You can use old laptops for this. For not too much money you can also get a backlit PDA and synchronize it automatically with an existing PDA (copy over the folder). Use a "keep it lit" hackmaster extension and your clock program of choice... Map Avant Go's weather station to one of the buttons, and you have basically what you are describing. You would have to shell out a few hundred for MP3 and audio streams, but for 50 bucks used you could have the best clock ever.
Have a group of kids who have never worked on Linux before (but who want to help) be told the inputs, the outputs, and what should happen in the middle. Rewrite from scratch. No Copyright infringement, because you cannot create a derivative work without seeing the original.
However, as another reader mentioned, there could be other great applications for this sort of embedded system with network patching and such, but the XPEmbedded licence pretty much spoils that.
Could you expand on this? I'm not familiar with the limitations of the XPE licence... How would it spoil network patching, etc?
Re:I don't see why this is so difficult.
on
Savage to Support Linux
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I have been involved in the development of several full games (though not as a programmer), both PC and console, so I will interject.
The design, artwork, and programming all go to some degree in parallel. And it is very true that many aspects of the process can be brought across platforms. But programming and debugging, once you hit the optimization phase, becomes problematic. Optimizations can cause problems on one console but not another, and fixes for such problems can break the first one. Keeping two computers perfectly synchronized for online play is quite a task, but keeping them synchronized on different operating systems is a nightmare.
My company has as many programmers and QA people as artists and designers. Don't underestimate the difficulty of such a task. And remember, that additional 5% sales you get from the other OS may be counterbalanced by lost sales due to missing your ship date, which can total millions of dollars per week. When numbers like that become involved, people start to believe that they would be better off tasking their programmers to making the game better on one platform, rather than trying to reach that last bit of audience.
And honestly, I can't fault them for that decision. Build a better game on the dominant platform or an engine that can reach the niche markets? If you are in the market of selling engines (like Id), your decision is clear. For the rest of us, we just want to make the best games we can.
Further reading of the patent appears to limit it to A: CD-Rom media B: a hash derived from the file table of the media C: a Telivision monitor (not HDTV) D: something that does not require an external check for installation scripts
And amusingly enough a snippet of the Patent "In addition, the video converter card does not address the user interface problem; namely, a typical personal computer keyboard and mouse are extremely inconvenient, if not totally unworkable, for a home user sitting on a comfortable couch and watching a large screen television several feet away. These drawbacks may be major deterrents for the home consumer. "
If I'm not forgetting a finer point of patent law, doesn't this mean that anyone can create an insert-and-run game system so long as they use a binary search tree (and not a table) to store the relevant data?
Just pointing out, what is listed is the specs for the high-end machine. The 300 dollar machine specs with
A Via CPU and motherboard
40 GB hard drive
512 MB Ram
SIS graphics card (http://www.xabre.com/)
A reviewer at E3 commented that "the $299 unit, on display at the show, struggled to run Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit 2. The game, released in 2002, couldn't manage a steady frame-rate, and sometimes dropped to completely unplayable levels, if only for a few seconds."
So no, there would be no point in buying one for parts.
Next-Generation systems need to blow all current systems out of the water. This one appears to struggle to keep up. Sad.
The Phantom seems to focus on one thing: online game distribution. The prospect of buying a game online and having it downloaded to a computer is a compelling one... one that should have happened years ago. Honestly, I would rather see the Phantom integrated as a part of a computer distribution running regular PC games, rather than trying to make a palladiumesque black box, but the idea is sound. Honestly, if I could pay 3 dollars to rent Elite Force II tonight, I probably would have. That kind of impulse availability of games is just cool. Plus pushed demos is just a fun marketing idea.
I guess the Phantom reminds me of alt-get on Debian, and that is a compelling feature.
Neither console will survive, of course... 300 dollars gets you a system that barely scrapes out min-spec on games released last year. But I hope Microsoft and Sony are taking notes.
I doubt we would abduct the inhabitants. History would show that's unlikely. How many Native Americans do you see wandering around the UK, or Aztecs in Barcelona? And now that we have become more advanced than our savage, killing predescessors, likely we will just put them up in tin shacks, make them ashamed of their nakedness, and force them to "work" for "money" to buy food while not actually providing jobs.
Yes, our enlightened species would bring great things to these indiginous aliens. Wonders such as US approved democracy, shortsighted environmental regulation, and the commoditization of all things living and dead. The few "dollars" eked out by the free labor of the alien races could be brought right back to their liberators by making our race fashionable to their youngsters. Our race would be fashionable to their youngsters because we would be the haves which they fantisize they could become. We would bring them Brittany Spears, Coca-Cola, and C#. They would bring us chests full of gold. This synergistic relationship would be cemented into the rules of their law, and we would enjoy the bounty of their royalty-free culture.
