I don't think he meant high school. Many students are graduating high school early and going on to college at 17, 16 (like me), or even 15. These are precisely the students a project like the SoC should be targetting, but they are ignored.
If you are in a salaried position then you don't get overtime. Period. If you take a job with a contract involving completing a project in 18 months for $40k/yr then you are going to finish the project for $60k regardless of how many hours you work in those 18 months. The other side of this coin is getting better control of your time off (short and long term). If you don't like this then take an hourly position, duh.
A lot of brand new Sound Blaster cards, sitting on Best Buy shelves as I type this, have no hardware mixing. The popular consumer SB Live! 24-bit is the worst offender.
I didn't buy HL until years after CS came out. I bought it to play a mod called Natural Selection and at that time, probably circa 2001, the CS version, with no single player story, was $30 at every store in town while the 'classic' HL (including blue shift and the original mods like that tron disc mod) was $20.
I have ordered these by popularity, as near as I can estimate. Some of the lower ones on the lists might not be as mainstream as you would like, but the top ones definitely are.
mainstream linux-native...
RPGs: Neverwinter Nights BG/IWD/BG2 some day when GemRB is finished
MMORPGs: Second Life Puzzle Pirates Runescape A Tale in the Desert Daimonin Vega Strike Vendetta Online
RTSes: Homeworld Total Annihilation: Spring Kohan: Immortal Sovereigns Majesty Gold Myth 2
and more FPSes: Quake 3 America's Army Return to Castle Wolfenstein Medal of Honor: AA Descent 3 Descent Freespace 2 Postal 2 Serious Sam 2 Sin
I admit, this is but a fraction of the games that run in Windows, but I think this list, plus the cutting edge games that are coming to Linux soon, proves that there is nothing holding back Linux gaming except game developers simply ignoring it during development.
The sad thing is that supporting Linux wouldn't cost them much, if anything at all. Most games are successfully ported to Linux (often using SDL+OpenGL) within weeks, if not days, of having their source code liberated. Usually by a handful of enthusiastic hobbyists in their spare time. Any game company willing to dedicate those same few dozen man hours could increase their player base by at least a few hundred (I don't delude myself into thinking there are many hard core native linux gamers), which seems well worth it to me.
Let me direct you to one of my favorite Sale vs License rulings, Adobe v Softman. Relevant excerpts follow:
A number of courts have held that the sale of software is the sale of a good within the meaning of Uniform Commercial Code. Advent Sys. Ltd. v. Unisys Corp., 925 F.2d 670, 676 (3d Cir. 1991); Step-Saver, 929 F.2d at 99-100; Downriver Internists v. Harris Corp., 929 F.2d 1147, 1150 (6th Cir. 1991). It is well-settled that in determining whether a transaction is a sale, a lease, or a license, courts look to the economic realities of the exchange....
Other courts have reached the same conclusion: software is sold and not licensed. See, e.g., RRX Indus., Inc. v. Lab-Con Inc., 772 F.2d 543, 546 (9th Cir. 1985); Applied Info. Mgmt., Inc, v. Icart, 976 Supp. 149, 155 (E.D.N.Y. 1997) finding that whether a transaction denominated a "license" was in act a sale conveying ownership was a disputed question of fact); Novell, Inc. v. CPU Distrib., Inc., 2000 U.S. Dist. Lexis 9975 (S.D. Tex. 2000). In Novell, a software manufacturer was pursuing a discount retailer for copyright infringement. Like Adobe, CPU argued that it purchased the software from an authorized source, and was entitled to resell it under the first sale doctrine. Novell claimed that it did not sell software but merely licensed it to distribution partners. The court held that these transactions constituted sales and not a license, and therefore that the first sale doctrine applied. 2000 U.S. Dist. Lexis 9975 at *18....
The Court finds that the circumstances surrounding the transaction strongly suggests that the transaction is in fact a sale rather than a license. For example, the purchaser commonly obtains a single copy of the software, with documentation, for a single price, which the purchaser pays at the time of the transaction, and which constitutes the entire payment for the "license." The license runs for an indefinite term without provisions for renewal. In light of these indicia, many courts and commentators conclude that a "shrinkwrap license" transaction is a sale of goods rather than a license.12...
