I used to think that too. But it isn't true in the videogame space, yet piracy is still extensive here. I think it may just be that the delivered media has been expensive for many years, and companies just happened to have monopolies too.
Game piracy is rampant everywhere. There are clearly more games downloaded and played than purchased legally. Yet PC (and console) games distribution is not a monopoly proposition, and unlike a lot of other areas there is actual price competitions that go on.
Even if these companies are bahaving well, people will still pirate whatever it is that you do if your product is A: more than a trivial amount of money and B: easy to pirate. It's just that we don't have that many companies that are behaving well to test this theory on.
Of course, if you do have an illegal monopoly or a functionally illegal cartel pricing going on, and you're getting pirated, you get no sympathy from me.
Note: most gaming companies have a healthier attitude about this sort of thing. They put up some technological barrier, and accept that some people will jump through the hoops to break it. I guess we've been living with casual digital piracy for a lot longer than the music or movie people.
It also ensures that instead of looking for a lower-cost solution, these people only know about Photoshop, Illustrator, and Dreamweaver. Once they go out to the working world, they then buy Photoshop, Illustrator, and Dreamweaver, even if simple and far cheaper replacement apps would do everything they need.
If Windows were impossible to pirate, Linux would be doing better.
Apple has never competed on price. The basic iPod is still the most expensive MP3 player by about 30%. And for the cost of a 4GB nano, you can get a 20GB HDD based MP3 player. Heck, you can get a 20 GB Archos Jukebox for 100 dollars if you look.
Where Apple shines is form factor. That Archos Jukebox can be amazingly cheap, but it won't fit in your pocket. The iRiver is a powerful, fully featured player, but just try to get it to do anything without taking a course at your technical school. Even the regular iPod is big by many people's standards, leading to the popularity of the Mini and Nano.
And if you haven't held it in your hands, the Nano is damned small. This thing could fit in a wallet. It can fit in the tiny key pocket on most jeans. You don't have to decide between taking your iPod or your PDA (or your iPod or your Compact, etc). Just take 'em both. They'll both fit.
Besides, if you're comparing USB drives, why not compare to the Shuffle? 100 dollars for 1GB of storage, which includes the battery and playback interface out of the box. Not an amazingly low cost solution, but not bad compared to the rest of the stuff in that space.
An MP3 player is more than just flash memory, you know.
Wow. That's basically how I envisioned the system would work. And now that they can dial more than 10 numbers (weird oversight), it seems nearly perfect! Thanks!
The apartment is actually on Vonage, so SoftPhone wouldn't be a bad option.
But there has to be a geekier way. We've got at least 6 computers in this apartment. It seems like it should be easy to get audio from one machine to the phone line, then define some numerical tones perhaps triggered through a chat message. Wire the audio-out directly into the mic on a phone, vice-versa with the audio-in... maybe use a parallel-port connection to define if the phone is picked up or not. On a fundamental level it shouldn't be too difficult to do.
Asterisk is an intriguing option. It doesn't sound quite like what I'm looking for, but it seems interesting for it's own reasons. I'll investigate it. Thanks!
In John Woo's defense, in a foreign country and a foreign language is very hard to communicate an artistic vision. He also remains very good at putting people in completely messed up, intractible situations. Sure, nothing has been as good as A Better Tomorrow, but nothing has been as bad as Hard Target was.
Unfortunately the sort of over-the-top action that seemed really cool on a Hong Kong budget just looks over-the-top on a US budget. For example, in MI2 he has a scene where the main character flips around a motorcycle and smacks someone in the face with the back wheel. In the US, it looks horribly artificial. In HK, they would have just hired a stuntman to do it, and it would have been awsome.
Metroid is possible. Partly by not having dialog that gives the film makers carte blanc to do whatever they want. Partly by being Sci-Fi it gives Woo the ability to do whatever HE wants, without it seeming too weird. The suit is a problem... it's going to come off terribly if it looks like it does in the games, and it will mask the actress' ability to be expressive. I almost want Andy Serkis in that suit, at least for the parts of the movie where you can't see her face.