The DISCover® game console is the only game console designed to play PC games instead of video games.
XBox? Indrema? Phantom? Pippin? I know there is a necessary threshold of bs when reading press releases, and I know we're supposed to swallow more than this, but the lack of knowledge doesn't bode well.
Besides, that threshold is quickly exceeded.
The Pentium®4, along with today's graphic and audio processors allow for PC games with awesome visual and audio effects.
Here comes that threshold. According to the Gamers.com article, the $300 price tag will get you a Via processor, not the touted intel P4. For a P4, you need to pay $700, or roughly the cost of a P4 system. And there is an even MORE expensive version in the pipeline, with TIVO capability. Do you expect "awesome visual and audio effects" from that $200 Wallmart machine?
There are thousands PC games, far more than video games, in proprietary formats (i.e. PlayStation2 and Xbox). And the best games are made for the PC.
Bad punctuation aside, how many of those games are worth playing? You too can have 9,999 Bust-A-Move clones on your own device! AAA titles are as rare on the PC as they are on the PS2, as they both require large development houses and a large outlay in manpower to create.
Until now serious gamers were required to install and run computer programs on a PC. With DISCover's patented technology, the PC is no longer the only place to play PC games. PC games, with their dazzling graphics and stunning audio, can now be played on a TV hassle free.
They patented video out to a TV? Or did they patent playing games from an installer without actually installing. Did they do anything to deserve a patent on playing PC games on a TV? Commodore 64? TV-Out? XBox? Linux on PS?
As a game console, DISCover® is connected to a TV, not to a computer monitor. To play any one of thousands of PC games on TV, you simply Drop the game in the DISCover® and play.
BTW, standard TVs run at a maximum resolution of 640 x 480 interlaced. Many modern computer games don't even support a resolution that low. In other words, games will not look nearly as good on your TV as they do on a computer monitor.
Picking apart their press releases aside, I fail to see the point of this console. It plays PC games, so it is redundant to anyone who owns a gaming PC. It plays on a television, so graphics will be inferior. What they appear to be trying to do is sell a PC gaming machine to console people by telling them that consoles, in short, suck. That's like trying to gain votes for the democratic party by calling the republicans inferior and stupid, and wondering why people don't feel swayed by your compelling arguments.
But don't let me say it: Let's hear from their own mouths.
Markets: Our market is the digital interactive entertainment market, in particular the $9 billion game markets. Individuals who would enjoy playing PC games on their TV are the specific target in this market. At the low-end of the market are video gamers who would like to move up to PC games (ages 12-25); at the high end of the are PC gamers who would like to move from their computer monitor to their big-screen home-theater (ages 25-45). The middle market is made up of those who would like PC games and other PC entertainment on their TV, as well as having a DVD, DVR and movies on demand.
On the one hand, you have young people who want to play PC games, but who can't afford a PC. Because targeting markets with no money is the right way to launch a product. On the other hand, you have people with money and high-end theater systems, but who haven't discovered their high-tech PC comes standard with an SVideo out port. And finally, you have those people who are swarming out to buy a set-top box, to rent movies-on-demand and to buzzword their buzzword with B.U.Z. and W.R.D. disks.
Then you are just comparing crumple zones. We all know that having crumple zones is a good thing... That has been proven for years. They expand the moment of impact, which lowers force exerted upon passengers at a linear rate.
What you should do is collide two moving vehicles of different weight. If you collide two 3k lb cars together at 50 mph, the energy from the collision will cancel and both drivers will come to a dead stop. If, on the other hand, you collide a 10k lb vehicle and a 1k lb vehicle, the 1k lb vehicle will have the lower of the two energies. Without pulling out my old physics textbook, that means that after the collision, the driver of the 10k car will still be going about 45 mph in the original direction of travel, but the driver of the 1k car will be traveling 45 mph in the opposite direction, for a velocity change of 95 MPH during the moment of impact. 5 MPH vs 95 MPH... Who is going to survive this crash?
Don't be so fast to shout bullshit.
-Chris
P.S. The passengers of the car don't feel the force of the kinetic energy of the opposing car during a crash, they feel the force of the kinetic energy the car they are in exerts upon them in response to the force of the second car. The mass of the car you are in is very important to the overall equation.
You too can own your own copy of Windows XP SP2! Just 99.95 (per year) gets you a full suite of new abilities such as an enhanced notepad with integrated spellcheck feature, an easier control panel system with automatic user-input correction, an integrated desktop launch bar, and automatic digital video camera detection for your digital lifestyle. A revamped Internet Explorer now features "Tabbed Browsing," a revolutionary first in Internet Experiences brought to you by the innovators at Microsoft. And you get security patches that prevent the Skynet virus from becoming self-aware and launching nuclear weapons against humanity's densely populated cities. And themes! SP2 contains over 20 new windows themes for you to choose from. With such desktops as "Daisy Sunshine," "Piano Blues," and "Where do you want to go today?" you are sure to find a style that fits any taste.