The reality of the business environment also suggests that Adobe sells its software to distributors. Adobe transfers large amounts of merchandise to distributors. The distributors pay full value for the merchandise and accept the risk that the software may be damaged or lost.13 The distributors also accept the risk that they will be unable to resell the product.14 The distributors then resell the product to other distributors in the secondary market. The secondary market and the ultimate consumer also pay full value for the product, and accept the risk that the product may be lost or damaged. This evidence suggests a transfer of title in the good. The transfer of a product for consideration with a transfer of title and risk of loss generally constitutes a sale. VWP of Am., Inc. v. United States, 175 F.3d 1327, 1338-39 (Fed. Cir. 1999)....
[signed] DEAN D. PREGERSON United States District Judge
There is also the not-insignificant point that the games that run on both platforms run faster in Linux. I played UT2004 in both when I was dual booting (no more!) and regularly got 10-15% higher FPS with the same settings in Linux. Savage had the same boost. I haven't directly compared the others, but my subjective feeling is that they were all faster as well.
Why spend $100 on a slower OS just so youll need to spend an extra $100 on hardware to make your games run faster? Give me Linux + GeForce 6600 over Windows + GeForce 6800 any day.
And UT2004, and Quake 4, and Doom 3, and Saveage, and Enemy Territory, and any of a hundred other awesome commercial competitive games that run natively in linux.
As to upcoming games, UT2007, Savage 2, and Enemy Territory: Quake Wars are all going to run natively in linux.
Yes, but delivery prices will not rise at the same rate as personal driving prices. There is an economy of scale with even a single large truck delivery.
A thousand people drive to Joe's Grocery Store for $5 instead of Wal Mart for $25. To accomodate those same thousand people Joe's Grocery store has to pay $15 instead of $5 per person for gas to get products to the store. Net savings for the customer is still $10 per visit.
Don't worry, Wal Mart's reign will be coming to a close as gas prices continue to rise. Currently people think nothing of driving 20-30 miles, often in less than ideal traffic, to get the cheaper prices of a large store. When gas costs $10 or $20 per gallon (not including inflation) this behavior will stop and we will see a return to power of the local grocery store, the local hardware store, the local automotive shop, etc.
At some point in advancement a society begins to produce artifacts that WILL last 50 million years, or at least leave traces. If every human on the planet died today, I think a civilization 50 million years from now could tell we were here. In particular, Radioisotopes in nuclear waste with 100k year half lives would still exist in detectable quantities after that long. Also, our moon landers would still be sitting up there, barring moon-destroying interplanetary meteor activity.
Try the following Steve Jackson game: Frag - Doom 2 as a board game Hacker - Uplink as a card/board game Munchkin - Kill the monsters, Steal the treasure, Stab your buddy. distilled Essence Of RPG as a card game Ogre - great introduction to tile based wargaming. simple mechanics, simple units
No. They sold 1000000000-X songs and gave away X songs. 1000000X1000000000. I know a soda company gave away at least a million songs. And a magazine a million more. Half the MP3 players Radio Shack sold at one point came with free iTunes download cards. I am sure there are thousands of free-itunes-download promotions that I do not know about. I would estimate that X is somewhere in the vicinity of 300000000 (that would be approximately 1 free song per person in the USA).
I have a quite dated gaming machine. Quake4 was the first game I could not play due to low FPS. I am tempted to buy Oblivion and see how it runs, but I am trying to hold out until I upgrade. I will be upgrading to a rig similar to what you have. Right now I am looking at perhaps an Athlon64 3000+ or Sempron64 3300+, 2GB PC3200, and a GF 6600 or 7300 video card.
Bzzt, wrong. I own two video cards. A GF 4 4800 and a GF FX 5200. I use the 5200 for DX9-heavy games, and the 4800 for everything else. The 4800 is quite a bit faster, but its missing those features that games like BF2 require.
having a second child after a daugher does not increase the boy:girl ratio. at worst, it decreases it, as a couple who has had one daugher has provided a statistical sample of one that they are more likely to have girls, which while extremely lacking in predicitivity, does pass 1%.
The context definitely mattered here. At the Game Developers Conference most of the audience already understood the concept of procedural content generation. I would like to think that most of them had played.kkreiger already, a 96kb game that uses the PCG concept to produce an environment prettier than most modern 1GB games.
The idea is not very new. What Spore is doing is taking it to new heights. EVERYTHING will be generated procedurally. The game might realistically only be a few dozen megabytes. No textures, no models, no animations, no sounds. Just code for PRODUCING textures, models, animations, and sounds, given randomized and user-provided input. Assuming you have the code to figure out how a legged creature walks, theres no reason to store animations for 4, 6, and 37-legged creatures seperately. The video shows a 3-legged gait, iirc.
