But Zelda looks better than the vast majority of cartoons.
Are you trying to tell me that this isn't a matter of taste?
Yes, I am, and I gave very specific reasons why.
The animation in Zelda is of a higher quality than most cartoons. Your average cartoon has approximately 12 frames per second, where as Zelda has 30.
Look at the shading in a cartoon. There is significantly less shading done in the animation than there is in still drawings done for, say, posters. Zelda's level of shading falls somewhere in between those two levels. This results in much better depth perception than in most cartoons.
I seriously doubt you'll find anyone that honestly feels that 12 frames per second is better animation than 30 frames per second, or that decreasing sense of depth would improve a 3d scene.
Maybe you just don't like the character models. Blame the artists for that.
Maybe you just don't like your games to look like cartoons. Accept it rather than blame the game.
But cell shading isn't bad. It can't match the top notch hand drawings, but it's certainly demonstratably better quality than a tv series cartoon.
I could understand if you said you didn't like like cartoon style graphics. If you left things at that, it would simply be a matter of taste and would be understandable.
But Zelda looks better than the vast majority of cartoons. You've got a lot better sense of depth than in hand drawn cartoons. The motion is smooter. The shading is better than in most cartoons. Yes, the shading in game isn't as detailed as it is in the hand drawn pictures in the instruction book, but, those are single frame drawings. Animations are never as high quality as single frames.
You do realize that every Zelda except for the N64 ones had a cartoon look to it, right? Probably the only reason the N64 games didn't have a cartoon look was because the N64 wasn't powerful enough to do cell shading.
Look at the instruction manual for Zelda 1. It's got pictures of every enemy in the game. There's the in game picture, and the "what it really looks like" picture. The later picture looks exactly like the Wind Waker art.
Miyamoto has designed the controllers at least since the SNES days. Look at the controllers for the systems - designed around the games Miyamoto was working on at the time.
Miyamoto also supposedly had a big say in the N64 using cartridges - he didn't think Mario 64 would be nearly as good as it was if it had long load times.
That's to be expected when you look at how the companies sell the systems.
Nintendo's systems have sold primarily on their own games, with 3rd party games to fill in the gaps. Nintendo designs the hardware around the games they want to make. Their controllers have typical been designed around the games they were working on at the time.
Sony relies mainly on 3rd party games to sell their systems. They make a fairly generic controller, and focus on making a good system for other people to make use of.
I'd say his points are more true on the server side than the client side.
Say you're a large business, and you have a mix of client side and server side applications. Both have significant processing time requirements Which do you spend more time optimizing?
In this scenario, you're going to have a large number of client machines and a small number of servers. If servers need a little more power, you can upgrade the machine without too much disruption or money spent. The upgrade will benefit all users of the system. In this case, it's more cost effective to upgrade the server than it is to pay developers to optimize the hell out of the code.
The client machines is a different story. There's a lot of machines in use. Upgrading any one will only help the user of that computer. Optimizing the code will help every user. In this case, paying a developer to optimize your code will be a lot cheaper than doing a company wide hardware upgrade.
This is all of course assuming you're designing things well in the first place. Of course you should do things like use a quick sort (or whatever may be more appropriate in the case at hand) instead of a bubble sort. The point is its not worth spending days to get the last 1% of performance.
I was planning on taking the AP CS exam in 1999, the first year it was offered in C++. I looked at the prep materials they sent, and realized the test was a complete joke and I wouldn't have to study much at all for it.
It doesn't use STL, but rather a set of AP classes which are really a subset of the STL classes. They strip the classes down to the minimum necessary to get the point of the class, and have you use that. You only need a minimal knowledge of C++ to handle it.
The content is all very basic. Really all it covered was the material found in the first month or so of a college level Data Structures course.
I checked with the colleges I was looking at going to - none of them gave credit for taking the CS AP test. I asked a CS professor about it at an open house, and he confirmed what I thought - they didn't give credit for the test because it was too simple.
Pretty much everyone involved in the deal did, other than people who traded the stock at the right time.
Before buying Time Warner, AOL was buying up companies making technology important to them, such as Netscape & WinAmp. They didn't want to be dependant on anyone.
Time Warner didn't care about any of that stuff. They were content letting other people deal with those issues, and just providing the content.
The two merged, and really didn't mix well. Everything stagnated, and they blamed each other for the fall. AOL really only had one product, so when that started to lose popularity, they took all the blame, and Time Warner took over the company and tried to distance themselves from AOL as much as they could.