Remember, when you don't upgrade your software, you support the destruction of all mankind at the hands of The Machines.
Why is everyone focusing on the tremendous legal shortcomings of his plan, and nobody is focusing on the severe financial problems?
Essentially, he wants to sell a startup for 200 million dollars, then split the stock 6 times while retaining the original stock price. Not only would his company be worth 12 billion dollars, but the incentive for early investment would be exclusively based around the entry of new stock investors and not in the financial value of the company. And this fresh investment would provide the financial capital that would drive the company.
Can you say pyramid? I knew you could.
Furthermore, at 10 CD's per year at 50 cents each gross revenue would be about 6 million per year but the cost of all of those Visa transactions would be about 5 million of that... and that's just what Visa would charge you, not your accountants, your billpay system, your backlog of unpaid bills, etc.
In short, neither of Cringely's proposed revenue systems will actually produce revenue. Complete illegality aside, there would be nothing to power the company. Nice try, but he needs some new economist friends to go along with better lawyer friends.
That is where morality comes into play. Your goal isn't specifically to eat ewoks or sell out the Mudokans... your goal is your choice. A person in a MMPORPG will feel bad when PKed because he has lost experience, gold, and a sum of his time towards his goal, whatever that may be.
I agree that nobody should feel guilty for fragging a point leader. But one should feel guilty if one DDOSes the point leader in order to win. There are certain roads that are immoral to take in the achieving of one's goals. Just because videogames change both the goals and the morality of the situation doesn't mean that the morality has been moved. The closer the videogame attempts to ape the situations found in life, the closer the resulting morality template will be. Characters in stories can act immorally even though they are characters. As a player in the role of a character you too should feel emotional ramifications of your decisions.
Listen. I've been working 17 hour days for the last few weeks. I don't sleep much. Hopefully we will be ready to ship soon, and I can return to reading my usual diet of political rhetoric and sociological texts. In the meantime you are going to have to accept the misspelling of one bloody word.
Sequel.
According to my Compact Edition (unabridged) Oxford English Dictionary, that's the only word misspelled in my two previous posts. Reinvisioning isn't a word proper, but as invision refers to a lack of sight it can be considered a witty jab at the lack of social consciousness of the game referenced.
Thank you for pointing out my mistake in such a helpful and mature fashion. I could point out that it is impossible to "get off slashdot," but such a thing would be like burning a letter because the messenger was ugly. Besides, someday you too will discover prepositions. In the meantime I can't thank you enough for your helpful commentary. I wonder why it wasn't modded "Score 5: Insightful"?
Reality is not defined by rocks but by the presence of people. Setting another player back an hour just to acquire a little gold should make you feel guilty, as while the wound is virtual the choice made is real.
Even fantasy is, to some degree, echoes of experiences with people. The Ilthorian mentioned in a previous poster's comments is a stand in for a very real situation we have probably all faced in our lives: Do we add our voice to a chorous of tourments for sake of personal gain or do we sacrifice our social status for the benefit of another? Whether or not we have emotionally injured a person is secondary to whether or not we chose to injure. The physical damage is less important than the insight into one's character, and such insights should evoke feelings.
Films are very different than videogames, in that one does not choose what happens: one only watches the outcome. If a person goes to watch a Hannibal Lectre movie about eating people, their conscious should be clean. They, after all, didn't initiate the action. But if one choses to eat ewoks alive, killing the character and booting the user permanently from the server, one should rightfully feel guilty. If one chose to sell out the Mudokans to their fate in order to save their own hide, one should feel guilty. If one chose to beat their virtual pet whenever they were having a bad day, one should feel guilty.
On the one hand, GTA 3 was a reinvisioning of the series, not a sequal so much as a remake. On the other hand, if you had actually read all of my post you would note that GTA3 was both released a full 3 years after GTA2 and had a much higher relative quality level, both of which would account for higher sales under the given equation. The "law" as stated in text was merely a statement of the recognition that one cannot milk a series forever.
Vice City is just an expansion pack. It was released 5 months after the original, and contains almost zero original code. Rockstar doesn't count it as a true sequal, and neither do I.
Companies in the gaming industry are starting to catch on to the law of diminishing sequals. The law states that the first game will blow all sales records and the second game will also have strong sales. The third game will show good sales, the fourth: a generous OK. The fifth game will be lucky to break even. The longer between sequals, the better the sales. The better the quality, the better the sales.