More negative points, I'll stop counting now. I drive a car, with a plain old gasoline engine, no hybrid, no extra batteries. It seems like youve got this whole prepared speech that you are just dying to give about hybrids and the superiority of driving inefficient cars, despite it having nothing to do with anything I am saying. Feel free to continue, if you ever get near the point I'll listen up.
PS: My car completely paid for itself in gas savings in less than a year. Zero net cost, and dropping into the negative every day since then. Chew on that.
A) My car is 12 years old, and although I haven't put quite as many miles on it as you have on yours, rest assured that it has seen more than its share.
B) It weighs well under 1 ton, with me in it.
C) It runs on gasoline, not diesel. I considered diesel alternatives when I bought it, but nothing really stood out at the time.
I think its hilarious when people keep track of fractional mpg. I am a valet, and I see brand new F350s with digital mpg gauges reading "14.95". It is like a small child telling you they are "five and three quarters years old!", such a miniscule amount that the fraction matters. I get 45 MPG (yes, 45. Not 45.1, not 45.27349.) on a mixed commute and normal daily driving, and I would get 50 if I ever bothered to have my seals replaced. Anyone driving a vehicle that gets less is being irresponsible, AND wasting money. And mostly endangering my life, but that's another matter.
procedural content generation is, in short, a system where you store properties and methods for generating content, instead of storing the content itself..theprodukkt's demo scene stuff uses it, as does 3d studio max.
Imagine making a texture (not a picture) of something like wood or rusty metal in photoshop. You start with a base color, add some repetetive but randomized detail, apply a bunch of filters, and youve got something very nice. Now you save a picture of it. That is old school. The procedural way is to store a list of the things you did, and save that, then feed it to a copy of photoshop again later. This has two advantages. One, it saves a shitload of space, since the list is tiny and the resulting bitmap is huge. Two, it allows for really 'smooth' changes. You can change one step in the middle of the list and get a similar-but-significantly-different texture.
The same goes for music, 3d models, animations, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think he meant high school. Many students are graduating high school early and going on to college at 17, 16 (like me), or even 15. These are precisely the students a project like the SoC should be targetting, but they are ignored.
If you are in a salaried position then you don't get overtime. Period. If you take a job with a contract involving completing a project in 18 months for $40k/yr then you are going to finish the project for $60k regardless of how many hours you work in those 18 months. The other side of this coin is getting better control of your time off (short and long term). If you don't like this then take an hourly position, duh.
A lot of brand new Sound Blaster cards, sitting on Best Buy shelves as I type this, have no hardware mixing. The popular consumer SB Live! 24-bit is the worst offender.
I didn't buy HL until years after CS came out. I bought it to play a mod called Natural Selection and at that time, probably circa 2001, the CS version, with no single player story, was $30 at every store in town while the 'classic' HL (including blue shift and the original mods like that tron disc mod) was $20.
I have ordered these by popularity, as near as I can estimate. Some of the lower ones on the lists might not be as mainstream as you would like, but the top ones definitely are.
mainstream linux-native...
RPGs:
Neverwinter Nights
BG/IWD/BG2 some day when GemRB is finished
MMORPGs:
Second Life
Puzzle Pirates
Runescape
A Tale in the Desert
Daimonin
Vega Strike
Vendetta Online
RTSes:
Homeworld
Total Annihilation: Spring
Kohan: Immortal Sovereigns
Majesty Gold
Myth 2
and more FPSes:
Quake 3
America's Army
Return to Castle Wolfenstein
Medal of Honor: AA
Descent 3
Descent Freespace 2
Postal 2
Serious Sam 2
Sin
I admit, this is but a fraction of the games that run in Windows, but I think this list, plus the cutting edge games that are coming to Linux soon, proves that there is nothing holding back Linux gaming except game developers simply ignoring it during development.
The sad thing is that supporting Linux wouldn't cost them much, if anything at all. Most games are successfully ported to Linux (often using SDL+OpenGL) within weeks, if not days, of having their source code liberated. Usually by a handful of enthusiastic hobbyists in their spare time. Any game company willing to dedicate those same few dozen man hours could increase their player base by at least a few hundred (I don't delude myself into thinking there are many hard core native linux gamers), which seems well worth it to me.
Let me direct you to one of my favorite Sale vs License rulings, Adobe v Softman. Relevant excerpts follow:
...
...
...
...
