If I'm not mistaken, doesn't USB have a way for devices to access the host's memory via DMA? If so, does that mean it's possible for a 'hacked' keyboard to use DMA to write an exploit into the host machine's memory?
Why would you want to use PS3s for a homebrew supercomputing cluster if it means you have to write and optimize code for the SPEs to get benefit out of it? The PS3's linux environment doesn't let you utilize the GPU or all of the built-in SPEs and it doesn't have a lot of RAM available either. It seems like it would be cheaper to build a cluster out of commodity PC parts, and maybe use GPUs+CUDA to get more muscle without having to completely hand-roll your own accelerated computation code (since CUDA is roughly C). I can't imagine that the PS3 would end up cheaper for these purposes, considering it includes a Blu-Ray player along with a bunch of other things you're not going to be using.
That's interesting, but this article is about someone who doesn't work for Microsoft anymore, and hates Intel graphics chips for the same reason any other game developer hates them: They're utter garbage.
I'll enumerate the primary reasons quickly, since I don't expect you to be intimately familiar with the relationship between graphics programmers and graphics driver developers (it's drastically different from Intel's relationship with the X developers):
1) Intel graphics drivers are possibly the most inconsistent drivers on the market. Any given user with a particular Intel chipset might have one of a hundred different driver configurations, as a result of the fact that the chips are bundled with different motherboards which then come with their own driver package... and when you add pre-built machine vendors into the mix the situation is only worse. If their driver quality was extremely high across the board, this wouldn't be an issue, but...
2) Intel graphics drivers have a bad stability track record, at least on Windows. They have a tendency to return invalid/nonsensical error codes from driver calls that shouldn't be able to fail, or to silently fail out inside a driver call instead of returning the error code they're supposed to... resulting in graphics programmers having to special-case handling of individual Intel graphics chipsets (and even driver revisions). In my case, I ended up just having to shut off entire blocks of my hardware-accelerated pipeline on Intel chipsets and replace them with custom software implementations to avoid the incredible hassle involved in coming up with specific fixes. (The wide variety of chipsets and drivers out there meant that for my particular project - an indie game - it was impossible to ensure that I had worked around every bug a user was likely to hit, so I had to just opt out of hardware accel in problem areas entirely).
3) Intel graphics chipsets have sub-par performance across the board, despite marketing claims otherwise. This is mostly problematic for people developing 'cutting-edge' games software, where it creates a 'he-said-she-said' situation with a game developer/publisher claiming that a user's video chipset is insufficient to run a game while Intel claims the complete opposite. (in most cases, Intel is lying.) This is particularly troublesome in areas like support for cutting-edge shader technology, where an Intel chipset may 'support' a feature like Pixel Shader Model 3.0 but implement it in such a way to make it completely unusable. Users don't benefit from this, and neither do developers.
4) Intel graphics chipsets harm the add-on graphics market by discouraging users from picking up a (significantly better) bargain video card from NVidia/ATI for $50 and dropping it into their machine. This hurts everyone because even though that bargain card is significantly better (and most likely more reliable), the user already 'paid' for the integrated chipset on their motherboard, and the documentation that comes with it attempts to make them believe that they don't need a video card. I consider this a dramatic step backward compared to the situation years ago, when integrated graphics chipsets were unheard of and people instead had the option of 'bargain 2d' video cards like Trident or Matrox that would do everything needed for desktop 2D, but also had the option of fairly affordable 3D accelerator cards if they wanted to play games occasionally.
On the bright side, most integrated ATI/NVidia GPUs these days are mature enough to be able to run games acceptably and meet the needs of a typical user. The only thing really holding the market back here, in my opinion, is Intel's insistence on marketing inferior products instead of partnering with ATI or NVidia to please their customers.
Of course, this is unrelated to your point that their Linux/Free Software support is superb, as is their documentation - I'm inclined to agree with you here, but it unfortunately doesn't do much to outweigh their other grievous sins.
It would have to, because otherwise you could register an anonymous class or other similarly constructed object as an event handler, release all your other references, and the GC would collect it while it still needs to be able to recieve messages. (That, or the GC would unregister the event handler, which would be utterly mysterious to debug if you didn't already know the intricacies of the GC, especially since you have no way of predicting when your event handler is collected).