Mathematically speaking, this law can be paraphrased as
This sequal sales = last sequal sales * ( current quality / previous quality ) * Years between release / 2
The problem is that when figuring out if another sequel is warranted, developers usually take the 1st release sales figures into account, not the last, and try to minimize the time between releases to get the gaming goodies as quickly as possible. Bad news: Mega Man X8 sold poorly. Do the math.
What the industry needs is more seeds. More Ape Escape 1's and more Deceptions. More titles that sell millions because they are new, not because they are sequels. Sadly, though, this is difficult when all magazines cover is buzz, and buzz is hard to generate for a game that nobody has ever heard of let alone played.
You can't rely upon luck for quality, but you can't take it on faith that hard work will pay off. I don't know of a single game developer that doesn't put in 60-80 hour weeks, doesn't want their game to be the greatest ever, and doesn't sweat the small stuff. But the fact of the matter is that many games get released that had tremendous years of effort and the backing of some of the greatest minds in the industry and still aren't very good. MOO3 comes to mind. It was a highly polished, highly intricate game that just fell flat. Perhaps I should have said "fun" instead of quality, but in my book the two are synonomous.
As for "trying to innovate," innovations take far more luck than fun or quality. For every Street Fighter, there are 100 Wild 9's, and even more innovative games that were canceled by the publisher. What 3D realms is trying to release is the best FPS game they can, not the most innovative: that's why they have been working on existing engines rather than coding their own.
The success of a game does involve a great deal of luck. Daiktana was a horrible failure, yet the disregarded branch of Ion Storm created the wonderful Deus Ex. Did they work harder than the other branch? Were they better funded? No, they worked their tails off just as much as the rest of Ion Storm, but they had a great game idea and they shipped while it was still fresh.
A lot of great developers have failed. Perhaps chalking one up to luck is a defense mechanism that we all need to survive in this industry.
While effects look more and more correct, they get less and less believeable because they are shot with less and less skill. If the trees storming Isengard scene was filmed in the 80's, it would have been carefully choreographed with a lot of low-angle shots, quick clips of moving branches, reaction shots, etc. Now it gets rendered from above in a single sweeping shot that doesn't do anything to bring people into the experience. Revolutions suffered from the same fate: the scene with the clone Smiths was such an unbelieveable and unreal event that they should have humanized it, filming it with a minimum of effects, and never allowing the camera to drift from within 1 foot of the characters. Instead it was shot artlessly, largely from over-the-head shots, and without any attempt to make believeable what was happening. Just because every individual frame looks right doesn't mean that the overall scene will have believeable movement or human depth.
The best effect from Matrix: Revolutions was the multiple moniters setup in god's apartment. That effect was in service of the human aspect of the story, and worked well. The action scenes in the original Matrix all served the human aspect of the story, and therefore worked well ("Do you think that's air you're breathing? Hm?"). The terminator worked in T2 because he was playing the role of Data: an exploration of how far a machine can become a person without losing its identity.
3D rendering doesn't necessarily have to be a bad thing. Gollum is the perfect example of this: he is a character with redeeming value done in CG. The same thing for the T-Rex in Jurrassic Park.
In some ways this early generation of 3D artists has forgotten the lessons of filmmakers past: never pull back to show all of a set, never film from above your characters heads, always obscure parts of the scene even if you don't have to, maximize impact on the audience not the size of your explosions, and always make your effects service the human aspect of your film. If we can see more of this kind of CG, then it will have come into its own.
...3D Realms will not release the game until they are sure it is the best first person shooter ever.
3D Realms will not release the game until their publisher gets fed up with footing their bill without any resulting product. 3D Realms will be forced to foot their own bill, and go broke or finish. See Ion Storm for more information.
And also some comments by Joe Siegler: "If we had wanted some quickie piece of crap, it would have been out ages ago. It takes time to innovate - it doesn't take any time to shovel any old crap out there. Since we are not a publically held company, we aren't beholden to the same things that some big companies hold their development teams to, hence we can afford to take the time to make a quality product. Besides, once it's released, no one will care how long it took, they'll care that they have a cool fun game."
Quality products have been made, recieved sequals, and fallen into squallor in the time that 3D Realms has been working on this title. Quality takes time: 3 years. But quality also takes luck. In the now 7 years of development that Duke Nukem Forever has been undergoing, 3D Realms could have released 3 FPSs, one of which might have had that elusive magical all-togetherness that makes games great.
You can't simply throw more development time at the problem of quality... at some point you need to throw out what you have done and start over. You can do this as the DNF people have been doing and release nothing, or you can release what you have done, and move on with your life.
Put in low-enough LOD models and a prioritized effects system and it could be done on a VooDoo 2. The difficulty is that nobody wants to pay artists to do 8-step LOD models, nor do the programmers want their beautiful particle systems scaled back to one particle per second.
