Im not sure I understand your point. Are you saying that Quake isnt tolerant of slow ping? Or that it is? I don't think of quake as a massively multiplayer game anyway, those would be ones like EverQuest and Asheron's Call.
I would add to this that the game engine itself is actually the easy part. Game content as in game logic, artwork, music etc for a game that is saleable quality is a huge amount of work, an order of maginitude bigger than the game engine.
This is a great explanation of multiplayer game design!
I would only flag that the choice of using UDP is not necessarily correct. I read an article a long while back that surveyed various game publishers and concluded that UDP was not a win. Simplistically, the logic goes that you end up re-implementing the TCP stack logic in your game, only generally with lots of bugs. Also, in some instances TCP will pass through a firewall where UDP will not.
In my view, the bottom line is that LAG is real, and UDP won't get rid of it. Your game needs to be tolerant of LAG in the thousands of milliseconds anyway, so the benefit of using UDP is limited in real significance, the but complexity of 'getting it right' will add many many hours of development time to your game and may be the straw that breaks the camels back.
I made a 3d game engine and in my cleverness, I figured I'd reduce load on the server by offloading the physics asynchronously onto the clients. I learned the hard way that THIS WONT WORK. The reason is that different floating point processors get slightly different answers in some instances. Indeed, if all processors are the same stepping of the same intel processor, you'll be fine, however for example an Athlon might in some rare circumstance be different by the very last decimal point from an Intel. The butterfly effect will eventually catch up to you and the Athlon machine will for example detect a collision where the intels didn't.
Using emulation or fixed point is either too slow or too inaccurate, so I ended up just doing all the work on the server and doing continual sychronization.
To be more precise, in order to smooth out 'lag' time, the clients would do their own emulation, but would resychronize all decisions on the 'heartbeat'. Using interpolation, this worked out to have great apparent lag response, even lag times of 3 seconds were smoothed out. The only problem then was when a client's lag was unstable, fluctuating a lot. I smoothed this out by emulating a 1 second lag in all circumstance, so everyone has a smoothed out lag response which isn't too bad to play. Only unstable lag of 2 seconds or more caused a problem, where that client would see his character jump around everytime synchronization kicked in.
At http://www.fusor.net they have a forum on building your own fusion device. Not very useful for much, but it will generate neutrons. Hmmm..what could you do with a device that generates lots of neutrons...
I thought this survey was a joke. Or rather a PR stunt. I hope it is. The multiple choice options represent no rational choices, and the number rating system is surely designed to create random survey results.
If this survey represents in any way the thinking at NASA, then the US's space future is doomed.
Its frustrating to even ponder whats wrong with the questions. They seem to be picked as if the space program is just imaginary government bluster with no purpose behind it.
Take the first set about the future of the planetary exploratory program. Each one is something to do, but not connected to a philosophy or plan. Sure you can study the origins of the Solar system or look for life, but there is no reason or scheme expressed as to why this would be the right thing to do. They are just random data points can't form any sort of rational approach.
Question 2 reminds me of that game: would you rather be poked in the eye or eat a bug?
The last is a list of things with the word mission behind it. What does it mean?
The entire rest of the questionaire is pure demographics info.
Many of the posters here have mentioned that Nash was a "bisexual, schizophrenic, deadbeat dad" not deserving the lovable storyline. This really hacks me off! Have you people learned nothing? Bisexuality is a natural fact, nothing to be ashamed of..and nothing to be scorned. Also, schizophrenia is a mental disorder, again something not to be stigmantized but something to be dealt with as a disease. Dead-beat dad? Well ok but that guy was bat-out-of-his-gourd for most of his life so maybe his priorities werent exactly in order. In his day, there was no viable treatment for schizophrenia, just a bunch of pseudoscience mumbo-jumbo that probably just made things worse.
That fact is the man, flaws and all, made some major contributions to mathematics despite serious personal difficulty.
You seem to have interpreted my meaning 180 degrees out of phase with what I intended. My point wasn't that if you didn't notice the differences you were a loser, but rather don't be sucked in by peer pressure to buy a $100,000 home theatre that you don't appreciate yourself. I too know many individuals who have paid top dollar for systems they in fact couldnt distinguish from a bottom-of-line system. One guy I know who bought a 20k system had it set to fit the picture to a conventional screen, so the picture was all horizontally squished. He would show the thing off to everyone and talk about how good it is for months, yet never noticed something so horribly obvious.
Nor in fact did I imply that I myself am a videophile, I'm not particularly and that is why I don't own an HDTV.
