"Sure you could still go buy it for your child , but you are now not allowed to let your child have the responsibility to choose based on your parenting."
What really rubs me the wrong way about it was that I was 16 when I had my first car and my first job. My dad trusted me with the car. I earned that trust. He didn't have a problem with me playing Mortal Kombat, either. Why? I was a good kid. (i.e. I never got into fights or anything like that.)
I had the means to get the game, I even had the trust of my parents to play it. In that example, I would have been inconvenienced. And yeah, it would have felt like the mean ol' gov't was trying to 'protect' me even though it didn't even know me.
I really don't think it's cool. The age is too high and I really don't see a problem getting solved here. The loudmouths trying to take Rockstar down, for example, aren't trying to take it down because a bunch of kids have played violent games and ruined the world. They are noisy because, in their narrow view, they think it'll happen and they acted on an unsupported intuition. That bugs me. That really bugs me.
I guess what I'm saying is that the law itself doesn't bug me (it beats games getting flat out banned) but I cannot imagine it being the last step. It's amazing how passionate people get when they're ignorant.
"Why in the world would a person want their MOUSE to notify them when they get an Email?"
My monitor turns off after 20 minutes. If I go for a quick 10 second check of email, I have to bring it up again and wait for it to warm up. If my mouse blinked at me, that'd be convenient. Just a quick glance in the general direction of my desk and I know whether to bother turning the CRT back on.
It really didn't take a whole lotta brain power to work that out.
" The only problem is that Nintendo isn't taking it as far as it could. Example: Nintendogs- I was done with this game by the second hour."
Admittedly I have not played this game extensively. But everything I've read (including a couple of reviews in Game Informer) suggested that the 'game' isn't so much a game, but rather a simulation. You can 'play' it endlessly. They also said Nintendogs was meant to be played an hour a day for a long time.
I wouldn't have responded, but they very clearly said that there is no 'end' to the game, and for that they weren't sure whether to really call it a game. I cannot say you're wrong from personal experience, but I do wonder if you missed the point of it.
"Game Developer postmortems are usually interesting, and always good for at least one insight."
This is true. One of the things I miss about my previous job is that they subscribed to Game Developer magazine. I always had fun reading the post-mortem section because it often went into some of the stickier issues of managing a large team to build a game.
Okay, enough babble. Are there other mags out there that do 'postmortem' type articles regularly?
"Which goes to show you that Marvel really hasn't come up with much exciting stuff in the last couple decades."
On the flip side, it means that Marvel has franchises that have withstood the test of time. Frankly, I don't think highly of super-hero movies, but if they have a devoted fan base then give them what they want.
"This looks like a cool new technology, but how useful can it be? I'm wondering how durable the 'film screen' is. Can I accidentally rip it, pulling it out of a pocket? I'm interested to see prototypes in other such designs, but I'm having a hard time figuring out how useful something like this may be."
It means a lower weight device with much lower power consumption. I like the idea of one of these devices as a simple e-book reader that runs on a single AA.
"This is NOT, let me repeat, NOT rocket science (or even a *nix shell). Do you see that button that says "install"? Do not panic! Just click it. If you see any buttons afterwards that say "next" be sure to click those too."
Don't be an ass. He's got a point. Buy a console game, plop disc in, play. Buy a PC game, plop disk in, press OK a few times, wait, wait, wait, configure your vid card settings, configure your kb shortcuts, download the latest patches, wait, wait wait. Ah! I can finally play! *please wait while the game loads.*
He *is* right about this. Despite all of these hoops to jump through, PC games still manage to have significant loading times. It's obnoxious and people are right to bitch about it. PC Gaming is downright painful sometimes. Arguing that it isn't is like arguing that the roof's okay because you're standing under the one part that isn't leaking.
"What kind of effect will procedural textures have on this? Surely a procedural algorithm would be smaller (in code at least)?"
You're right. Procedural textures would be significantly smaller. They also have the added benefit of scaling up quite nicely.