There isn't any reason why Doom 3 couldn't have a version that runs on anything and looks like junk... But who would want to pay to develop that?
Slashdot Mirror
You can use old laptops for this. For not too much money you can also get a backlit PDA and synchronize it automatically with an existing PDA (copy over the folder). Use a "keep it lit" hackmaster extension and your clock program of choice... Map Avant Go's weather station to one of the buttons, and you have basically what you are describing. You would have to shell out a few hundred for MP3 and audio streams, but for 50 bucks used you could have the best clock ever.
Have a group of kids who have never worked on Linux before (but who want to help) be told the inputs, the outputs, and what should happen in the middle. Rewrite from scratch. No Copyright infringement, because you cannot create a derivative work without seeing the original.
Problem solved.
However, as another reader mentioned, there could be other great applications for this sort of embedded system with network patching and such, but the XPEmbedded licence pretty much spoils that.
Could you expand on this? I'm not familiar with the limitations of the XPE licence... How would it spoil network patching, etc?
I have been involved in the development of several full games (though not as a programmer), both PC and console, so I will interject.
The design, artwork, and programming all go to some degree in parallel. And it is very true that many aspects of the process can be brought across platforms. But programming and debugging, once you hit the optimization phase, becomes problematic. Optimizations can cause problems on one console but not another, and fixes for such problems can break the first one. Keeping two computers perfectly synchronized for online play is quite a task, but keeping them synchronized on different operating systems is a nightmare.
My company has as many programmers and QA people as artists and designers. Don't underestimate the difficulty of such a task. And remember, that additional 5% sales you get from the other OS may be counterbalanced by lost sales due to missing your ship date, which can total millions of dollars per week. When numbers like that become involved, people start to believe that they would be better off tasking their programmers to making the game better on one platform, rather than trying to reach that last bit of audience.
And honestly, I can't fault them for that decision. Build a better game on the dominant platform or an engine that can reach the niche markets? If you are in the market of selling engines (like Id), your decision is clear. For the rest of us, we just want to make the best games we can.
Further reading of the patent appears to limit it to
A: CD-Rom media
B: a hash derived from the file table of the media
C: a Telivision monitor (not HDTV)
D: something that does not require an external check for installation scripts
And amusingly enough a snippet of the Patent "In addition, the video converter card does not address the user interface problem; namely, a typical personal computer keyboard and mouse are extremely inconvenient, if not totally unworkable, for a home user sitting on a comfortable couch and watching a large screen television several feet away. These drawbacks may be major deterrents for the home consumer. "
(the DISCover ships with a keyboard and mouse)
If I'm not forgetting a finer point of patent law, doesn't this mean that anyone can create an insert-and-run game system so long as they use a binary search tree (and not a table) to store the relevant data?
Just pointing out, what is listed is the specs for the high-end machine. The 300 dollar machine specs with
A Via CPU and motherboard
40 GB hard drive
512 MB Ram
SIS graphics card (http://www.xabre.com/)
A reviewer at E3 commented that "the $299 unit, on display at the show, struggled to run Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit 2. The game, released in 2002, couldn't manage a steady frame-rate, and sometimes dropped to completely unplayable levels, if only for a few seconds."
So no, there would be no point in buying one for parts.
Next-Generation systems need to blow all current systems out of the water. This one appears to struggle to keep up. Sad.
The Phantom seems to focus on one thing: online game distribution. The prospect of buying a game online and having it downloaded to a computer is a compelling one... one that should have happened years ago. Honestly, I would rather see the Phantom integrated as a part of a computer distribution running regular PC games, rather than trying to make a palladiumesque black box, but the idea is sound. Honestly, if I could pay 3 dollars to rent Elite Force II tonight, I probably would have. That kind of impulse availability of games is just cool. Plus pushed demos is just a fun marketing idea.
I guess the Phantom reminds me of alt-get on Debian, and that is a compelling feature.
Neither console will survive, of course... 300 dollars gets you a system that barely scrapes out min-spec on games released last year. But I hope Microsoft and Sony are taking notes.
I doubt we would abduct the inhabitants. History would show that's unlikely. How many Native Americans do you see wandering around the UK, or Aztecs in Barcelona? And now that we have become more advanced than our savage, killing predescessors, likely we will just put them up in tin shacks, make them ashamed of their nakedness, and force them to "work" for "money" to buy food while not actually providing jobs.
Yes, our enlightened species would bring great things to these indiginous aliens. Wonders such as US approved democracy, shortsighted environmental regulation, and the commoditization of all things living and dead. The few "dollars" eked out by the free labor of the alien races could be brought right back to their liberators by making our race fashionable to their youngsters. Our race would be fashionable to their youngsters because we would be the haves which they fantisize they could become. We would bring them Brittany Spears, Coca-Cola, and C#. They would bring us chests full of gold. This synergistic relationship would be cemented into the rules of their law, and we would enjoy the bounty of their royalty-free culture.
