was reported last year that someone ported MAME to the Xbox. Unfortunately, since it is not an approved Microsoft title of any sort, it will never be made available for general use.
Because their bandwidth bill is going to sky rocket today.
I am not talking about the screenshot linked to in the Slashdot article. I am talking about the screenshot pointed to by the comment that is the parent of mine above (#2466971).
This is not a green screen of death. Heck, imagine running an executable from the commandline of a linux box:
chmod +x textfile.txt
./textfile.txt
You'll get an error that the format was unknown.
This is the same deal. Someone tried to load an xbox executable with a bad format. It was likely that the executable was compiled with a different Xbox Development Kit version than the previously loaded executable.
If the Xbox really did crash, what would happen is that the framebuffer would lock up and you would see the same screen forever.
This image is not an Xbox crashing
The person to point at in Sony is Ken Kutaragi
Man, I don't know what you do to your drives, but my IBM's have never failed. I own four Deskstars that are all put to use in my server. I've never really had a problem with them, except for maybe losing some partition information once.
When I bought my first Deskstar, they were the best performers out there. And even though they come at a slight premium with respect to other drives, I won't buy anything but a Deskstar any more because they have never failed on me, whereas I've had a Maxtor that totally crapped out on me once.
Anyway, I just think you ran into some bad luck with these drives. They are really top quality in my opinion.
There's a model called the PSOne. It is, in all due respect, a portable Playstation. Sony is even releasing a small LCD screen with speakers that attaches onto the PSOne, so you can actually play on the go. You can see the thing here.
Buy a Ferrari! Seriously, my friend was having some bad times at work, and was thinking about leaving. His bosses convinced him to stay, but he still hated it - especially his commute. So he asked himself, "What can I do to make my commute more enjoyable?" and voila... he bought a nice car :)
Local weirdness is determined by the developers, not the manufacturer. Granted, the manufacturer is the one that approves titles to be released. However, it is ironic that a manufacturer should nix any title (because it just means more royalties - remember, the loss of the console itself is made up on software royalties).
Therefore, it makes perfect sense for Microsoft (and therefore Sony and Nintendo) to approve many 3rd party titles for release. Nintendo was pretty stuck up in the N64 days, taking the opinion that 3rd party support wasn't necessary to win against Sony and SEGA. Unfortunately, while their content was certainly good, it wasn't enough.
So, do I know if Microsoft will focus on American games? No.. but I don't think it's in their best interests to do so.
Well, if you've been keeping up on real gaming news (and I mean real gaming sites - not this Slashdot category BS), then you'd know that they are not going to release Halo simultaneously on Mac/PC/Xbox. It will be Xbox exclusive for a while, and the Mac/PC ports are planned at the moment (and being worked on, which I was told by a friend at Bungie).
Man, this guy has guts. On the other hand, you could call him a PHB too. From an administrative perspective, there's soooo many problems that are going to crop up, they may totally take away any usefulness of this project.
And it's not just going to be the random "I can't open my lab report" type of problem. It's going to be the "I dropped my laptop on the way to school, and it fell apart" type of problem. All of the state.
I'd hate to be the support staff for any school district up in Maine...
It's actually quite a serious thing to plug a company owned by your own parent corporation, without giving explicit notice of that fact, or making the plug an advertisement.
But this is Slashdot, where none of that applies...
Let's say I'm a D3D or OGL programmer. Doesn't matter what platform I'm programming on - my rendering pipeline still looks basically the same:
Geometry loading -> Vertex transform -> vertex lighting -> vertex shading -> rasterization
Now, where does PS2 or Xbox come into play here about changing your graphics pipeline? I'm curious...
Of course, you have to change the API you're using. And in general, there are a few fundamental differences between OGL and D3D. However, I think that these are not *too* difficult for an experienced game engine coder(s) to work around.
Personally, I find D3D easier to understand (mainly because OGL's built-in matrix stack had me confused for a good while... who knows exactly why).
Could we please finally get a user's comment history to include all the comments that the user has posted? Personally, I'd also like an option to make that public info or have it to myself (where the public version would be "the last few weeks" or "the last 10")
Just having "the last 24 comments" sucks - I like to see what I've posted over the last year or two (or even ever since I started).