There are a couple of problems with procedurals that I suspect is preventing them from being used in gaming. One is that their very nature means they can generate a shimmery/sparkly effect when the detail gets too small. I imagine there are software work arounds for this, but those eat up cycles. That is an unfortunate side-effect of using procedurals with Lightwave. It is easy to make a very noisy render with procedurals if you perform an extreme camera movement, like zooming way out for example. We've been able to partially fix it by having the higher detail procedurals fade out when the camera reaches a certain distance. Raster textures are nice because they get filtered in such a way that this effect doesn't happen near as badly. The other problem is that it takes time and CPU power to generate these cycles. When you're rendering, the difference isn't noticable. But in a real time environment, the CPU (GPU?) will have to generate the appropriate texture value for every pixel on the screen that is rendered. From what I understand, I'm quite certain this would prove to be a headache for the programmers who are trying to maintain a constant frame rate. However, I suspect that some clever programming could alleviate some of these problems. (one of these days I'm going to write a procedural shader so I can understand this a little better...)
There is an interesting way they can solve both the problems I've mentioned. That would be by using a procedural to generate a raster texture. They'd still use up texture memory, but they'd also be able to do that with a managable rendering speed and probably even refine out the sparkly issue.
"I thought they (Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft) all take a loss on the console, and make the money back on the overly priced games?"
Sony sold at a loss at first, but now they're making a profit on the machines. Nintendo made a profit on GameCubes sold, however there were times where they might have lost say $10 a machine or so. (like right after a price drop.) But, yes, the money is primarily made from the games.
On a side note, there's a site that claims Sony never sold at a loss. (Acts of Gord.) Unfortunately, the author of that site is basing this assumption on a blurb in a quarterly stock report Sony released. If you run across it, I recommend taking what he says with a grain of salt. Stock reports are written to impress shareholders. It doesn't actually say they didn't sell the units at a loss, just that they would have made 175 mil if they had more units out. The latest issue of Game Informer, however, is saying Sony lost 500 mil at the launch of the PS2. So.. yeah.. whatever. Interesting note: Gord says Sony spent 2 billion (yes, billion with a b) developing the PS2. I don't think they regret it, but I do think it's interesting that they're having IBM and Toshiba help them develop the Cell processor for the PS3.
I really am curious what Nintendo and Microsoft are spending to develop their new machines. Nintendo has a few bill in the bank, but it is difficult to imagine them spending 2 billion on the Revolution.
"The ratio of compression directly affects the quality of the texture (look at n64 textures, colored smudged pasted onto models). So yes and no, you can compress them, but the less compression the better."
Erm. Hehe. Part of the problem with the N64 textures is that, if I recall properly, they had a limit of 4k per poly for the texture image. They had to make some awful compromises to work that out. Add to that that the textures were such a low res that ANY form of compression was hurtful. With the current generation (PS2, XBOX, GameCube) the textures are a LOT larger. 512 by 512 textures are not uncommon. You can get away with a LOT more when it comes to compression. They could use JPEG for the textures and get an incredible amount of storage-savings. Nobody'd ever really know. Truth be told, I don't know if they actually do that or not. JPEG can be an extensive decode if overused. I imagine they compromise between a slightly larger file that is much quicker, computationally, to blit into memory.
At this point, I'm out of my element. I do 3D animation for a living, but not for games. If any game developers are floating around, I'd appreciate a reply.
"You said tripple the size. As I said, can you explain how bump maps could be larger?"
I can offer a little detail. Have a peek at this image I made here. No, this is not an in-game mesh, but it's the sort of graphic that game consoles are rapidly approaching the ability to do in real time. There are a lot of photographic textures in that scene. Each texture is 2048 by 2048 in size. Here's a breakdown of the data involved:
- Color texture. (24-bit):: This is the color image for the surfaces. The warning sign and the "DO NOT BLOCK ENTRY" sign both use images made in Photoshop to look like that. Those vents on the back wall are also simply photographs. (I'm starting to wish I made a render of this cannon without the textures to give an idea...)
- Bump texture (8-bit):: This generates a 'bump' on the surface by adding an embosed looking shadow to the texture. The tiles on the floor in this image us that process.