Amen
The DISCover® game console is the only game console designed to play PC games instead of video games.
XBox? Indrema? Phantom? Pippin? I know there is a necessary threshold of bs when reading press releases, and I know we're supposed to swallow more than this, but the lack of knowledge doesn't bode well.
Besides, that threshold is quickly exceeded.
The Pentium®4, along with today's graphic and audio processors allow for PC games with awesome visual and audio effects.
Here comes that threshold. According to the Gamers.com article, the $300 price tag will get you a Via processor, not the touted intel P4. For a P4, you need to pay $700, or roughly the cost of a P4 system. And there is an even MORE expensive version in the pipeline, with TIVO capability. Do you expect "awesome visual and audio effects" from that $200 Wallmart machine?
There are thousands PC games, far more than video games, in proprietary formats (i.e. PlayStation2 and Xbox). And the best games are made for the PC.
Bad punctuation aside, how many of those games are worth playing? You too can have 9,999 Bust-A-Move clones on your own device! AAA titles are as rare on the PC as they are on the PS2, as they both require large development houses and a large outlay in manpower to create.
Until now serious gamers were required to install and run computer programs on a PC. With DISCover's patented technology, the PC is no longer the only place to play PC games. PC games, with their dazzling graphics and stunning audio, can now be played on a TV hassle free.
They patented video out to a TV? Or did they patent playing games from an installer without actually installing. Did they do anything to deserve a patent on playing PC games on a TV? Commodore 64? TV-Out? XBox? Linux on PS?
As a game console, DISCover® is connected to a TV, not to a computer monitor. To play any one of thousands of PC games on TV, you simply Drop the game in the DISCover® and play.
BTW, standard TVs run at a maximum resolution of 640 x 480 interlaced. Many modern computer games don't even support a resolution that low. In other words, games will not look nearly as good on your TV as they do on a computer monitor.
Picking apart their press releases aside, I fail to see the point of this console. It plays PC games, so it is redundant to anyone who owns a gaming PC. It plays on a television, so graphics will be inferior. What they appear to be trying to do is sell a PC gaming machine to console people by telling them that consoles, in short, suck. That's like trying to gain votes for the democratic party by calling the republicans inferior and stupid, and wondering why people don't feel swayed by your compelling arguments.
But don't let me say it: Let's hear from their own mouths.
Markets: Our market is the digital interactive entertainment market, in particular the $9 billion game markets. Individuals who would enjoy playing PC games on their TV are the specific target in this market. At the low-end of the market are video gamers who would like to move up to PC games (ages 12-25); at the high end of the are PC gamers who would like to move from their computer monitor to their big-screen home-theater (ages 25-45). The middle market is made up of those who would like PC games and other PC entertainment on their TV, as well as having a DVD, DVR and movies on demand.
On the one hand, you have young people who want to play PC games, but who can't afford a PC. Because targeting markets with no money is the right way to launch a product. On the other hand, you have people with money and high-end theater systems, but who haven't discovered their high-tech PC comes standard with an SVideo out port. And finally, you have those people who are swarming out to buy a set-top box, to rent movies-on-demand and to buzzword their buzzword with B.U.Z. and W.R.D. disks.
There are other problems: One
Then you are just comparing crumple zones. We all know that having crumple zones is a good thing... That has been proven for years. They expand the moment of impact, which lowers force exerted upon passengers at a linear rate.
What you should do is collide two moving vehicles of different weight. If you collide two 3k lb cars together at 50 mph, the energy from the collision will cancel and both drivers will come to a dead stop. If, on the other hand, you collide a 10k lb vehicle and a 1k lb vehicle, the 1k lb vehicle will have the lower of the two energies. Without pulling out my old physics textbook, that means that after the collision, the driver of the 10k car will still be going about 45 mph in the original direction of travel, but the driver of the 1k car will be traveling 45 mph in the opposite direction, for a velocity change of 95 MPH during the moment of impact. 5 MPH vs 95 MPH... Who is going to survive this crash?
Don't be so fast to shout bullshit.
-Chris
P.S. The passengers of the car don't feel the force of the kinetic energy of the opposing car during a crash, they feel the force of the kinetic energy the car they are in exerts upon them in response to the force of the second car. The mass of the car you are in is very important to the overall equation.
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Brought to you by Microsoft.
Microsoft: There is no Fate.
Why is everyone focusing on the tremendous legal shortcomings of his plan, and nobody is focusing on the severe financial problems?