Ted Turner pretty much lost any power he had, and things he used to own went down too. The Atlanta Braves have had a huge cut in payroll. WCW was sold off for peanuts to WWF (now WWE) - supposedly just the wrestling rings and other equipment alone was worth more than the total sale price. WWE is making a lot of money selling DVDs made from the video footage they got in the deal.
Netscape got left to die a slow death, before finally getting killed off last year.
NullSoft hasn't been allowed to do anything interesting.
Japan is the 2nd largest market for games. It's not something you can just talking aside when talking about console sales. Especially not in this situation. The Xbox has a slim sales lead over the Cube in the US and Europe, but is hugely behind in Japan. Perhaps if the Xbox had a huge lead in the regions its ahead ignoring Japan would be interesting. But right now, ignoring Japan is just tossing aside the numbers you don't like to make your side look better.
Tossing aside Japan can really change the outlook of consoles. The N64 was only outsold by the PS1 3:2 in the US, and that's largely because the last year or two of the N64's life had a large reduction in the number of games available. But in Japan, the PS1 outsold the N64 somewhere around 10:1, which had a huge effect on the worldwide numbers, and is where all talk of the N64 not doing well talk comes from.
The Japanese aren't buying the Xbox not because the system is American, but rather because the games are all catered to American tastes. Selling NFL Gameday with all English text & packaging in Japan isn't going to sell. Nor will selling lots of First Person Shooters.
Windows 3.x was always horrible. Compare it to other things of the time - OS/2, GEOS, GEM, Mac. It had the worst of both stability and usability. It won because of the monopoly position DOS had, and some illegal product tying.
You're forgetting that IE before 4 was a terrible product. IE 3 couldn't render lots of common sites without problems.
You're the one trolling. The GameCube is outselling the Xbox worldwide by a significant margin. In the US, the Xbox is slightly ahead, but the GameCube has been closing the gap since the cut to $99 last fall.
Lossy compression is far more noticable in concert recordings than in studio records.
In the studio recording you've got clear, isolated music. In the concert recording, there's constant crowd noise mixed in. Yes, the crowd is much less significant in a soundboard recording, but it's still noticable.
Ever listen to a concert broadcast over the radio? The drop in sound quality is extremely noticable, even to people who normally don't notice the quality drop caused by radio.
It's been about 8 years since I read the relevant sections of copyright law, but this is the conclusion that I came to at the time. Pretty much everyone on the web that looked into the issue at that time had the same conclusion.
If the concert was performed for you, then you have the right to record it. However, the law never clearly specified who it was concerned to be performed for. You could make a case that the concert was considered to be performed for the owners of the performance venue. You could also make a case that the concert was being performed for the people in attendance. Either way you argued it, there would be a few lines that seemed out of place.
In the end though, the law seemed to make a lot more sense if you considered the concert to be performed for the people in attendance, which would give them the right to record it.
I also remember that the concert trading scene seemed to consider trading or giving away concert recordings to be legal, but that selling them wasn't. I don't remember where that idea comes from. It may be from the same laws I talked about above, or not...
I don't think game developers are really concerned about the people only willing to spend $10 on a game. Selling 1 copy at $50 is worth more than 5 copies at $10, as a higher percentage would be profit.
It's one thing to design a good product for one company, then go to another and design a new product there.
But how can you trust a person whose job entirely consists of convincing people that product A is better than product B, who then gets a job convincing people that product B is better than product A ? Neither product has changed that significantly recently. It just proves that he's only telling you what his employer wants you to hear, rather than anything grounded in reality.
Nintendo completely bought out Retro Studios before Metroid Prime came out, so Retro isn't going anywhere.
Rare had become a money sink. They've released very little in the past few years, all of which has been significantly lower quality than their older stuff. The owners wanted to cash out, and asked Nintendo for a very large sum of money. There's a limit to how much money is worth sinking into a company, and Nintendo decided they'd be better off selling the company than buying it out. So they let Rare sell themselves to the highest bidder, and sold their own stock in the same deal.
Who knows what went on with Silicon Knights. Give it time and maybe we'll hear more. But they really weren't a good match together. Nintendo focuses on gameplay above all else, whereas Silicon Knights focuses on story above all else.
Nintendo seems to like to keep their first party games... well, first party.
I wouldn't necessarily say that. Star Fox Adventures was developed by Rare, and wasn't even originally a Star Fox game. Nintendo saw it and thought Star Fox would fit, so they had Rare use the license. Rare also has done most Donkey Kong games since the mid 90's. Namco recently did Donkey Konga.
Sega did the most recent F-Zero game.