- Specular Texture (8-bit):: This controls how much 'shininess' is reflected from the surface. It is hard to see in this pic a great example of this process, but it's fairly subtle in this pick. Take a look at the tiles in the floor, though. There is some roughness on the floor from the specularity image, the bump image, and the glossiness image.
- Glossiness Texture (8-bit):: This affects how 'big' a specular highlight is on a per-pixel level. This is great for making metal or something look 'smudged' when light hits it. The floor also uses this technique. Unfortunately, you'd have to see it animated to really get an idea of what effect it has on this scene. Basically, if the camera were to slowly truck to the right, you'd see a sort of 'shimmering' effect as the light hit the different areas of the glossiness map, causing the specular highlights to change in size. That's really the main reason I put that in there, I thought it'd make it look a little more like a real set.
- Diffuse Texture (8-bit):: This texture controls how much light is reflected from each pixel of the surface. Sort of a poor man's HDRI. The floor just under the cannon uses this effect. It's sort of bluish in this shot. If the light dimmed a bit, the cannon would still be quite visible, but the blue floor beneath it would be black. The seams between the tiles are also almost black in the diffuse channel.
- Normal Map (24-bit):: I did not use normal maps in this scene. If I had, the bump would look a little more convincing. (Although, for a scene like this, it would have been hard to tell.) These are full color images that represent bump in 3 axes instead of just one. I could have made those vents in the background appear to have more depth to them if I had known about normal maps at the time. To be honest, though, if I did this shot again, I probably would not use them. I would, however, if I were trying to simplify the geometry. There are 1.2 million polygons in this scene. The main reason there are so many is that every edge is rounded. A normal map could have done effectively the same trick at the cost of texture memory. Unfortunately, this would have been painful, as it was this scene took most of my gig of memory to render. As it was, I had dithered down the color textures to 8-bits each. (yes, those are 8-bit images and not 24. I wasn't sure whether to mention that or not... Hard to tell, iddn't it?)
Assuming I had used normal maps and didn't use an 8-bit image for the color channel, each texture in that scene had 80-bits of data. If I could only have used 24-bit color textures, then I would have seen at least a doubling of the assets. (But not quite tripling..) If I had come from using 8-bit textures... well the numbers turn a lot worse. Unfortunately, I do not know if game companies typically use 8 or 24 bit color t
"Textures can be very big, bump maps can doubel ro tripple that size, and then there is audio/fmv's. The actual game binaries woudl fit on a CD but it's the Art assets that are huge."
The funny thing about textures is that they can be compressed. The faster the machine, the more compression they can afford to do. Add to that that most XBOX games were around 3 gigs.
What you say is true, but I'd be surprised if many game developers felt hindered by having only 9 gigs to play with. On the flip side, and I hate to sound like a Microsoft PR parrot here, but a Dual Layered DVD drive also has considerably faster access to the data on the disc. Supposedly MS's developers chose that over capacity. Although I don't know why I say 'supposedly', seems like a reasonable request to me. San Andreas's load times drove me nuts.
"...Are CBS, Donny Deutsch, and Ed Bradley actually informing their viewers--or just inflaming their fears in a culture already on edge?"
It'd sure be interesting if these dudes would say "Here are games we approve of!", as opposed to just bla bla bla'ing about how games they've never played are evil.
Slashdot Mirror
I just love some of the things people do when they face a criticism they don't wanna hear. Not a single person has addressed my point.
"Sure you could still go buy it for your child , but you are now not allowed to let your child have the responsibility to choose based on your parenting."
What really rubs me the wrong way about it was that I was 16 when I had my first car and my first job. My dad trusted me with the car. I earned that trust. He didn't have a problem with me playing Mortal Kombat, either. Why? I was a good kid. (i.e. I never got into fights or anything like that.)
I had the means to get the game, I even had the trust of my parents to play it. In that example, I would have been inconvenienced. And yeah, it would have felt like the mean ol' gov't was trying to 'protect' me even though it didn't even know me.
I really don't think it's cool. The age is too high and I really don't see a problem getting solved here. The loudmouths trying to take Rockstar down, for example, aren't trying to take it down because a bunch of kids have played violent games and ruined the world. They are noisy because, in their narrow view, they think it'll happen and they acted on an unsupported intuition. That bugs me. That really bugs me.