I have shopped around for HDTVs for quite some time now, and have not decided on buying one. Mainly because of the high cost and lack of much content.
The main note I have to make is that most of the so-called HDTVs are crap. The only ones I've seen that are quality are also very expensive. If you can't tell the difference, heck, buy the cheap one. But if you can't tell the difference I say, why bother? It gives you bragging rights perhaps, buy you are not a "video-phile" and don't really appreciate the benefits anyway.
The main complaints I have with them is the lack of actual resolution (dont believe the ads, *look* at it), bad viewing angle, and abominable "back-lighting" that leaves a halo on the picture.
You can buy one of these at the toy store!
on
Coffee-Powered Batteries
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I was at a Toy store [Imaginarium] last night and they were selling a clock that runs on Potatoes..or a whole list of things, one of them being coffee grounds.
Do you know the history of the "MS-DOS" days? I think not! Most of the "MS-DOS days", DOS was owned and operated by IBM! Microsoft stopped developement on MS-DOS after version 2; actual developement from then to version 5 was done by 3rd parties like Zenith, Compaq and IBM. Microsoft was not "stagnant" as it was designing OS/2 and the beginning of NT, as well as a [literally] small project named Windows. Microsoft was at the forefront of trying to supplant DOS! They thought DOS was dead way way before the market did.
Wrong. If you can cut the Gordian knot by running algorithms nondeterministically, NP=P becomes only mathemematical curiosity. In the real world, non-deterministic machines would have a much bigger impact than solving NP-complete.
It must be noted however that a) factoring is not NP-Complete, and the best possible deterministic runtime is unknown and b) a quantum computer is no a non-determistic turing machine, although there are some apparently non-deterministic characteristics to the algorithms we do have.
The old Zone sign in software was buggy and stretched beyond its limits. The only reason they didn't switch to messenger way earlier was the headache of switching everyone. But it had to happen sometime. Messenger is very specialized software designed to meet the needs of millions of people simultaneously; the zone is a hack that was hardly designed and could barely meet the needs of a few thousand.
Thus, the decision to switch makes good technical sense. So put away your conspiracy theories and let them do what they think is right for their customers. You can go do whats right for yours.
People have been making points about how the story could continue given details like the fact the terminated melted himself down. However, there are no problems with any particular story line, since time travel implies alternate futures. How could they one-up the technology in T2? Well, they could have a multi-verse ala "The One" where alternate universe versions of Skynet try to take over all universes.
In any event, there are an infinite number of possible simple stories they could use that would fit just fine, once you allow Time Travel *anything* is possible.
Mr Sterling's manifesto reads a lot like many other anti-establishment whack-job's ramblings. Just as he starts to make a point, he wanders off into anecdotal bits of dead-spy arcana which somehow is supposed to make you think he must know what he's talking about. Except he forgets to ever really say anything that can be grabbed onto so you can say, yeah! you got a point, (or even, hey, that not right).
When it comes right down to it, the culprit is the maturation of the tech industry. Its not so fun anymore, all the low hanging fruit has been picked. And the drama about crypto and spy-hackers that gave geeks a sort of mystery and coolness just never amounted to much, and wishing won't make it so.
Best RPG out today. Actually, the best part is Trials of the Luremaster, a free expansion to Heart of Winter.
IT's not for you!
on
This is IT?
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
This thing is not for rich suburban white guys who hang out on internet all day. Its for postmen and chinamen. Ever been to a crowded asian city? What a nightmare. The elites will definitaly prefer a Segway to other vehicles. The american consumer is probably the last market for this thing.
You say "It is the responsibility of the OS to ensure system stability", but it wasnt always that so. Many people believe that multi-tasking OSs was a blunder. In particular, when it comes to server operation, a single tasking OS makes a lot more sense...the simplicity keeps the MTF way way down.
I have seen many people complain about their cable service; seems like they are never on AT&T though. My experience with AT&T has been nothing short of miraculous. They installed it the day after I ordered it off the web. I get 1M-3M throughput and a near perfect uptime. I used to work at a major software firm and AT&T's reliability is much higher than the internal corporate service I got.
May well be remembered 50 years from now in the same way we still recall the Brothers Grimm. I personally believe that her books are even more compelling than any of the authors listed in the header.
I truly doubt that any technology is "new" to anyone here! We've all seen speech recognition on workstations for decades now. The difference is that the usability of the speech interface is becoming interesting and useful outside the desktop (where its really not that useful).