Essentially, he wants to sell a startup for 200 million dollars, then split the stock 6 times while retaining the original stock price. Not only would his company be worth 12 billion dollars, but the incentive for early investment would be exclusively based around the entry of new stock investors and not in the financial value of the company. And this fresh investment would provide the financial capital that would drive the company.
Can you say pyramid? I knew you could.
Furthermore, at 10 CD's per year at 50 cents each gross revenue would be about 6 million per year but the cost of all of those Visa transactions would be about 5 million of that... and that's just what Visa would charge you, not your accountants, your billpay system, your backlog of unpaid bills, etc.
In short, neither of Cringely's proposed revenue systems will actually produce revenue. Complete illegality aside, there would be nothing to power the company. Nice try, but he needs some new economist friends to go along with better lawyer friends.
The combination of dry wit and knowledge is refreshing at this late hour. Thank you for the laugh, and the insight.
I had meant to say "[it] doesn't mean that morality has been REmoved."
That is where morality comes into play. Your goal isn't specifically to eat ewoks or sell out the Mudokans... your goal is your choice. A person in a MMPORPG will feel bad when PKed because he has lost experience, gold, and a sum of his time towards his goal, whatever that may be.
I agree that nobody should feel guilty for fragging a point leader. But one should feel guilty if one DDOSes the point leader in order to win. There are certain roads that are immoral to take in the achieving of one's goals. Just because videogames change both the goals and the morality of the situation doesn't mean that the morality has been moved. The closer the videogame attempts to ape the situations found in life, the closer the resulting morality template will be. Characters in stories can act immorally even though they are characters. As a player in the role of a character you too should feel emotional ramifications of your decisions.
Listen. I've been working 17 hour days for the last few weeks. I don't sleep much. Hopefully we will be ready to ship soon, and I can return to reading my usual diet of political rhetoric and sociological texts. In the meantime you are going to have to accept the misspelling of one bloody word.
Sequel.
According to my Compact Edition (unabridged) Oxford English Dictionary, that's the only word misspelled in my two previous posts. Reinvisioning isn't a word proper, but as invision refers to a lack of sight it can be considered a witty jab at the lack of social consciousness of the game referenced.
Thank you for pointing out my mistake in such a helpful and mature fashion. I could point out that it is impossible to "get off slashdot," but such a thing would be like burning a letter because the messenger was ugly. Besides, someday you too will discover prepositions. In the meantime I can't thank you enough for your helpful commentary. I wonder why it wasn't modded "Score 5: Insightful"?
My mistake. I was going by PC release dates.
Reality is not defined by rocks but by the presence of people. Setting another player back an hour just to acquire a little gold should make you feel guilty, as while the wound is virtual the choice made is real.
Even fantasy is, to some degree, echoes of experiences with people. The Ilthorian mentioned in a previous poster's comments is a stand in for a very real situation we have probably all faced in our lives: Do we add our voice to a chorous of tourments for sake of personal gain or do we sacrifice our social status for the benefit of another? Whether or not we have emotionally injured a person is secondary to whether or not we chose to injure. The physical damage is less important than the insight into one's character, and such insights should evoke feelings.
Films are very different than videogames, in that one does not choose what happens: one only watches the outcome. If a person goes to watch a Hannibal Lectre movie about eating people, their conscious should be clean. They, after all, didn't initiate the action. But if one choses to eat ewoks alive, killing the character and booting the user permanently from the server, one should rightfully feel guilty. If one chose to sell out the Mudokans to their fate in order to save their own hide, one should feel guilty. If one chose to beat their virtual pet whenever they were having a bad day, one should feel guilty.
Guilt is not a question of damage, but character.
On the one hand, GTA 3 was a reinvisioning of the series, not a sequal so much as a remake. On the other hand, if you had actually read all of my post you would note that GTA3 was both released a full 3 years after GTA2 and had a much higher relative quality level, both of which would account for higher sales under the given equation. The "law" as stated in text was merely a statement of the recognition that one cannot milk a series forever.
Vice City is just an expansion pack. It was released 5 months after the original, and contains almost zero original code. Rockstar doesn't count it as a true sequal, and neither do I.
Companies in the gaming industry are starting to catch on to the law of diminishing sequals. The law states that the first game will blow all sales records and the second game will also have strong sales. The third game will show good sales, the fourth: a generous OK. The fifth game will be lucky to break even. The longer between sequals, the better the sales. The better the quality, the better the sales.
Mathematically speaking, this law can be paraphrased as
This sequal sales = last sequal sales * ( current quality / previous quality ) * Years between release / 2
The problem is that when figuring out if another sequel is warranted, developers usually take the 1st release sales figures into account, not the last, and try to minimize the time between releases to get the gaming goodies as quickly as possible. Bad news: Mega Man X8 sold poorly. Do the math.