I guess what I'm saying is that the law itself doesn't bug me (it beats games getting flat out banned) but I cannot imagine it being the last step. It's amazing how passionate people get when they're ignorant.
" then you'll be SOL."
Argh! That'd suck if they forced me to watch cheesy movies!
"You can certainly get more tools on the same storage space with GNU/Linux than XP."
OSS is all about choice until one of those choices is provided by Microsoft. I love Slashdot.
"Why in the world would a person want their MOUSE to notify them when they get an Email?"
My monitor turns off after 20 minutes. If I go for a quick 10 second check of email, I have to bring it up again and wait for it to warm up. If my mouse blinked at me, that'd be convenient. Just a quick glance in the general direction of my desk and I know whether to bother turning the CRT back on.
It really didn't take a whole lotta brain power to work that out.
"However you do it, you'd do well to distribute the game as a boot cd."
I can't speak for anybody else, but I'm unlikely to play a game I have to reboot my computer for.
" The only problem is that Nintendo isn't taking it as far as it could. Example: Nintendogs- I was done with this game by the second hour."
Admittedly I have not played this game extensively. But everything I've read (including a couple of reviews in Game Informer) suggested that the 'game' isn't so much a game, but rather a simulation. You can 'play' it endlessly. They also said Nintendogs was meant to be played an hour a day for a long time.
I wouldn't have responded, but they very clearly said that there is no 'end' to the game, and for that they weren't sure whether to really call it a game. I cannot say you're wrong from personal experience, but I do wonder if you missed the point of it.
"Game Developer postmortems are usually interesting, and always good for at least one insight."
This is true. One of the things I miss about my previous job is that they subscribed to Game Developer magazine. I always had fun reading the post-mortem section because it often went into some of the stickier issues of managing a large team to build a game.
Okay, enough babble. Are there other mags out there that do 'postmortem' type articles regularly?
"Nano spec says USB 2.0 only -- and no firewire -- this means I don't think I can plug it into my MDD PowerMac. :-("
Argh. And my desktop has firewire but no USB 2.0. I just love competing standards.
"s/MAC/Mac/g"
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"Which goes to show you that Marvel really hasn't come up with much exciting stuff in the last couple decades."
On the flip side, it means that Marvel has franchises that have withstood the test of time. Frankly, I don't think highly of super-hero movies, but if they have a devoted fan base then give them what they want.
"whoever modded me Flamebait obviously has no sence of humor :)"
Perhaps you should tell him that you're *giggle* kind of horny, but you've gotta go, so he should check your pics on a site ending in 18+.com.
"This looks like a cool new technology, but how useful can it be? I'm wondering how durable the 'film screen' is. Can I accidentally rip it, pulling it out of a pocket? I'm interested to see prototypes in other such designs, but I'm having a hard time figuring out how useful something like this may be."
It means a lower weight device with much lower power consumption. I like the idea of one of these devices as a simple e-book reader that runs on a single AA.
"This is NOT, let me repeat, NOT rocket science (or even a *nix shell). Do you see that button that says "install"? Do not panic! Just click it. If you see any buttons afterwards that say "next" be sure to click those too."
Don't be an ass. He's got a point. Buy a console game, plop disc in, play. Buy a PC game, plop disk in, press OK a few times, wait, wait, wait, configure your vid card settings, configure your kb shortcuts, download the latest patches, wait, wait wait. Ah! I can finally play! *please wait while the game loads.*
He *is* right about this. Despite all of these hoops to jump through, PC games still manage to have significant loading times. It's obnoxious and people are right to bitch about it. PC Gaming is downright painful sometimes. Arguing that it isn't is like arguing that the roof's okay because you're standing under the one part that isn't leaking.
"They forgot to make the clouds move."
There's a movie on MST3K that showed an OLD Universal logo without any clouds. Crow said "It's the best weather Earth has ever had!"
"What kind of effect will procedural textures have on this? Surely a procedural algorithm would be smaller (in code at least)?"
You're right. Procedural textures would be significantly smaller. They also have the added benefit of scaling up quite nicely.