A number of courts have held that the sale of software is the sale of a good within the meaning of Uniform Commercial Code. Advent Sys. Ltd. v. Unisys Corp., 925 F.2d 670, 676 (3d Cir. 1991); Step-Saver, 929 F.2d at 99-100; Downriver Internists v. Harris Corp., 929 F.2d 1147, 1150 (6th Cir. 1991). It is well-settled that in determining whether a transaction is a sale, a lease, or a license, courts look to the economic realities of the exchange.
Other courts have reached the same conclusion: software is sold and not licensed. See, e.g., RRX Indus., Inc. v. Lab-Con Inc., 772 F.2d 543, 546 (9th Cir. 1985); Applied Info. Mgmt., Inc, v. Icart, 976 Supp. 149, 155 (E.D.N.Y. 1997) finding that whether a transaction denominated a "license" was in act a sale conveying ownership was a disputed question of fact); Novell, Inc. v. CPU Distrib., Inc., 2000 U.S. Dist. Lexis 9975 (S.D. Tex. 2000). In Novell, a software manufacturer was pursuing a discount retailer for copyright infringement. Like Adobe, CPU argued that it purchased the software from an authorized source, and was entitled to resell it under the first sale doctrine. Novell claimed that it did not sell software but merely licensed it to distribution partners. The court held that these transactions constituted sales and not a license, and therefore that the first sale doctrine applied. 2000 U.S. Dist. Lexis 9975 at *18.
The Court finds that the circumstances surrounding the transaction strongly suggests that the transaction is in fact a sale rather than a license. For example, the purchaser commonly obtains a single copy of the software, with documentation, for a single price, which the purchaser pays at the time of the transaction, and which constitutes the entire payment for the "license." The license runs for an indefinite term without provisions for renewal. In light of these indicia, many courts and commentators conclude that a "shrinkwrap license" transaction is a sale of goods rather than a license.12
The reality of the business environment also suggests that Adobe sells its software to distributors. Adobe transfers large amounts of merchandise to distributors. The distributors pay full value for the merchandise and accept the risk that the software may be damaged or lost.13 The distributors also accept the risk that they will be unable to resell the product.14 The distributors then resell the product to other distributors in the secondary market. The secondary market and the ultimate consumer also pay full value for the product, and accept the risk that the product may be lost or damaged. This evidence suggests a transfer of title in the good. The transfer of a product for consideration with a transfer of title and risk of loss generally constitutes a sale. VWP of Am., Inc. v. United States, 175 F.3d 1327, 1338-39 (Fed. Cir. 1999).
[signed]
DEAN D. PREGERSON
United States District Judge
You've never seen someone think they are paying $2.19 for gas when they are really paying $2.199?
But it cost more than HL1, and had less content to boot!
There is also the not-insignificant point that the games that run on both platforms run faster in Linux. I played UT2004 in both when I was dual booting (no more!) and regularly got 10-15% higher FPS with the same settings in Linux. Savage had the same boost. I haven't directly compared the others, but my subjective feeling is that they were all faster as well.
Why spend $100 on a slower OS just so youll need to spend an extra $100 on hardware to make your games run faster? Give me Linux + GeForce 6600 over Windows + GeForce 6800 any day.
And UT2004, and Quake 4, and Doom 3, and Saveage, and Enemy Territory, and any of a hundred other awesome commercial competitive games that run natively in linux.
As to upcoming games, UT2007, Savage 2, and Enemy Territory: Quake Wars are all going to run natively in linux.
Nice try Mr FUD.
Yes, but delivery prices will not rise at the same rate as personal driving prices. There is an economy of scale with even a single large truck delivery.
A thousand people drive to Joe's Grocery Store for $5 instead of Wal Mart for $25. To accomodate those same thousand people Joe's Grocery store has to pay $15 instead of $5 per person for gas to get products to the store. Net savings for the customer is still $10 per visit.
Don't worry, Wal Mart's reign will be coming to a close as gas prices continue to rise. Currently people think nothing of driving 20-30 miles, often in less than ideal traffic, to get the cheaper prices of a large store. When gas costs $10 or $20 per gallon (not including inflation) this behavior will stop and we will see a return to power of the local grocery store, the local hardware store, the local automotive shop, etc.
At some point in advancement a society begins to produce artifacts that WILL last 50 million years, or at least leave traces. If every human on the planet died today, I think a civilization 50 million years from now could tell we were here. In particular, Radioisotopes in nuclear waste with 100k year half lives would still exist in detectable quantities after that long. Also, our moon landers would still be sitting up there, barring moon-destroying interplanetary meteor activity.