Capcom made 2 new Zelda games for GameBoy Color, and did the remake of A Link to the Past for GBA.
I think the split (and the reason Silicon Knights never had a chance to do a Zelda game) was due to the philosophy differences between Silicon Knights. Nintendo makes gameplay the top priority, and molds the rest around it. Silicon Knights makes the story the top priority, and seems to leave the gameplay practically as an afterthought. Silicon Knights making a Zelda game would've resulted in a realistic (but not that impressive) looking game full of blood and dark colors, but completely missing any interesting gameplay.
These days, processing cycles cheap, programmer time expensive.
That claim is valid (to an extent) when you're talking about something running on one machine, or a small number of them.
This is a project that's going to run for a month on hundreds of machines. Lets assume 30 days on 500 machines. That's 15,000 computation days. Say he spends one day making the code 1% faster. That one day of time results in a gain equivalent to 150 computation days. In this example, 1 day of work was equal to adding 5 more computers to the project. You'd have to be taking in a really big paycheck for that optimization to not be worth it.
Keep in mind that a lot of posters on this story are claiming that a 2-4x speed increase by rewriting in C would be realistic. Assuming that's true, a C version would be well worth doing.
The elevator scenes are largely there for effect. Every Metroid game has them, despite the fact that all the others are on cartridges.
The doors not opening doesn't happen often. The door to the artifact temple takes a long time to open, but you're standing in an empty room so its not a big deal. The only other noticable time doors won't open right away is when you're in a connecting hallway and rush thru it really quickly (usually morph into a ball and use the boost repeatedly). The hallways exist to slow you down so the game can load the next room.
The company logos at console startup are there partially to keep you aware of the brand (altho you know what system you're playing, the other people in the room may not), but also to hide the loading time for game startup code.
Actually, this trojan works solely because the file extension isn't used as typing.
The trojan is an application with its icon set to the default MP3 icon, with a.mp3 extension. The type and creator codes say it's an application, whereas the filename says its an mp3.
Slashdot Mirror
But Zelda looks better than the vast majority of cartoons.
Are you trying to tell me that this isn't a matter of taste?
Yes, I am, and I gave very specific reasons why.
The animation in Zelda is of a higher quality than most cartoons. Your average cartoon has approximately 12 frames per second, where as Zelda has 30.
Look at the shading in a cartoon. There is significantly less shading done in the animation than there is in still drawings done for, say, posters. Zelda's level of shading falls somewhere in between those two levels. This results in much better depth perception than in most cartoons.
I seriously doubt you'll find anyone that honestly feels that 12 frames per second is better animation than 30 frames per second, or that decreasing sense of depth would improve a 3d scene.
Maybe you just don't like the character models. Blame the artists for that.
Maybe you just don't like your games to look like cartoons. Accept it rather than blame the game.
But cell shading isn't bad. It can't match the top notch hand drawings, but it's certainly demonstratably better quality than a tv series cartoon.
I could understand if you said you didn't like like cartoon style graphics. If you left things at that, it would simply be a matter of taste and would be understandable.
But Zelda looks better than the vast majority of cartoons. You've got a lot better sense of depth than in hand drawn cartoons. The motion is smooter. The shading is better than in most cartoons. Yes, the shading in game isn't as detailed as it is in the hand drawn pictures in the instruction book, but, those are single frame drawings. Animations are never as high quality as single frames.
You do realize that every Zelda except for the N64 ones had a cartoon look to it, right? Probably the only reason the N64 games didn't have a cartoon look was because the N64 wasn't powerful enough to do cell shading.
Look at the instruction manual for Zelda 1. It's got pictures of every enemy in the game. There's the in game picture, and the "what it really looks like" picture. The later picture looks exactly like the Wind Waker art.
Miyamoto has designed the controllers at least since the SNES days. Look at the controllers for the systems - designed around the games Miyamoto was working on at the time.
Miyamoto also supposedly had a big say in the N64 using cartridges - he didn't think Mario 64 would be nearly as good as it was if it had long load times.
That's to be expected when you look at how the companies sell the systems.
Nintendo's systems have sold primarily on their own games, with 3rd party games to fill in the gaps. Nintendo designs the hardware around the games they want to make. Their controllers have typical been designed around the games they were working on at the time.
Sony relies mainly on 3rd party games to sell their systems. They make a fairly generic controller, and focus on making a good system for other people to make use of.
That's exactly what I meant by assuming your design is ok first.
If there's a huge bottleneck, fix that first. I'm talking about what to do if you still need more performance after that.