This problem is actually less drastic in C#, since you have the ability to instantiate anonymous methods (delegates) instead of anonymous classes when doing event handling, and they have lower overhead. So even if you mess up your resource management, it's still much easier to control your resource usage because you have access to cheaper primitives to work with.
It's not as if C doesn't leak memory when you mishandle resources. All these people needed to do was spend 5 minutes with the (free) MS.NET profiler and look at the allocation and GC graphs, and they'd be done.
The sad thing is that Microsoft offers a perfectly servicable profiler for free that can be used on any C# application and is better than most commercial native Win32 profilers...
ArenaNet is an independent studio, like Cryptic was. NCSoft doesn't have much direct influence on anything as far as maintenance and game updates go.
However, since NCSoft is hiring as many of the Cryptic guys as possible, it's plausible that they'll still have the freedom to take customer feedback and maintain the game. It's less likely, though, since they'll be more directly influenced by publisher upper management now.
I'm not really sure if titles published by Sony can really count as 'indie'. If the platform was open to the extent that any indie had a shot at getting a game on the service, then they'd have something... at this point Sony doesn't even have a public devkit equivalent to MS's XNA (unless you count using the crippled multimedia in PS3 Linux).
flOw and Everyday Shooter are great, but they're not titles that were 'lured' onto the platform, unless handing large stacks of money to indie developers to convince them to make their titles exclusives counts as a 'lure'. Jenova Chen in particular isn't really 'indie' anymore since he's running a studio and has a contract with Sony (great guy, though).
I suppose this all depends on your definition of indie...
This article contains less information than you'd get from 5 minutes of google searches on the names of the various technologies. Why reward such haphazardly written articles with frontpage coverage and ad impressions?
The author's few actual opinions about technologies are equally worthless; his rambling about Palm and J2ME makes it clear that he's never actually used the technology for more than a few minutes, and the ranting about Linux's license and the hassle of 'signing' applications makes you wonder if he's ever written any software at all. Someone who considers the Java Mobile API 'beyond him' probably shouldn't be writing articles about programming.
The majority of the space usage is almost certainly FMV and weakly-compressed audio. This has been the case in most major titles released in the past few years - FMV and audio eat up 40% or more of the total size of the game, and are typically not compressed nearly as effectively as they could be.
If previous Final Fantasy titles are any indicator, this is definitely going to be the case with Mistwalker games. Most of the information I've seen on space used by PS3 games also indicates more or less the same - audio and FMV consuming most of the space.
Not to say that audio and FMV are worthless, of course... just that they're what eats up space. A game developer can still deliver an extremely solid, cutting-edge experience in the amount of space offered by a DVD if they're willing to ante up and do the work necessary.
Diablo 1 and 2 were built by Roper and the other folks at Blizzard North, yes, but not by them only. My understanding is that Roper primarily acted in a PR and oversight position, and while he's a great guy and nice to talk to he wasn't actually responsible for much when it came to what the game ended up being like. This is the reason why the things Roper says don't always make sense from the perspective of someone who worked on those titles.
That, and a large portion of Diablo 1 was actually developed by Blizzard proper, because North's team was really inexperienced at that point and they couldn't have shipped a game on their own. I'm not sure if that was the case for D2 as well but I wouldn't be suprised.
Ignoring the fact that you can do the same thing using ODF, and Microsoft only uses BLOBs to store embedded images and other files, not actual document content... but I wouldn't expect you to know that unless you'd written an OpenXML reader (yes, I have).
This must be rough for Intel. Spilling beans on a computer is bad enough (have you ever TRIED getting beans out of electronics? It's a nightmare!), but spilling them on a development prototype? Somebody had to get fired for this debacle...
He's an actual game developer, so he knows that more space doesn't necessarily translate into better games. There are two ways to use more space: 1) Fill it with content 2) Fill it with useless garbage (like, say, badly compressed cinematics...) And, as most people know these days, content is EXPENSIVE.