Team of scientists in a secret lab on a planet which looks mysteriously like south america accidentally unleash the ultimate horror. Lab is destroyed, leaving none the wiser. Cut To - a woman breaking up a hostage situation in space. 5 criminals have taken over the control deck of a large, well populated ship, and have obviously been at this for a while. Samus makes a brazen entrance, killing four of the criminals in a quick sweep. The last one manages to get a hostage up as a shield, and Samus shoots both of them. Cut to Samus getting sent in to the lab planet with a small team of spunky expendables wearing XO suits. The lab tells them to leave, but the Spunky expendables ignore the warnings of the computer and break in anyway. They work their way down to the main computer area, but find it is too late. Much carnage is watched in computer flashbacks. The blast doors close and suddenly, the team is trapped... and the horror will only get worse.
See? Totally do-able as a piece of passable hollywood schlock, and all you had to do was rip off another game movie that almost got it right, Resident Evil.
As a side note, a lot of certification processes are basically worthless. FIPS makes sure the software doesn't do some of the most boneheaded security mistakes, like not encrypting anything, but it doesn't actually certify the security of the software. It would be easy to write a completely insecure FIPS-certifiable program.
On the other hand, an open source application in wide usage is generally hardened against attack. If people find a vulnerability, they can report it (without going to Jail, thank you DMCA) and it will generally be fixed quickly. If it is popular a lot of people will look at the code, a lot of people will try to attack the code, and things like buffer overflows which may lie dormant in commercial packages for years are quickly rooted out. It is much harder to have a popular, completely insecure open-source application.
This sounds ver similar to the built-in voice recognition that macintoshes have had for some time now (not to knock it). Anything you want typed or done can be triggered by a voice command, though it has to be scripted individually.
In terms of Windows, the best that I know of is still Dragon Naturally Speaking, though I strongly recommend pirating it first to decide if it serves your needs. Unfortunately, even with regular training it still gets things wrong with alarming frequency. You have to retouch everything or your mail recipients will think you're an incoherent blogger.
Thank goodness my nieces are generally very well behaved and patient people, and don't seem to mind (or question) the fact that I have to fast forward through these things for them.
That's... Terrible.
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. It follows that all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
I'm guessing economic reasons push harder than technical ones.
Sony already assumes that their PS3 chips will have a fault in one of the cores, and simply lock off that section when one is found. One fault no longer kills a chip, though two can render the power unacceptably low.
The cool thing is this scales. If you have a 10cm^2 chip, traditionally your chance of perfection is 1/4th that of a 5cm chip, cutting your yield drastically. But if you have 6 cores on a chip with one dead one, and you want to go to 12, you should get a similar yield for a proportionally similar amount of dead cores.
Cores let you limit damage from manufacturing errors, letting you build bigger chips more cheaply. At least, that's my layman's understanding.
There is a big secret to innovation that I've found over the years, and if I may be so pretentious I'd like to share it.
Pretend your game isn't innovative.
This may seem like a weird thing to say, but the fact is that innovation does not promote accessability. Accessability is someone looking at your game, and within the first screenshot and title being able to say "I know what that is. I like that. Let's try that." Then within the first 10 seconds of playing "I know what this is, I'll keep playing." After they have their bearings in the world, that's when you hit them with the innovative parts.
Accessability is key.
The whole Tolkien / DnD world space is instantly recognizable and highly accessable. You know what to do when someone who looks like a dwarf comes to you as much as you do when someone who looks like a goblin does. Sequals are highly accessable for the same reason.
Or use subject matter that is instantly understandable to people even if it is new to gaming. What about a D-Day Landing role playing game? Or a game based in a Santa Claus universe? When players enter, they immediately have some idea of A: who they are, B: who the good guys and bad guys are, (even if this changes over time), and C: what they are supposed to do. They should be able to tell this from the screenshot, the title (Santa vs the Martians) or a one sentence summary.
Having the hook to a larger thing that people really care about, like holidays or issues of national pride, are also useful.
Games have to be accessable to a degree that non-interactive mediums do not. In a story, one can read about what the main character is doing without having to know the rules of the universe they are doing it in. A player could not make the right decisions for the Dread Pirate Roberts through the first 30 minutes of The Princess Bride without knowing that he is really Westley. A player wouldn't survive for any length of time in Hellraiser: the game, if they didn't know the rules of the box.
Ironically sometimes it is easier to be innovative with a big publisher. When we fail in the market (and we do sometimes) we don't exactly lose our house. Of course, we don't get the call on whether or not we get to be expressive, but that is a different issue. But we definitely appreciate it when independent developers step in and write original games.
Oh, and as another poster pointed out your artist and engine could use an overhaul. I'd recommend at least switching to transpartent PNG files and concepting out a more unique and consistently applied style to the imagery. Maybe pull the camera in 30% to emphasize the characters. Even old computers should have no problem supporting all of that. And it shouldn't be too difficult on your engine, as you're on systems with easy PNG support.