Re:demo of pocket pc with speech
on
Talking Palm
·
· Score: 1
Slashdot Mirror
Im not sure I understand your point. Are you saying that Quake isnt tolerant of slow ping? Or that it is? I don't think of quake as a massively multiplayer game anyway, those would be ones like EverQuest and Asheron's Call.
I would add to this that the game engine itself is actually the easy part. Game content as in game logic, artwork, music etc for a game that is saleable quality is a huge amount of work, an order of maginitude bigger than the game engine.
This is a great explanation of multiplayer game design!
I would only flag that the choice of using UDP is not necessarily correct. I read an article a long while back that surveyed various game publishers and concluded that UDP was not a win. Simplistically, the logic goes that you end up re-implementing the TCP stack logic in your game, only generally with lots of bugs. Also, in some instances TCP will pass through a firewall where UDP will not.
In my view, the bottom line is that LAG is real, and UDP won't get rid of it. Your game needs to be tolerant of LAG in the thousands of milliseconds anyway, so the benefit of using UDP is limited in real significance, the but complexity of 'getting it right' will add many many hours of development time to your game and may be the straw that breaks the camels back.
I made a 3d game engine and in my cleverness, I figured I'd reduce load on the server by offloading the physics asynchronously onto the clients. I learned the hard way that THIS WONT WORK. The reason is that different floating point processors get slightly different answers in some instances. Indeed, if all processors are the same stepping of the same intel processor, you'll be fine, however for example an Athlon might in some rare circumstance be different by the very last decimal point from an Intel. The butterfly effect will eventually catch up to you and the Athlon machine will for example detect a collision where the intels didn't.
Using emulation or fixed point is either too slow or too inaccurate, so I ended up just doing all the work on the server and doing continual sychronization.
To be more precise, in order to smooth out 'lag' time, the clients would do their own emulation, but would resychronize all decisions on the 'heartbeat'. Using interpolation, this worked out to have great apparent lag response, even lag times of 3 seconds were smoothed out. The only problem then was when a client's lag was unstable, fluctuating a lot. I smoothed this out by emulating a 1 second lag in all circumstance, so everyone has a smoothed out lag response which isn't too bad to play. Only unstable lag of 2 seconds or more caused a problem, where that client would see his character jump around everytime synchronization kicked in.
At http://www.fusor.net they have a forum on building your own fusion device. Not very useful for much, but it will generate neutrons. Hmmm..what could you do with a device that generates lots of neutrons...
I thought this survey was a joke. Or rather a PR stunt. I hope it is. The multiple choice options represent no rational choices, and the number rating system is surely designed to create random survey results.
If this survey represents in any way the thinking at NASA, then the US's space future is doomed.
Its frustrating to even ponder whats wrong with the questions. They seem to be picked as if the space program is just imaginary government bluster with no purpose behind it.
Take the first set about the future of the planetary exploratory program. Each one is something to do, but not connected to a philosophy or plan. Sure you can study the origins of the Solar system or look for life, but there is no reason or scheme expressed as to why this would be the right thing to do. They are just random data points can't form any sort of rational approach.
Question 2 reminds me of that game: would you rather be poked in the eye or eat a bug?
The last is a list of things with the word mission behind it. What does it mean?
The entire rest of the questionaire is pure demographics info.
Many of the posters here have mentioned that Nash was a "bisexual, schizophrenic, deadbeat dad" not deserving the lovable storyline. This really hacks me off! Have you people learned nothing? Bisexuality is a natural fact, nothing to be ashamed of..and nothing to be scorned. Also, schizophrenia is a mental disorder, again something not to be stigmantized but something to be dealt with as a disease. Dead-beat dad? Well ok but that guy was bat-out-of-his-gourd for most of his life so maybe his priorities werent exactly in order. In his day, there was no viable treatment for schizophrenia, just a bunch of pseudoscience mumbo-jumbo that probably just made things worse.
That fact is the man, flaws and all, made some major contributions to mathematics despite serious personal difficulty.
You seem to have interpreted my meaning 180 degrees out of phase with what I intended. My point wasn't that if you didn't notice the differences you were a loser, but rather don't be sucked in by peer pressure to buy a $100,000 home theatre that you don't appreciate yourself. I too know many individuals who have paid top dollar for systems they in fact couldnt distinguish from a bottom-of-line system. One guy I know who bought a 20k system had it set to fit the picture to a conventional screen, so the picture was all horizontally squished. He would show the thing off to everyone and talk about how good it is for months, yet never noticed something so horribly obvious.
Nor in fact did I imply that I myself am a videophile, I'm not particularly and that is why I don't own an HDTV.
I have shopped around for HDTVs for quite some time now, and have not decided on buying one. Mainly because of the high cost and lack of much content.