I'd say his points are more true on the server side than the client side.
Say you're a large business, and you have a mix of client side and server side applications. Both have significant processing time requirements Which do you spend more time optimizing?
In this scenario, you're going to have a large number of client machines and a small number of servers. If servers need a little more power, you can upgrade the machine without too much disruption or money spent. The upgrade will benefit all users of the system. In this case, it's more cost effective to upgrade the server than it is to pay developers to optimize the hell out of the code.
The client machines is a different story. There's a lot of machines in use. Upgrading any one will only help the user of that computer. Optimizing the code will help every user. In this case, paying a developer to optimize your code will be a lot cheaper than doing a company wide hardware upgrade.
This is all of course assuming you're designing things well in the first place. Of course you should do things like use a quick sort (or whatever may be more appropriate in the case at hand) instead of a bubble sort. The point is its not worth spending days to get the last 1% of performance.
I was planning on taking the AP CS exam in 1999, the first year it was offered in C++. I looked at the prep materials they sent, and realized the test was a complete joke and I wouldn't have to study much at all for it.
It doesn't use STL, but rather a set of AP classes which are really a subset of the STL classes. They strip the classes down to the minimum necessary to get the point of the class, and have you use that. You only need a minimal knowledge of C++ to handle it.
The content is all very basic. Really all it covered was the material found in the first month or so of a college level Data Structures course.
I checked with the colleges I was looking at going to - none of them gave credit for taking the CS AP test. I asked a CS professor about it at an open house, and he confirmed what I thought - they didn't give credit for the test because it was too simple.
Pretty much everyone involved in the deal did, other than people who traded the stock at the right time.
Before buying Time Warner, AOL was buying up companies making technology important to them, such as Netscape & WinAmp. They didn't want to be dependant on anyone.
Time Warner didn't care about any of that stuff. They were content letting other people deal with those issues, and just providing the content.
The two merged, and really didn't mix well. Everything stagnated, and they blamed each other for the fall. AOL really only had one product, so when that started to lose popularity, they took all the blame, and Time Warner took over the company and tried to distance themselves from AOL as much as they could.
Ted Turner pretty much lost any power he had, and things he used to own went down too. The Atlanta Braves have had a huge cut in payroll. WCW was sold off for peanuts to WWF (now WWE) - supposedly just the wrestling rings and other equipment alone was worth more than the total sale price. WWE is making a lot of money selling DVDs made from the video footage they got in the deal.
Netscape got left to die a slow death, before finally getting killed off last year.
NullSoft hasn't been allowed to do anything interesting.
Where are you looking for cables? The official Nintendo one is about $12. You can find 3rd party ones for less.
Japan is the 2nd largest market for games. It's not something you can just talking aside when talking about console sales. Especially not in this situation. The Xbox has a slim sales lead over the Cube in the US and Europe, but is hugely behind in Japan. Perhaps if the Xbox had a huge lead in the regions its ahead ignoring Japan would be interesting. But right now, ignoring Japan is just tossing aside the numbers you don't like to make your side look better.
Tossing aside Japan can really change the outlook of consoles. The N64 was only outsold by the PS1 3:2 in the US, and that's largely because the last year or two of the N64's life had a large reduction in the number of games available. But in Japan, the PS1 outsold the N64 somewhere around 10:1, which had a huge effect on the worldwide numbers, and is where all talk of the N64 not doing well talk comes from.
The Japanese aren't buying the Xbox not because the system is American, but rather because the games are all catered to American tastes. Selling NFL Gameday with all English text & packaging in Japan isn't going to sell. Nor will selling lots of First Person Shooters.
Windows 3.x was always horrible. Compare it to other things of the time - OS/2, GEOS, GEM, Mac. It had the worst of both stability and usability. It won because of the monopoly position DOS had, and some illegal product tying.
You're forgetting that IE before 4 was a terrible product. IE 3 couldn't render lots of common sites without problems.
You're the one trolling. The GameCube is outselling the Xbox worldwide by a significant margin. In the US, the Xbox is slightly ahead, but the GameCube has been closing the gap since the cut to $99 last fall.
That's not how it goes. The second game diverges greatly from the first, then the third goes back to the original formula.
Look at all the old NES games that followed that model. Super Mario Bros and The Legend of Zelda are the most glaring series to do it.
Lossy compression is far more noticable in concert recordings than in studio records.
In the studio recording you've got clear, isolated music. In the concert recording, there's constant crowd noise mixed in. Yes, the crowd is much less significant in a soundboard recording, but it's still noticable.