In the interview he talks about (I'm summarizing here, so I'm probably off a little bit) his general distaste for large scale game development now because of how much time and money goes into creating all the content a game requires, and why he's decided he wants to work on smaller games. For someone like him that's aware of how expensive and time-consuming it is to use the amount of space provided by a format like HD-DVD or Blu-Ray, it's not remotely suprising that he thinks putting it in the PS3 was a bad idea.
In comparison, it's quite easy for Sony execs to ramble on about the promise of Blu-Ray and how it enables developers to make games, because if you don't understand something it's easy to lie about it and still look sincere.
For the past few months Microsoft has been dispatching crack teams of special operatives into the past to alter the course of American History for their benefit, in hopes of eventually transforming the United States into the New Microsoft Empire. But little do they know, a world-weary Librarian and Ex-Marine at the Library of Congress won't stand for that shit. He's put together a team of agents in hopes of reversing the damage to the timestream before it becomes irreversable. Together with Agents Linus Torvalds (Technology Specialist - Special power: x-ray glasses), Donald Trump (Logistics Specialist - Special power: nuclear fusion comb-over) and Stephen Hawking (Quantum Physics Specialist - Special power: medusa glare), he just may be the only hope for American History's future.
A fairly common trend these days in PC games (mostly multiplayer ones) is the use of a kernel-mode windows driver (effectively a rootkit in most cases) to 'protect' the game from hacking. Many eastern (korean, taiwanese, etc.) game development companies opt to use this mechanism to secure their games instead of writing secure client and server code - for example, GunBound, Maple Story, Ragnarok Online, Rakion, etc... pretty much any MMO you see an ad for these days that isn't from a US or European studio uses this stuff for security. The basic mechanism it uses is that it hooks all the low level operations you can do on your system (file access, process access, etc.) and prevents you from touching anything related to the game. The end result is that you can't even so much as end-task a misbehaving game 'protected' by this driver.
With the huge amount of popularity this approach seems to have (I personally suspect it's a result of some very, very aggressive marketing on the part of the driver's developers), I wouldn't be suprised to see many games start demanding that users run them on Windows Vista, so that the 'protected process' mechanism can be used to fully 'protect' the games from users' interference. While you'd at least be able to end-task them, I can't say I see this as an improvement. It's saddening that many companies believe the solution to security is a series of hacks, workarounds, and black boxes - the only real solution is careful, methodical design and engineering. It seems very likely to me that within a few years, many PC games will refuse to run on anything except a Vista system with nothing but signed drivers loaded, and that's saddening. I dislike the notion that I am denied even basic rights to investigate what an application is doing on my machine simply for the sake of 'security', when it's trivial to set up a second machine to inspect and modify a game's network packets and cheat all I want.
SiteFinder broke DNS for the purpose of making money. This is just a 'feature' similar to the one in Firefox that automatically performs a google search on things you enter into the URL bar if they aren't valid addresses; MS is just taking the idea further (and making money off it, because they love money). I can see people being miffed by the fact that there are ads on the search page, but it's not as if Google doesn't have ads on their search pages.
This is basically just a bunch of advertisers and domain squatters getting upset because Microsoft and Google are making money and they aren't.
Running a DX9/DX10-class game engine or graphics application on a DX7-class or DX8-class GPU is not remotely close to being as easy as 'compiling it for the Wii and the PS2'. No offense, but if you knew *anything* about game engines, you'd realize this. There are significant hurdles preventing an engine like Unreal 3 from running on hardware like the PS2 or Wii without being designed specifically for it in the first place.
The problem here is that UE3 was designed for a system with a modern graphics processor and fairly high end CPU. The Wii and PS2 have neither of these things, so UE3 simply won't run on them. Obviously, stuff like the previous Unreal Engine (used by Red Steel) runs fine on the Wii, so it's not as if the Wii can't run games. It just can't run UE3.
Staton cited statistics on dozens of teens who have been molested -- or murdered, in some instances -- by people they met through MySpace.com, according to law enforcement officials.
So, wait... dozens out of what, like 10 million myspace users? That's less than a hundredth of a percent. If anything, these statistics should indicate that he should be solving more dangerous problems, like car accidents or parental child abuse or teenage drug use, not chasing after imaginary problems.
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If I'm not mistaken, doesn't USB have a way for devices to access the host's memory via DMA? If so, does that mean it's possible for a 'hacked' keyboard to use DMA to write an exploit into the host machine's memory?