Ignoring the fact that what you've just described doesn't actually talk about the physics engine in a game, but damage engines, there are still reasons that arbitrary physics can be a mess.
The most common example is "stacking stuff" and breaking the 'freaking scripting. You've got a bad guy, you've got a castle. You are to go into this castle after the bad guy has revealed himself to have a climactic battle with his accountant. So instead of playing along with the game, the player stacks up a bunch of random crap outside of the castle, and climbs in. Or maybe they're accidentally blown in by a combination of a misplaced grenade, a feet of flight, and an enemy's lightning bolt. Either way, they've managed to completely break the scripting of the game and very possibly make it impossible to continue. They probably won't realize that either until after they've saved their progress.
Or the player is in a heated battle with a group of enemies, and they're all firing Tim-the-Enchanter-esque rockets at eachother. Once the player wins the battle, he discovers that the cave he was supposed to go into is now blocked by the rubble of the building that was just nuked around it, preventing progress.
Or the physics engine correctly asserts that objects should not pass through eachother, and so every time you swing a weapon it pushes the opponent out of your range. Or your body mass manages to push aside a character that is moving in a scripted fashion, thereby preventing them from reaching their objective. Or one of a million other things that can go wrong.
All of the "casual physics" would need to be programmed into the game in some form or another. Sure, you could have tree leaves that brush away from the player. But in addition to the calculation overhead, you need to define the occupied regions, joints, anchor points, and other physical properties of that object. If you want a building to break, you've got to define the stress thresholds of all of the polygonal objects, the collision volume, the breaking patterns, and draw all of the internal portions of the object. If you want the player to be able to dig a post hole, you have to define a ton of parameters for that as well. It may look like a tree, but it doesn't have the slightest clue what it is and what it is supposed to do.
Physics aren't free. They are, in fact, incredibly messy and touchy, and need to be coded on a case-by-case basis. I think Oblivion did a really fun job in this respect, as the two things I've seen people do with the game are A: jump their horse off a cliff to watch it twist up as it dies and B: blast the hell out of enemies trying to launch them over trees. Those must have taken reasonable amounts of coding resources, but added tremendously to the gameplay. The ability to arbitrarily deform buildings, on the other hand, would not be particularly helpful for this type of game.
I'm not saying that better integrated physics isn't a good goal going ahead. The physics in Oblivion as they stand now would have been considered hyper realistic as of 8 years ago. But it shouldn't be the primary concern of developers. Experience should always come first, and if physics support that in proportion to their development cost, they should go in. If they add undue burden to the coders, artists, or QA, they should be ignored for more important things.
Games are all smoke and mirrors, an illusion no thicker than the smoke eminating from a pool hall. Don't be confused into thinking that they are the real thing being held back by a lack of power. They are just an intricate floating illusion pushed forward by the remarkable power that we already have.
So they claim that Oblivion would be much better with AGIA brand physics acceleration hardware support. And if they had just supported AGIA, then so much more realism and immersion would be possible.
'smells like a press release to me. Nobody has an AGIA physics accelerator card yet. That's like saying the game would be better on a blue-ray disk. I wholeheartedly hope that physics acceleration will become a more standard piece of gaming kit at some time in the future, but nobody has one yet.
The success of Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion makes it the perfect example of what's missing from our current conception of next generation games... Oblivion lacks Casual Physics, and the result is a splendidly beautiful world that still requires a blind eye in order to buy into the environment.
Or maybe the success of Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion shows that Casual Physics are not necessary for a great game.
The question is whether Sam & Max 2 was any good, and nobody outside of Lucas and Telltale knows that. And both of them are throwing out the game.
It is quite possible that S&M2 was so terrible that they canned it in order to retain their reputation in the market, and cited "market" concerns to cover that up. Nobody wants to say "we made a crappy game so we canned it."
Ok, Blizzard said that with Ghost. But we all knew it by then anyway.
The point is that the gaming industry can always use a little judicious pruning of the bad stuff, but nobody wants to admit that a project didn't live up to expectations. In all likelyness S&M wasn't canned because it was an adventure game sequal, but because it didn't come together in a way that Lucasarts was happy with.