Ever listen to a concert broadcast over the radio? The drop in sound quality is extremely noticable, even to people who normally don't notice the quality drop caused by radio.
It's been about 8 years since I read the relevant sections of copyright law, but this is the conclusion that I came to at the time. Pretty much everyone on the web that looked into the issue at that time had the same conclusion.
If the concert was performed for you, then you have the right to record it. However, the law never clearly specified who it was concerned to be performed for. You could make a case that the concert was considered to be performed for the owners of the performance venue. You could also make a case that the concert was being performed for the people in attendance. Either way you argued it, there would be a few lines that seemed out of place.
In the end though, the law seemed to make a lot more sense if you considered the concert to be performed for the people in attendance, which would give them the right to record it.
I also remember that the concert trading scene seemed to consider trading or giving away concert recordings to be legal, but that selling them wasn't. I don't remember where that idea comes from. It may be from the same laws I talked about above, or not...
I don't think game developers are really concerned about the people only willing to spend $10 on a game. Selling 1 copy at $50 is worth more than 5 copies at $10, as a higher percentage would be profit.
It's one thing to design a good product for one company, then go to another and design a new product there.
But how can you trust a person whose job entirely consists of convincing people that product A is better than product B, who then gets a job convincing people that product B is better than product A ? Neither product has changed that significantly recently. It just proves that he's only telling you what his employer wants you to hear, rather than anything grounded in reality.
Why bother?
An 8 megabyte flash rom cartridge is down to about $40 now. It's a lot easier to use than cards, more durable and about the same price as the eReader.
Nintendo completely bought out Retro Studios before Metroid Prime came out, so Retro isn't going anywhere.
Rare had become a money sink. They've released very little in the past few years, all of which has been significantly lower quality than their older stuff. The owners wanted to cash out, and asked Nintendo for a very large sum of money. There's a limit to how much money is worth sinking into a company, and Nintendo decided they'd be better off selling the company than buying it out. So they let Rare sell themselves to the highest bidder, and sold their own stock in the same deal.
Who knows what went on with Silicon Knights. Give it time and maybe we'll hear more. But they really weren't a good match together. Nintendo focuses on gameplay above all else, whereas Silicon Knights focuses on story above all else.
Nintendo seems to like to keep their first party games... well, first party.
I wouldn't necessarily say that. Star Fox Adventures was developed by Rare, and wasn't even originally a Star Fox game. Nintendo saw it and thought Star Fox would fit, so they had Rare use the license. Rare also has done most Donkey Kong games since the mid 90's. Namco recently did Donkey Konga.
Sega did the most recent F-Zero game.
Capcom made 2 new Zelda games for GameBoy Color, and did the remake of A Link to the Past for GBA.
I think the split (and the reason Silicon Knights never had a chance to do a Zelda game) was due to the philosophy differences between Silicon Knights. Nintendo makes gameplay the top priority, and molds the rest around it. Silicon Knights makes the story the top priority, and seems to leave the gameplay practically as an afterthought. Silicon Knights making a Zelda game would've resulted in a realistic (but not that impressive) looking game full of blood and dark colors, but completely missing any interesting gameplay.
These days, processing cycles cheap, programmer time expensive.
That claim is valid (to an extent) when you're talking about something running on one machine, or a small number of them.
This is a project that's going to run for a month on hundreds of machines. Lets assume 30 days on 500 machines. That's 15,000 computation days. Say he spends one day making the code 1% faster. That one day of time results in a gain equivalent to 150 computation days. In this example, 1 day of work was equal to adding 5 more computers to the project. You'd have to be taking in a really big paycheck for that optimization to not be worth it.
Keep in mind that a lot of posters on this story are claiming that a 2-4x speed increase by rewriting in C would be realistic. Assuming that's true, a C version would be well worth doing.
The elevator scenes are largely there for effect. Every Metroid game has them, despite the fact that all the others are on cartridges.
The doors not opening doesn't happen often. The door to the artifact temple takes a long time to open, but you're standing in an empty room so its not a big deal. The only other noticable time doors won't open right away is when you're in a connecting hallway and rush thru it really quickly (usually morph into a ball and use the boost repeatedly). The hallways exist to slow you down so the game can load the next room.
The company logos at console startup are there partially to keep you aware of the brand (altho you know what system you're playing, the other people in the room may not), but also to hide the loading time for game startup code.
Actually, this trojan works solely because the file extension isn't used as typing.
.mp3 extension. The type and creator codes say it's an application, whereas the filename says its an mp3.
The trojan is an application with its icon set to the default MP3 icon, with a