Why would you want to use PS3s for a homebrew supercomputing cluster if it means you have to write and optimize code for the SPEs to get benefit out of it? The PS3's linux environment doesn't let you utilize the GPU or all of the built-in SPEs and it doesn't have a lot of RAM available either. It seems like it would be cheaper to build a cluster out of commodity PC parts, and maybe use GPUs+CUDA to get more muscle without having to completely hand-roll your own accelerated computation code (since CUDA is roughly C). I can't imagine that the PS3 would end up cheaper for these purposes, considering it includes a Blu-Ray player along with a bunch of other things you're not going to be using.
That's interesting, but this article is about someone who doesn't work for Microsoft anymore, and hates Intel graphics chips for the same reason any other game developer hates them: They're utter garbage.
I'll enumerate the primary reasons quickly, since I don't expect you to be intimately familiar with the relationship between graphics programmers and graphics driver developers (it's drastically different from Intel's relationship with the X developers):
1) Intel graphics drivers are possibly the most inconsistent drivers on the market. Any given user with a particular Intel chipset might have one of a hundred different driver configurations, as a result of the fact that the chips are bundled with different motherboards which then come with their own driver package... and when you add pre-built machine vendors into the mix the situation is only worse. If their driver quality was extremely high across the board, this wouldn't be an issue, but...
2) Intel graphics drivers have a bad stability track record, at least on Windows. They have a tendency to return invalid/nonsensical error codes from driver calls that shouldn't be able to fail, or to silently fail out inside a driver call instead of returning the error code they're supposed to... resulting in graphics programmers having to special-case handling of individual Intel graphics chipsets (and even driver revisions). In my case, I ended up just having to shut off entire blocks of my hardware-accelerated pipeline on Intel chipsets and replace them with custom software implementations to avoid the incredible hassle involved in coming up with specific fixes. (The wide variety of chipsets and drivers out there meant that for my particular project - an indie game - it was impossible to ensure that I had worked around every bug a user was likely to hit, so I had to just opt out of hardware accel in problem areas entirely).
3) Intel graphics chipsets have sub-par performance across the board, despite marketing claims otherwise. This is mostly problematic for people developing 'cutting-edge' games software, where it creates a 'he-said-she-said' situation with a game developer/publisher claiming that a user's video chipset is insufficient to run a game while Intel claims the complete opposite. (in most cases, Intel is lying.) This is particularly troublesome in areas like support for cutting-edge shader technology, where an Intel chipset may 'support' a feature like Pixel Shader Model 3.0 but implement it in such a way to make it completely unusable. Users don't benefit from this, and neither do developers.
4) Intel graphics chipsets harm the add-on graphics market by discouraging users from picking up a (significantly better) bargain video card from NVidia/ATI for $50 and dropping it into their machine. This hurts everyone because even though that bargain card is significantly better (and most likely more reliable), the user already 'paid' for the integrated chipset on their motherboard, and the documentation that comes with it attempts to make them believe that they don't need a video card. I consider this a dramatic step backward compared to the situation years ago, when integrated graphics chipsets were unheard of and people instead had the option of 'bargain 2d' video cards like Trident or Matrox that would do everything needed for desktop 2D, but also had the option of fairly affordable 3D accelerator cards if they wanted to play games occasionally.
On the bright side, most integrated ATI/NVidia GPUs these days are mature enough to be able to run games acceptably and meet the needs of a typical user. The only thing really holding the market back here, in my opinion, is Intel's insistence on marketing inferior products instead of partnering with ATI or NVidia to please their customers.
Of course, this is unrelated to your point that their Linux/Free Software support is superb, as is their documentation - I'm inclined to agree with you here, but it unfortunately doesn't do much to outweigh their other grievous sins.
It would have to, because otherwise you could register an anonymous class or other similarly constructed object as an event handler, release all your other references, and the GC would collect it while it still needs to be able to recieve messages. (That, or the GC would unregister the event handler, which would be utterly mysterious to debug if you didn't already know the intricacies of the GC, especially since you have no way of predicting when your event handler is collected).