There are a couple of problems with procedurals that I suspect is preventing them from being used in gaming. One is that their very nature means they can generate a shimmery/sparkly effect when the detail gets too small. I imagine there are software work arounds for this, but those eat up cycles. That is an unfortunate side-effect of using procedurals with Lightwave. It is easy to make a very noisy render with procedurals if you perform an extreme camera movement, like zooming way out for example. We've been able to partially fix it by having the higher detail procedurals fade out when the camera reaches a certain distance. Raster textures are nice because they get filtered in such a way that this effect doesn't happen near as badly. The other problem is that it takes time and CPU power to generate these cycles. When you're rendering, the difference isn't noticable. But in a real time environment, the CPU (GPU?) will have to generate the appropriate texture value for every pixel on the screen that is rendered. From what I understand, I'm quite certain this would prove to be a headache for the programmers who are trying to maintain a constant frame rate. However, I suspect that some clever programming could alleviate some of these problems. (one of these days I'm going to write a procedural shader so I can understand this a little better...)
There is an interesting way they can solve both the problems I've mentioned. That would be by using a procedural to generate a raster texture. They'd still use up texture memory, but they'd also be able to do that with a managable rendering speed and probably even refine out the sparkly issue.
Anyway, yep, they could save disk space that way.
"I thought they (Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft) all take a loss on the console, and make the money back on the overly priced games?"
Sony sold at a loss at first, but now they're making a profit on the machines. Nintendo made a profit on GameCubes sold, however there were times where they might have lost say $10 a machine or so. (like right after a price drop.) But, yes, the money is primarily made from the games.
On a side note, there's a site that claims Sony never sold at a loss. (Acts of Gord.) Unfortunately, the author of that site is basing this assumption on a blurb in a quarterly stock report Sony released. If you run across it, I recommend taking what he says with a grain of salt. Stock reports are written to impress shareholders. It doesn't actually say they didn't sell the units at a loss, just that they would have made 175 mil if they had more units out. The latest issue of Game Informer, however, is saying Sony lost 500 mil at the launch of the PS2. So.. yeah.. whatever. Interesting note: Gord says Sony spent 2 billion (yes, billion with a b) developing the PS2. I don't think they regret it, but I do think it's interesting that they're having IBM and Toshiba help them develop the Cell processor for the PS3.
I really am curious what Nintendo and Microsoft are spending to develop their new machines. Nintendo has a few bill in the bank, but it is difficult to imagine them spending 2 billion on the Revolution.
Thanks for the clarifications! I was kinda worried I was spounting off some inccorect stuff. Oooooops.. :)
"The ratio of compression directly affects the quality of the texture (look at n64 textures, colored smudged pasted onto models). So yes and no, you can compress them, but the less compression the better."
Erm. Hehe. Part of the problem with the N64 textures is that, if I recall properly, they had a limit of 4k per poly for the texture image. They had to make some awful compromises to work that out. Add to that that the textures were such a low res that ANY form of compression was hurtful. With the current generation (PS2, XBOX, GameCube) the textures are a LOT larger. 512 by 512 textures are not uncommon. You can get away with a LOT more when it comes to compression. They could use JPEG for the textures and get an incredible amount of storage-savings. Nobody'd ever really know. Truth be told, I don't know if they actually do that or not. JPEG can be an extensive decode if overused. I imagine they compromise between a slightly larger file that is much quicker, computationally, to blit into memory.
At this point, I'm out of my element. I do 3D animation for a living, but not for games. If any game developers are floating around, I'd appreciate a reply.
"You said tripple the size. As I said, can you explain how bump maps could be larger?"
:: This is the color image for the surfaces. The warning sign and the "DO NOT BLOCK ENTRY" sign both use images made in Photoshop to look like that. Those vents on the back wall are also simply photographs. (I'm starting to wish I made a render of this cannon without the textures to give an idea...)
:: This generates a 'bump' on the surface by adding an embosed looking shadow to the texture. The tiles on the floor in this image us that process.