The antagonism between/. denizens and patent attorneys has always puzzled me. Like people writing software, the main function of patent attorneys and agents is to write precisely, using terms and phrases the definition of which have previously been determined. A well-written patent application is not unlike a well-written (albeit uncommented) computer program:
The difference is that when we do our job well, your job gets easier. When patent attorneys do their jobs well, our jobs get a whole lot harder.
And an uncommented computer program is the anthesis of a well written one.
I have read my ISP service contract. And I used to work at one.
Basically all consumer-level services are provided without minimum service guarantees. You get no QOS provisions, no minimum speed provisions, no uptime provisions. Basically, you get something similar to what the provider promised you. If in practice it is 1/2 of the advertised speed level or is unavailable for 1 day a week, the person can decide to deal with it or leave.
DSL is particularly bad about this, as they never reach advertised speed and have frequent outages. 1.5 MBbps may be true if you are sitting on top of the phone company DSL center, but if you're in the outer reaches of their availability region (and most people are by simple geography) you're lucky if you get a consistent fifth of that.
But unless you're willing to shell out 500 dollars a month for business usage with a static IP, no service guarantees for you. Like it or leave it.
And yes, of course, the ISP always includes clauses that allow them to do anything they want if they suspect you of malicious activity or activities that deterr the service of others. But they don't actually have to have that clause for anyone except business users: home users have basically no guarantee of anything.
Our comcast router is so bad that it jams up and requires a reboot after a certain number of total connections are reached. With regular surfing, this can take about 6 months. But with any P2P apps or Torrents open, the router dies in about 12 hours.
Personally I'd rather they just throttled P2P traffic back to 10 kbps, but their solution is elegant too.
besides I really have done well without an online calendar until now, so there is no real need to use one for me.
"My business has run fine for generations without a computer, so there is no real need for us to have one."
Sometime in the not-too-distant future you're going to discover why people have sharable calendars. And then you're going to wonder how anyone managed to schedule anything without them.
Slashdot Mirror
I used to think that too. But it isn't true in the videogame space, yet piracy is still extensive here. I think it may just be that the delivered media has been expensive for many years, and companies just happened to have monopolies too.
Game piracy is rampant everywhere. There are clearly more games downloaded and played than purchased legally. Yet PC (and console) games distribution is not a monopoly proposition, and unlike a lot of other areas there is actual price competitions that go on.
Even if these companies are bahaving well, people will still pirate whatever it is that you do if your product is A: more than a trivial amount of money and B: easy to pirate. It's just that we don't have that many companies that are behaving well to test this theory on.
Of course, if you do have an illegal monopoly or a functionally illegal cartel pricing going on, and you're getting pirated, you get no sympathy from me.
Note: most gaming companies have a healthier attitude about this sort of thing. They put up some technological barrier, and accept that some people will jump through the hoops to break it. I guess we've been living with casual digital piracy for a lot longer than the music or movie people.
It also ensures that instead of looking for a lower-cost solution, these people only know about Photoshop, Illustrator, and Dreamweaver. Once they go out to the working world, they then buy Photoshop, Illustrator, and Dreamweaver, even if simple and far cheaper replacement apps would do everything they need.
If Windows were impossible to pirate, Linux would be doing better.
Apple has never competed on price. The basic iPod is still the most expensive MP3 player by about 30%. And for the cost of a 4GB nano, you can get a 20GB HDD based MP3 player. Heck, you can get a 20 GB Archos Jukebox for 100 dollars if you look.
Where Apple shines is form factor. That Archos Jukebox can be amazingly cheap, but it won't fit in your pocket. The iRiver is a powerful, fully featured player, but just try to get it to do anything without taking a course at your technical school. Even the regular iPod is big by many people's standards, leading to the popularity of the Mini and Nano.
And if you haven't held it in your hands, the Nano is damned small. This thing could fit in a wallet. It can fit in the tiny key pocket on most jeans. You don't have to decide between taking your iPod or your PDA (or your iPod or your Compact, etc). Just take 'em both. They'll both fit.
Besides, if you're comparing USB drives, why not compare to the Shuffle? 100 dollars for 1GB of storage, which includes the battery and playback interface out of the box. Not an amazingly low cost solution, but not bad compared to the rest of the stuff in that space.
An MP3 player is more than just flash memory, you know.
Wow. They trademarked this?
And the sounds of hell?
And for that matter, desn't that serve as prior art to this?
Wow. That's basically how I envisioned the system would work. And now that they can dial more than 10 numbers (weird oversight), it seems nearly perfect! Thanks!