Try the following Steve Jackson game:
Frag - Doom 2 as a board game
Hacker - Uplink as a card/board game
Munchkin - Kill the monsters, Steal the treasure, Stab your buddy. distilled Essence Of RPG as a card game
Ogre - great introduction to tile based wargaming. simple mechanics, simple units
No. They sold 1000000000-X songs and gave away X songs. 1000000X1000000000. I know a soda company gave away at least a million songs. And a magazine a million more. Half the MP3 players Radio Shack sold at one point came with free iTunes download cards. I am sure there are thousands of free-itunes-download promotions that I do not know about. I would estimate that X is somewhere in the vicinity of 300000000 (that would be approximately 1 free song per person in the USA).
I have a quite dated gaming machine. Quake4 was the first game I could not play due to low FPS. I am tempted to buy Oblivion and see how it runs, but I am trying to hold out until I upgrade. I will be upgrading to a rig similar to what you have. Right now I am looking at perhaps an Athlon64 3000+ or Sempron64 3300+, 2GB PC3200, and a GF 6600 or 7300 video card.
Bzzt, wrong. I own two video cards. A GF 4 4800 and a GF FX 5200. I use the 5200 for DX9-heavy games, and the 4800 for everything else. The 4800 is quite a bit faster, but its missing those features that games like BF2 require.
having a second child after a daugher does not increase the boy:girl ratio. at worst, it decreases it, as a couple who has had one daugher has provided a statistical sample of one that they are more likely to have girls, which while extremely lacking in predicitivity, does pass 1%.
it could include .1 tens of millions, or 100 tens of millions.
Not a single link on the results page works for me.
p ?id=1810
https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.ph
Does that URL work for anyone? The same goes for every other id=
The context definitely mattered here. At the Game Developers Conference most of the audience already understood the concept of procedural content generation. I would like to think that most of them had played .kkreiger already, a 96kb game that uses the PCG concept to produce an environment prettier than most modern 1GB games.
The idea is not very new. What Spore is doing is taking it to new heights. EVERYTHING will be generated procedurally. The game might realistically only be a few dozen megabytes. No textures, no models, no animations, no sounds. Just code for PRODUCING textures, models, animations, and sounds, given randomized and user-provided input. Assuming you have the code to figure out how a legged creature walks, theres no reason to store animations for 4, 6, and 37-legged creatures seperately. The video shows a 3-legged gait, iirc.
More negative points, I'll stop counting now. I drive a car, with a plain old gasoline engine, no hybrid, no extra batteries. It seems like youve got this whole prepared speech that you are just dying to give about hybrids and the superiority of driving inefficient cars, despite it having nothing to do with anything I am saying. Feel free to continue, if you ever get near the point I'll listen up.
PS: My car completely paid for itself in gas savings in less than a year. Zero net cost, and dropping into the negative every day since then. Chew on that.
1 point for good reasoning.
-7 points for false assumptions.
A) My car is 12 years old, and although I haven't put quite as many miles on it as you have on yours, rest assured that it has seen more than its share.
B) It weighs well under 1 ton, with me in it.
C) It runs on gasoline, not diesel. I considered diesel alternatives when I bought it, but nothing really stood out at the time.
I think its hilarious when people keep track of fractional mpg. I am a valet, and I see brand new F350s with digital mpg gauges reading "14.95". It is like a small child telling you they are "five and three quarters years old!", such a miniscule amount that the fraction matters. I get 45 MPG (yes, 45. Not 45.1, not 45.27349.) on a mixed commute and normal daily driving, and I would get 50 if I ever bothered to have my seals replaced. Anyone driving a vehicle that gets less is being irresponsible, AND wasting money. And mostly endangering my life, but that's another matter.
procedural content generation is, in short, a system where you store properties and methods for generating content, instead of storing the content itself. .theprodukkt's demo scene stuff uses it, as does 3d studio max.
Imagine making a texture (not a picture) of something like wood or rusty metal in photoshop. You start with a base color, add some repetetive but randomized detail, apply a bunch of filters, and youve got something very nice. Now you save a picture of it. That is old school. The procedural way is to store a list of the things you did, and save that, then feed it to a copy of photoshop again later. This has two advantages. One, it saves a shitload of space, since the list is tiny and the resulting bitmap is huge. Two, it allows for really 'smooth' changes. You can change one step in the middle of the list and get a similar-but-significantly-different texture.
The same goes for music, 3d models, animations, etc.