:: This controls how much 'shininess' is reflected from the surface. It is hard to see in this pic a great example of this process, but it's fairly subtle in this pick. Take a look at the tiles in the floor, though. There is some roughness on the floor from the specularity image, the bump image, and the glossiness image.
:: This affects how 'big' a specular highlight is on a per-pixel level. This is great for making metal or something look 'smudged' when light hits it. The floor also uses this technique. Unfortunately, you'd have to see it animated to really get an idea of what effect it has on this scene. Basically, if the camera were to slowly truck to the right, you'd see a sort of 'shimmering' effect as the light hit the different areas of the glossiness map, causing the specular highlights to change in size. That's really the main reason I put that in there, I thought it'd make it look a little more like a real set.
:: This texture controls how much light is reflected from each pixel of the surface. Sort of a poor man's HDRI. The floor just under the cannon uses this effect. It's sort of bluish in this shot. If the light dimmed a bit, the cannon would still be quite visible, but the blue floor beneath it would be black. The seams between the tiles are also almost black in the diffuse channel.
:: I did not use normal maps in this scene. If I had, the bump would look a little more convincing. (Although, for a scene like this, it would have been hard to tell.) These are full color images that represent bump in 3 axes instead of just one. I could have made those vents in the background appear to have more depth to them if I had known about normal maps at the time. To be honest, though, if I did this shot again, I probably would not use them. I would, however, if I were trying to simplify the geometry. There are 1.2 million polygons in this scene. The main reason there are so many is that every edge is rounded. A normal map could have done effectively the same trick at the cost of texture memory. Unfortunately, this would have been painful, as it was this scene took most of my gig of memory to render. As it was, I had dithered down the color textures to 8-bits each. (yes, those are 8-bit images and not 24. I wasn't sure whether to mention that or not... Hard to tell, iddn't it?)
I can offer a little detail. Have a peek at this image I made here. No, this is not an in-game mesh, but it's the sort of graphic that game consoles are rapidly approaching the ability to do in real time. There are a lot of photographic textures in that scene. Each texture is 2048 by 2048 in size. Here's a breakdown of the data involved:
- Color texture. (24-bit)
- Bump texture (8-bit)
- Specular Texture (8-bit)
- Glossiness Texture (8-bit)
- Diffuse Texture (8-bit)
- Normal Map (24-bit)
Assuming I had used normal maps and didn't use an 8-bit image for the color channel, each texture in that scene had 80-bits of data. If I could only have used 24-bit color textures, then I would have seen at least a doubling of the assets. (But not quite tripling..) If I had come from using 8-bit textures... well the numbers turn a lot worse. Unfortunately, I do not know if game companies typically use 8 or 24 bit color t
"Textures can be very big, bump maps can doubel ro tripple that size, and then there is audio/fmv's. The actual game binaries woudl fit on a CD but it's the Art assets that are huge."
The funny thing about textures is that they can be compressed. The faster the machine, the more compression they can afford to do. Add to that that most XBOX games were around 3 gigs.
What you say is true, but I'd be surprised if many game developers felt hindered by having only 9 gigs to play with. On the flip side, and I hate to sound like a Microsoft PR parrot here, but a Dual Layered DVD drive also has considerably faster access to the data on the disc. Supposedly MS's developers chose that over capacity. Although I don't know why I say 'supposedly', seems like a reasonable request to me. San Andreas's load times drove me nuts.
"Obviously important, but your rights online??!?"
Let's cut Slashdot a little slack. For once they reported news within 14 days of it breaking. We should pat them on the back!
"Slashdot's piss-poor search engine"
Funny, you just explained quite clearly why they don't typically use the search feature to prevent dupes, then you complain that they didn't.
Is it too hard to just ignore the dupe stories?
"...Are CBS, Donny Deutsch, and Ed Bradley actually informing their viewers--or just inflaming their fears in a culture already on edge?"
It'd sure be interesting if these dudes would say "Here are games we approve of!", as opposed to just bla bla bla'ing about how games they've never played are evil.
"I know the rotation of the Earth and the orbit of the Moon don't quite work like that, but with modern technology that could be solved..."
Modern technology can't even produce a toupee that doesn't get big laughs.