The apartment is actually on Vonage, so SoftPhone wouldn't be a bad option.
But there has to be a geekier way. We've got at least 6 computers in this apartment. It seems like it should be easy to get audio from one machine to the phone line, then define some numerical tones perhaps triggered through a chat message. Wire the audio-out directly into the mic on a phone, vice-versa with the audio-in... maybe use a parallel-port connection to define if the phone is picked up or not. On a fundamental level it shouldn't be too difficult to do.
Asterisk is an intriguing option. It doesn't sound quite like what I'm looking for, but it seems interesting for it's own reasons. I'll investigate it. Thanks!
Can we just mod the writer? Cringely is definitely a +5 idiot.
In John Woo's defense, in a foreign country and a foreign language is very hard to communicate an artistic vision. He also remains very good at putting people in completely messed up, intractible situations. Sure, nothing has been as good as A Better Tomorrow, but nothing has been as bad as Hard Target was.
Unfortunately the sort of over-the-top action that seemed really cool on a Hong Kong budget just looks over-the-top on a US budget. For example, in MI2 he has a scene where the main character flips around a motorcycle and smacks someone in the face with the back wheel. In the US, it looks horribly artificial. In HK, they would have just hired a stuntman to do it, and it would have been awsome.
Metroid is possible. Partly by not having dialog that gives the film makers carte blanc to do whatever they want. Partly by being Sci-Fi it gives Woo the ability to do whatever HE wants, without it seeming too weird. The suit is a problem... it's going to come off terribly if it looks like it does in the games, and it will mask the actress' ability to be expressive. I almost want Andy Serkis in that suit, at least for the parts of the movie where you can't see her face.
Team of scientists in a secret lab on a planet which looks mysteriously like south america accidentally unleash the ultimate horror. Lab is destroyed, leaving none the wiser. Cut To - a woman breaking up a hostage situation in space. 5 criminals have taken over the control deck of a large, well populated ship, and have obviously been at this for a while. Samus makes a brazen entrance, killing four of the criminals in a quick sweep. The last one manages to get a hostage up as a shield, and Samus shoots both of them. Cut to Samus getting sent in to the lab planet with a small team of spunky expendables wearing XO suits. The lab tells them to leave, but the Spunky expendables ignore the warnings of the computer and break in anyway. They work their way down to the main computer area, but find it is too late. Much carnage is watched in computer flashbacks. The blast doors close and suddenly, the team is trapped... and the horror will only get worse.
See? Totally do-able as a piece of passable hollywood schlock, and all you had to do was rip off another game movie that almost got it right, Resident Evil.
'Game development education has arrived'
I'm screwed.
Dada download link died, so here is a mirror.
Gravity Head, and the rest of the Experimental Gameplay Project
Dada: Stagnation in Blue
Cloud
Katamari Damacy
Facade
Flow
Orisinal
As a side note, a lot of certification processes are basically worthless. FIPS makes sure the software doesn't do some of the most boneheaded security mistakes, like not encrypting anything, but it doesn't actually certify the security of the software. It would be easy to write a completely insecure FIPS-certifiable program.
On the other hand, an open source application in wide usage is generally hardened against attack. If people find a vulnerability, they can report it (without going to Jail, thank you DMCA) and it will generally be fixed quickly. If it is popular a lot of people will look at the code, a lot of people will try to attack the code, and things like buffer overflows which may lie dormant in commercial packages for years are quickly rooted out. It is much harder to have a popular, completely insecure open-source application.
How much would it cost to get True Crypt certified? By the Wiki entry, it doesn't sound particularly difficult to clear level 1 security.
This sounds ver similar to the built-in voice recognition that macintoshes have had for some time now (not to knock it). Anything you want typed or done can be triggered by a voice command, though it has to be scripted individually.
In terms of Windows, the best that I know of is still Dragon Naturally Speaking, though I strongly recommend pirating it first to decide if it serves your needs. Unfortunately, even with regular training it still gets things wrong with alarming frequency. You have to retouch everything or your mail recipients will think you're an incoherent blogger.
Thank goodness my nieces are generally very well behaved and patient people, and don't seem to mind (or question) the fact that I have to fast forward through these things for them.
That's... Terrible.
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. It follows that all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
--George Bernard Shaw
I'm guessing economic reasons push harder than technical ones.
Sony already assumes that their PS3 chips will have a fault in one of the cores, and simply lock off that section when one is found. One fault no longer kills a chip, though two can render the power unacceptably low.