It shouldn't be too difficult, seeing as you've already done it for the story pipeline...
PocketPC is not Windows CE. They are two different operating systems. Windows CE (as far as I know) began from a Windows 9x codebase. PocketPC was written from scratch for portable computing devices.
Don't mix them up!
Usually ARMs aren't used for higher scaled things because it lacks floating point. (Note: yes, I know ARM *just* announced floating point support in their newest cores, but even ARM7 is just an integer processor).
So, good luck even trying to do stuff like image analysis, physical simulation, etc. in an emulated FP environment.
I'm an intern for MS in the XBOX group. (Yes, it's XBOX. Not xbox; Not X-box; Not X-Box; just XBOX).
There will be no such thing as DX drivers, at least none that the user will ever know about. Microsoft is not that stupid people. Think about it - this is a gaming CONSOLE. Yes, it is certainly a CONSOLE, and not a PC. Sure, it's got the same brand name parts. However, it has a different architecture. It has certain constraints PCs do not have. It has certain benefits that PCs do not have (locked hardware, unified memory, etc.)
As was stated at a tech talk at MIT by J Allard, there is no real "operating system" for XBOX. All the code that drives the hardware is statically linked with a game executable. And since it's a Microsoft "OS," it has to be huge, right? As of now, this is under a megabyte.
There. It's a console. It's not a PC. It doesn't really have an OS. There's no such thing as drivers. And stop bitching about XBOX just because it comes from Microsoft. Look past the freakin' name for once and see that MS might just have something good on their hands.
There is a large gaping hole in the back of the PS2. This hole is where the (internal) harddrive plugs into. You can buy the internal one, or the external one which uses a USB port.
Hold on. CT sez: "So, if you want to write code under windows, you must use Passport. Or not use MSDN". That is blatant FUD. No one in the world is stopping you from using MSDN Online. In fact, most of the information ever used by developers is on that site absolutely, 100% free.
No one is stopping you from obtaining a subscription to MSDN. This gets MAILED RIGHT TO YOUR DOOR.
The ONLY thing the above is saying is "If you want to download some stuff that we've only made available on the web, you gotta get a Passport". This is like saying "If you want to use Hotmail, you gotta get a Passport".
Does this mean you have to have everything from your Mother's maiden name to your pet's favorite food in there? NO.
I'm an intern for MS, but I'm not trolling here. And since I'm an intern, I barely have an impact on my own group let alone MSDN.
I am currently an undergrad at CMU. I was also in the internship market this last semester (as I have been the past two or three years).
Overall, no matter what job market there has been, finding an internship has been damn easy for me. Here's what I think really helped me get those internships:
Find a job you're interested in. Sounds pretty easy, and it was for me - I'm interested in pretty much everything in computer science. However, I think this is the most critical thing to do, because of the next reason:
Know what you're talking about. This sounds pretty obvious at first glance. However, there are a lot of idiots out there that have no clue what the fuck they are talking about. If you followed my first piece of advice, then you have a better chance of having this part taken care of. Also, if you are interested in the job, and know what you're talking about, this really tends to come out during interviews.
Have a good resume. Well, this seems to be less important to me, but you should have a resume that's easily readable and gets straight to the damn point. HR people don't need your life story, but they need more than your last job and why you quit. I personally have had internships in the past, which have been pretty good for dressing up my resume. If you're looking for your first one, then highlight the best stuff you've done - contests you've done, community work you've done (at school or whatever), etc. Independent projects (ahem, open source projects) are especially good.
Go for it. I personally hate online job applications. The reason is that I feel my resume just gets lost in the sea of crap. I don't mean to sound better than everyone else, but that's the way I feel when I compare my skillz against other people applying to the same job. Find a way to make your resume stand out. Send it to a friend at the company, or if it's a startup, have the audacity to send it to one of the founders - I think they get a kick out of that.
Bleh, that's all I can say. I've interned for MetaCreations (graphics software), Akamai, and now I'm interning for Microsoft (hey - I couldn't pass up Xbox, would you?).
Also, I had three internship offers this year, so I don't see where all this "crappy job market" stuff is coming from. I think that all the idiots are being filtered out, for the most part.