The main note I have to make is that most of the so-called HDTVs are crap. The only ones I've seen that are quality are also very expensive. If you can't tell the difference, heck, buy the cheap one. But if you can't tell the difference I say, why bother? It gives you bragging rights perhaps, buy you are not a "video-phile" and don't really appreciate the benefits anyway.
The main complaints I have with them is the lack of actual resolution (dont believe the ads, *look* at it), bad viewing angle, and abominable "back-lighting" that leaves a halo on the picture.
I was at a Toy store [Imaginarium] last night and they were selling a clock that runs on Potatoes..or a whole list of things, one of them being coffee grounds.
Do you know the history of the "MS-DOS" days? I think not! Most of the "MS-DOS days", DOS was owned and operated by IBM! Microsoft stopped developement on MS-DOS after version 2; actual developement from then to version 5 was done by 3rd parties like Zenith, Compaq and IBM. Microsoft was not "stagnant" as it was designing OS/2 and the beginning of NT, as well as a [literally] small project named Windows. Microsoft was at the forefront of trying to supplant DOS! They thought DOS was dead way way before the market did.
Wrong. If you can cut the Gordian knot by running algorithms nondeterministically, NP=P becomes only mathemematical curiosity. In the real world, non-deterministic machines would have a much bigger impact than solving NP-complete.
It must be noted however that a) factoring is not NP-Complete, and the best possible deterministic runtime is unknown and b) a quantum computer is no a non-determistic turing machine, although there are some apparently non-deterministic characteristics to the algorithms we do have.
The old Zone sign in software was buggy and stretched beyond its limits. The only reason they didn't switch to messenger way earlier was the headache of switching everyone. But it had to happen sometime. Messenger is very specialized software designed to meet the needs of millions of people simultaneously; the zone is a hack that was hardly designed and could barely meet the needs of a few thousand.
Thus, the decision to switch makes good technical sense. So put away your conspiracy theories and let them do what they think is right for their customers. You can go do whats right for yours.
People have been making points about how the story could continue given details like the fact the terminated melted himself down. However, there are no problems with any particular story line, since time travel implies alternate futures. How could they one-up the technology in T2? Well, they could have a multi-verse ala "The One" where alternate universe versions of Skynet try to take over all universes.
In any event, there are an infinite number of possible simple stories they could use that would fit just fine, once you allow Time Travel *anything* is possible.
doesnt mean you have a clue what you are talking about! These things are clearly confused, misleading, and just plain dead wrong.
Mr Sterling's manifesto reads a lot like many other anti-establishment whack-job's ramblings. Just as he starts to make a point, he wanders off into anecdotal bits of dead-spy arcana which somehow is supposed to make you think he must know what he's talking about. Except he forgets to ever really say anything that can be grabbed onto so you can say, yeah! you got a point, (or even, hey, that not right).
When it comes right down to it, the culprit is the maturation of the tech industry. Its not so fun anymore, all the low hanging fruit has been picked. And the drama about crypto and spy-hackers that gave geeks a sort of mystery and coolness just never amounted to much, and wishing won't make it so.
Just use DHCP and all is well.
Best RPG out today. Actually, the best part is Trials of the Luremaster, a free expansion to Heart of Winter.
This thing is not for rich suburban white guys who hang out on internet all day. Its for postmen and chinamen. Ever been to a crowded asian city? What a nightmare. The elites will definitaly prefer a Segway to other vehicles. The american consumer is probably the last market for this thing.
You say "It is the responsibility of the OS to ensure system stability", but it wasnt always that so. Many people believe that multi-tasking OSs was a blunder. In particular, when it comes to server operation, a single tasking OS makes a lot more sense...the simplicity keeps the MTF way way down.
I have seen many people complain about their cable service; seems like they are never on AT&T though. My experience with AT&T has been nothing short of miraculous. They installed it the day after I ordered it off the web. I get 1M-3M throughput and a near perfect uptime. I used to work at a major software firm and AT&T's reliability is much higher than the internal corporate service I got.
May well be remembered 50 years from now in the same way we still recall the Brothers Grimm. I personally believe that her books are even more compelling than any of the authors listed in the header.
The Rise of Rome (Age of Empires) is the best strategy game ever made.
Real tactics and real strategy. Regardless of what some newbies think, there is no single best strategy.
I truly doubt that any technology is "new" to anyone here! We've all seen speech recognition on workstations for decades now. The difference is that the usability of the speech interface is becoming interesting and useful outside the desktop (where its really not that useful).
clickable link to video I hope