The cool thing is this scales. If you have a 10cm^2 chip, traditionally your chance of perfection is 1/4th that of a 5cm chip, cutting your yield drastically. But if you have 6 cores on a chip with one dead one, and you want to go to 12, you should get a similar yield for a proportionally similar amount of dead cores.
Cores let you limit damage from manufacturing errors, letting you build bigger chips more cheaply. At least, that's my layman's understanding.
You know, if you just pirate the movie you can skip the adverts.
Hmm... There should be some lesson in there about giving consumers more for their money, but as far as I can tell that just means more adverts.
There is a big secret to innovation that I've found over the years, and if I may be so pretentious I'd like to share it.
Pretend your game isn't innovative.
This may seem like a weird thing to say, but the fact is that innovation does not promote accessability. Accessability is someone looking at your game, and within the first screenshot and title being able to say "I know what that is. I like that. Let's try that." Then within the first 10 seconds of playing "I know what this is, I'll keep playing." After they have their bearings in the world, that's when you hit them with the innovative parts.
Accessability is key.
The whole Tolkien / DnD world space is instantly recognizable and highly accessable. You know what to do when someone who looks like a dwarf comes to you as much as you do when someone who looks like a goblin does. Sequals are highly accessable for the same reason.
Or use subject matter that is instantly understandable to people even if it is new to gaming. What about a D-Day Landing role playing game? Or a game based in a Santa Claus universe? When players enter, they immediately have some idea of A: who they are, B: who the good guys and bad guys are, (even if this changes over time), and C: what they are supposed to do. They should be able to tell this from the screenshot, the title (Santa vs the Martians) or a one sentence summary.
Having the hook to a larger thing that people really care about, like holidays or issues of national pride, are also useful.
Games have to be accessable to a degree that non-interactive mediums do not. In a story, one can read about what the main character is doing without having to know the rules of the universe they are doing it in. A player could not make the right decisions for the Dread Pirate Roberts through the first 30 minutes of The Princess Bride without knowing that he is really Westley. A player wouldn't survive for any length of time in Hellraiser: the game, if they didn't know the rules of the box.
Ironically sometimes it is easier to be innovative with a big publisher. When we fail in the market (and we do sometimes) we don't exactly lose our house. Of course, we don't get the call on whether or not we get to be expressive, but that is a different issue. But we definitely appreciate it when independent developers step in and write original games.
Oh, and as another poster pointed out your artist and engine could use an overhaul. I'd recommend at least switching to transpartent PNG files and concepting out a more unique and consistently applied style to the imagery. Maybe pull the camera in 30% to emphasize the characters. Even old computers should have no problem supporting all of that. And it shouldn't be too difficult on your engine, as you're on systems with easy PNG support.
Ignoring the fact that what you've just described doesn't actually talk about the physics engine in a game, but damage engines, there are still reasons that arbitrary physics can be a mess.
The most common example is "stacking stuff" and breaking the 'freaking scripting. You've got a bad guy, you've got a castle. You are to go into this castle after the bad guy has revealed himself to have a climactic battle with his accountant. So instead of playing along with the game, the player stacks up a bunch of random crap outside of the castle, and climbs in. Or maybe they're accidentally blown in by a combination of a misplaced grenade, a feet of flight, and an enemy's lightning bolt. Either way, they've managed to completely break the scripting of the game and very possibly make it impossible to continue. They probably won't realize that either until after they've saved their progress.
Or the player is in a heated battle with a group of enemies, and they're all firing Tim-the-Enchanter-esque rockets at eachother. Once the player wins the battle, he discovers that the cave he was supposed to go into is now blocked by the rubble of the building that was just nuked around it, preventing progress.
Or the physics engine correctly asserts that objects should not pass through eachother, and so every time you swing a weapon it pushes the opponent out of your range. Or your body mass manages to push aside a character that is moving in a scripted fashion, thereby preventing them from reaching their objective. Or one of a million other things that can go wrong.
All of the "casual physics" would need to be programmed into the game in some form or another. Sure, you could have tree leaves that brush away from the player. But in addition to the calculation overhead, you need to define the occupied regions, joints, anchor points, and other physical properties of that object. If you want a building to break, you've got to define the stress thresholds of all of the polygonal objects, the collision volume, the breaking patterns, and draw all of the internal portions of the object. If you want the player to be able to dig a post hole, you have to define a ton of parameters for that as well. It may look like a tree, but it doesn't have the slightest clue what it is and what it is supposed to do.