This problem is actually less drastic in C#, since you have the ability to instantiate anonymous methods (delegates) instead of anonymous classes when doing event handling, and they have lower overhead. So even if you mess up your resource management, it's still much easier to control your resource usage because you have access to cheaper primitives to work with.
It's not as if C doesn't leak memory when you mishandle resources. All these people needed to do was spend 5 minutes with the (free) MS .NET profiler and look at the allocation and GC graphs, and they'd be done.
The sad thing is that Microsoft offers a perfectly servicable profiler for free that can be used on any C# application and is better than most commercial native Win32 profilers...
ArenaNet is an independent studio, like Cryptic was. NCSoft doesn't have much direct influence on anything as far as maintenance and game updates go.
However, since NCSoft is hiring as many of the Cryptic guys as possible, it's plausible that they'll still have the freedom to take customer feedback and maintain the game. It's less likely, though, since they'll be more directly influenced by publisher upper management now.
I'm not really sure if titles published by Sony can really count as 'indie'. If the platform was open to the extent that any indie had a shot at getting a game on the service, then they'd have something... at this point Sony doesn't even have a public devkit equivalent to MS's XNA (unless you count using the crippled multimedia in PS3 Linux).
flOw and Everyday Shooter are great, but they're not titles that were 'lured' onto the platform, unless handing large stacks of money to indie developers to convince them to make their titles exclusives counts as a 'lure'. Jenova Chen in particular isn't really 'indie' anymore since he's running a studio and has a contract with Sony (great guy, though).
I suppose this all depends on your definition of indie...
This article contains less information than you'd get from 5 minutes of google searches on the names of the various technologies. Why reward such haphazardly written articles with frontpage coverage and ad impressions?
The author's few actual opinions about technologies are equally worthless; his rambling about Palm and J2ME makes it clear that he's never actually used the technology for more than a few minutes, and the ranting about Linux's license and the hassle of 'signing' applications makes you wonder if he's ever written any software at all. Someone who considers the Java Mobile API 'beyond him' probably shouldn't be writing articles about programming.
The majority of the space usage is almost certainly FMV and weakly-compressed audio. This has been the case in most major titles released in the past few years - FMV and audio eat up 40% or more of the total size of the game, and are typically not compressed nearly as effectively as they could be.
If previous Final Fantasy titles are any indicator, this is definitely going to be the case with Mistwalker games. Most of the information I've seen on space used by PS3 games also indicates more or less the same - audio and FMV consuming most of the space.
Not to say that audio and FMV are worthless, of course... just that they're what eats up space. A game developer can still deliver an extremely solid, cutting-edge experience in the amount of space offered by a DVD if they're willing to ante up and do the work necessary.
I guess we know whose side you're on... though it's not really a suprise.
would rank the importance of realistic water simulations above the importance of good artificial intelligence in games.
And to think, I used to subscribe to popsci...
Diablo 1 and 2 were built by Roper and the other folks at Blizzard North, yes, but not by them only. My understanding is that Roper primarily acted in a PR and oversight position, and while he's a great guy and nice to talk to he wasn't actually responsible for much when it came to what the game ended up being like. This is the reason why the things Roper says don't always make sense from the perspective of someone who worked on those titles.
That, and a large portion of Diablo 1 was actually developed by Blizzard proper, because North's team was really inexperienced at that point and they couldn't have shipped a game on their own. I'm not sure if that was the case for D2 as well but I wouldn't be suprised.
Ignoring the fact that you can do the same thing using ODF, and Microsoft only uses BLOBs to store embedded images and other files, not actual document content... but I wouldn't expect you to know that unless you'd written an OpenXML reader (yes, I have).
Instead of complaining about the lack of a strong competitor to WoW, how about making one?
If they're dumb enough to use Jet in this sort of application, I'd hate to see their database schema... it'd probably make my eyes bleed.
This must be rough for Intel. Spilling beans on a computer is bad enough (have you ever TRIED getting beans out of electronics? It's a nightmare!), but spilling them on a development prototype? Somebody had to get fired for this debacle...
He's an actual game developer, so he knows that more space doesn't necessarily translate into better games.
There are two ways to use more space:
1) Fill it with content
2) Fill it with useless garbage (like, say, badly compressed cinematics...)