What the industry needs is more seeds. More Ape Escape 1's and more Deceptions. More titles that sell millions because they are new, not because they are sequels. Sadly, though, this is difficult when all magazines cover is buzz, and buzz is hard to generate for a game that nobody has ever heard of let alone played.
Now I'm off to chat on the Worms 3D forums.
You can't rely upon luck for quality, but you can't take it on faith that hard work will pay off. I don't know of a single game developer that doesn't put in 60-80 hour weeks, doesn't want their game to be the greatest ever, and doesn't sweat the small stuff. But the fact of the matter is that many games get released that had tremendous years of effort and the backing of some of the greatest minds in the industry and still aren't very good. MOO3 comes to mind. It was a highly polished, highly intricate game that just fell flat. Perhaps I should have said "fun" instead of quality, but in my book the two are synonomous.
As for "trying to innovate," innovations take far more luck than fun or quality. For every Street Fighter, there are 100 Wild 9's, and even more innovative games that were canceled by the publisher. What 3D realms is trying to release is the best FPS game they can, not the most innovative: that's why they have been working on existing engines rather than coding their own.
The success of a game does involve a great deal of luck. Daiktana was a horrible failure, yet the disregarded branch of Ion Storm created the wonderful Deus Ex. Did they work harder than the other branch? Were they better funded? No, they worked their tails off just as much as the rest of Ion Storm, but they had a great game idea and they shipped while it was still fresh.
A lot of great developers have failed. Perhaps chalking one up to luck is a defense mechanism that we all need to survive in this industry.
-Chris
While effects look more and more correct, they get less and less believeable because they are shot with less and less skill. If the trees storming Isengard scene was filmed in the 80's, it would have been carefully choreographed with a lot of low-angle shots, quick clips of moving branches, reaction shots, etc. Now it gets rendered from above in a single sweeping shot that doesn't do anything to bring people into the experience. Revolutions suffered from the same fate: the scene with the clone Smiths was such an unbelieveable and unreal event that they should have humanized it, filming it with a minimum of effects, and never allowing the camera to drift from within 1 foot of the characters. Instead it was shot artlessly, largely from over-the-head shots, and without any attempt to make believeable what was happening. Just because every individual frame looks right doesn't mean that the overall scene will have believeable movement or human depth.
The best effect from Matrix: Revolutions was the multiple moniters setup in god's apartment. That effect was in service of the human aspect of the story, and worked well. The action scenes in the original Matrix all served the human aspect of the story, and therefore worked well ("Do you think that's air you're breathing? Hm?"). The terminator worked in T2 because he was playing the role of Data: an exploration of how far a machine can become a person without losing its identity.
3D rendering doesn't necessarily have to be a bad thing. Gollum is the perfect example of this: he is a character with redeeming value done in CG. The same thing for the T-Rex in Jurrassic Park.
In some ways this early generation of 3D artists has forgotten the lessons of filmmakers past: never pull back to show all of a set, never film from above your characters heads, always obscure parts of the scene even if you don't have to, maximize impact on the audience not the size of your explosions, and always make your effects service the human aspect of your film. If we can see more of this kind of CG, then it will have come into its own.
I hope this will come sooner rather than later.
-Chris
...3D Realms will not release the game until they are sure it is the best first person shooter ever.
3D Realms will not release the game until their publisher gets fed up with footing their bill without any resulting product. 3D Realms will be forced to foot their own bill, and go broke or finish. See Ion Storm for more information.
And also some comments by Joe Siegler: "If we had wanted some quickie piece of crap, it would have been out ages ago. It takes time to innovate - it doesn't take any time to shovel any old crap out there. Since we are not a publically held company, we aren't beholden to the same things that some big companies hold their development teams to, hence we can afford to take the time to make a quality product. Besides, once it's released, no one will care how long it took, they'll care that they have a cool fun game."
Quality products have been made, recieved sequals, and fallen into squallor in the time that 3D Realms has been working on this title. Quality takes time: 3 years. But quality also takes luck. In the now 7 years of development that Duke Nukem Forever has been undergoing, 3D Realms could have released 3 FPSs, one of which might have had that elusive magical all-togetherness that makes games great.
You can't simply throw more development time at the problem of quality... at some point you need to throw out what you have done and start over. You can do this as the DNF people have been doing and release nothing, or you can release what you have done, and move on with your life.
Put in low-enough LOD models and a prioritized effects system and it could be done on a VooDoo 2. The difficulty is that nobody wants to pay artists to do 8-step LOD models, nor do the programmers want their beautiful particle systems scaled back to one particle per second.
There isn't any reason why Doom 3 couldn't have a version that runs on anything and looks like junk... But who would want to pay to develop that?