Physics aren't free. They are, in fact, incredibly messy and touchy, and need to be coded on a case-by-case basis. I think Oblivion did a really fun job in this respect, as the two things I've seen people do with the game are A: jump their horse off a cliff to watch it twist up as it dies and B: blast the hell out of enemies trying to launch them over trees. Those must have taken reasonable amounts of coding resources, but added tremendously to the gameplay. The ability to arbitrarily deform buildings, on the other hand, would not be particularly helpful for this type of game.
I'm not saying that better integrated physics isn't a good goal going ahead. The physics in Oblivion as they stand now would have been considered hyper realistic as of 8 years ago. But it shouldn't be the primary concern of developers. Experience should always come first, and if physics support that in proportion to their development cost, they should go in. If they add undue burden to the coders, artists, or QA, they should be ignored for more important things.
Games are all smoke and mirrors, an illusion no thicker than the smoke eminating from a pool hall. Don't be confused into thinking that they are the real thing being held back by a lack of power. They are just an intricate floating illusion pushed forward by the remarkable power that we already have.
So they claim that Oblivion would be much better with AGIA brand physics acceleration hardware support. And if they had just supported AGIA, then so much more realism and immersion would be possible.
'smells like a press release to me. Nobody has an AGIA physics accelerator card yet. That's like saying the game would be better on a blue-ray disk. I wholeheartedly hope that physics acceleration will become a more standard piece of gaming kit at some time in the future, but nobody has one yet.
The success of Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion makes it the perfect example of what's missing from our current conception of next generation games... Oblivion lacks Casual Physics, and the result is a splendidly beautiful world that still requires a blind eye in order to buy into the environment.
Or maybe the success of Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion shows that Casual Physics are not necessary for a great game.
The question is whether Sam & Max 2 was any good, and nobody outside of Lucas and Telltale knows that. And both of them are throwing out the game.
It is quite possible that S&M2 was so terrible that they canned it in order to retain their reputation in the market, and cited "market" concerns to cover that up. Nobody wants to say "we made a crappy game so we canned it."
Ok, Blizzard said that with Ghost. But we all knew it by then anyway.
The point is that the gaming industry can always use a little judicious pruning of the bad stuff, but nobody wants to admit that a project didn't live up to expectations. In all likelyness S&M wasn't canned because it was an adventure game sequal, but because it didn't come together in a way that Lucasarts was happy with.
The antagonism between /. denizens and patent attorneys has always puzzled me. Like people writing software, the main function of patent attorneys and agents is to write precisely, using terms and phrases the definition of which have previously been determined. A well-written patent application is not unlike a well-written (albeit uncommented) computer program:
The difference is that when we do our job well, your job gets easier. When patent attorneys do their jobs well, our jobs get a whole lot harder.
And an uncommented computer program is the anthesis of a well written one.
I have read my ISP service contract. And I used to work at one.
Basically all consumer-level services are provided without minimum service guarantees. You get no QOS provisions, no minimum speed provisions, no uptime provisions. Basically, you get something similar to what the provider promised you. If in practice it is 1/2 of the advertised speed level or is unavailable for 1 day a week, the person can decide to deal with it or leave.
DSL is particularly bad about this, as they never reach advertised speed and have frequent outages. 1.5 MBbps may be true if you are sitting on top of the phone company DSL center, but if you're in the outer reaches of their availability region (and most people are by simple geography) you're lucky if you get a consistent fifth of that.
But unless you're willing to shell out 500 dollars a month for business usage with a static IP, no service guarantees for you. Like it or leave it.
And yes, of course, the ISP always includes clauses that allow them to do anything they want if they suspect you of malicious activity or activities that deterr the service of others. But they don't actually have to have that clause for anyone except business users: home users have basically no guarantee of anything.
Our comcast router is so bad that it jams up and requires a reboot after a certain number of total connections are reached. With regular surfing, this can take about 6 months. But with any P2P apps or Torrents open, the router dies in about 12 hours.
Personally I'd rather they just throttled P2P traffic back to 10 kbps, but their solution is elegant too.
besides I really have done well without an online calendar until now, so there is no real need to use one for me.
"My business has run fine for generations without a computer, so there is no real need for us to have one."
Sometime in the not-too-distant future you're going to discover why people have sharable calendars. And then you're going to wonder how anyone managed to schedule anything without them.