And, as most people know these days, content is EXPENSIVE.
In the interview he talks about (I'm summarizing here, so I'm probably off a little bit) his general distaste for large scale game development now because of how much time and money goes into creating all the content a game requires, and why he's decided he wants to work on smaller games. For someone like him that's aware of how expensive and time-consuming it is to use the amount of space provided by a format like HD-DVD or Blu-Ray, it's not remotely suprising that he thinks putting it in the PS3 was a bad idea.
In comparison, it's quite easy for Sony execs to ramble on about the promise of Blu-Ray and how it enables developers to make games, because if you don't understand something it's easy to lie about it and still look sincere.
For the past few months Microsoft has been dispatching crack teams of special operatives into the past to alter the course of American History for their benefit, in hopes of eventually transforming the United States into the New Microsoft Empire. But little do they know, a world-weary Librarian and Ex-Marine at the Library of Congress won't stand for that shit. He's put together a team of agents in hopes of reversing the damage to the timestream before it becomes irreversable. Together with Agents Linus Torvalds (Technology Specialist - Special power: x-ray glasses), Donald Trump (Logistics Specialist - Special power: nuclear fusion comb-over) and Stephen Hawking (Quantum Physics Specialist - Special power: medusa glare), he just may be the only hope for American History's future.
A fairly common trend these days in PC games (mostly multiplayer ones) is the use of a kernel-mode windows driver (effectively a rootkit in most cases) to 'protect' the game from hacking. Many eastern (korean, taiwanese, etc.) game development companies opt to use this mechanism to secure their games instead of writing secure client and server code - for example, GunBound, Maple Story, Ragnarok Online, Rakion, etc... pretty much any MMO you see an ad for these days that isn't from a US or European studio uses this stuff for security. The basic mechanism it uses is that it hooks all the low level operations you can do on your system (file access, process access, etc.) and prevents you from touching anything related to the game. The end result is that you can't even so much as end-task a misbehaving game 'protected' by this driver.
With the huge amount of popularity this approach seems to have (I personally suspect it's a result of some very, very aggressive marketing on the part of the driver's developers), I wouldn't be suprised to see many games start demanding that users run them on Windows Vista, so that the 'protected process' mechanism can be used to fully 'protect' the games from users' interference. While you'd at least be able to end-task them, I can't say I see this as an improvement. It's saddening that many companies believe the solution to security is a series of hacks, workarounds, and black boxes - the only real solution is careful, methodical design and engineering. It seems very likely to me that within a few years, many PC games will refuse to run on anything except a Vista system with nothing but signed drivers loaded, and that's saddening. I dislike the notion that I am denied even basic rights to investigate what an application is doing on my machine simply for the sake of 'security', when it's trivial to set up a second machine to inspect and modify a game's network packets and cheat all I want.
A book on game design by someone who's apparently never designed games before and probably hasn't even talked to a game designer before.
You know what? I think I'll pass.
(Though if this guy has any actual experience, I'm interested to hear about it. I googled and couldn't find anything.)
SiteFinder broke DNS for the purpose of making money. This is just a 'feature' similar to the one in Firefox that automatically performs a google search on things you enter into the URL bar if they aren't valid addresses; MS is just taking the idea further (and making money off it, because they love money). I can see people being miffed by the fact that there are ads on the search page, but it's not as if Google doesn't have ads on their search pages.
This is basically just a bunch of advertisers and domain squatters getting upset because Microsoft and Google are making money and they aren't.
Running a DX9/DX10-class game engine or graphics application on a DX7-class or DX8-class GPU is not remotely close to being as easy as 'compiling it for the Wii and the PS2'. No offense, but if you knew *anything* about game engines, you'd realize this. There are significant hurdles preventing an engine like Unreal 3 from running on hardware like the PS2 or Wii without being designed specifically for it in the first place.
The problem here is that UE3 was designed for a system with a modern graphics processor and fairly high end CPU. The Wii and PS2 have neither of these things, so UE3 simply won't run on them. Obviously, stuff like the previous Unreal Engine (used by Red Steel) runs fine on the Wii, so it's not as if the Wii can't run games. It just can't run UE3.
There's this thing in your browser called a cache that stores a copy of pages you visit...