So do you really work out a monthly budget for your computer time? Is everyone in the house timesharing it at their own dumb-terminals? What if someone wants to run a GUI, are the cycles just not there for something else?
And you know you don't code at the hardware level for your PS/2 ports. Stop lying.
Can a compiler flag redesign your code? No? Then it can't do what you're asking. In order to take full advantage of the cell, you have to break your task up into parallel units and have them run on the SPUs. The SPU has a low memory overhead so you can't just throw any old piece of code at it. If you were writing something for a similar architecture I could see it, but otherwise just enabling "cell mode" won't get you much.
It probably means the same thing here as well. But its still "done enough" to let people have an idea of what the final product will be. At this stage if you can't get an idea of how the product will behave end-to-end then you're in deep shit. You don't even have to have final art, or things like all the bells and whistles on the graphics, but you need to have all the gameplay elements finished to let everyone know what they can begin focusing on for the marketing campaigns and whatnot. You are right that a lot of QA probably doesn't filter into it, simply because since so much of the code base can still be in flux (say some places have a framerate of 3, too many memory leaks to do more than one level at a time, etc) that bugs simply won't be helpful because the engineers are full time on finishing the product. Still, you can do usability testing (as "helpful" as that might be) on stuff like the UIs, control scheme etc. which while it is isn't the "find a bug, fix it" mode of QA found after alpha or beta, its still something you can do at this stage.
It means execs/marketing/packaging/etc can take a look at most of the game (bugs & all) and have a reasonable idea of what it will look like and how the major features will work. That way the non-development stuff can really start kicking into gear (not that planning & stuff would have already happened). Testing has assuredly already started, albiet with a smaller more focused QA team, generally in house with the studio as opposed to the bigger "general QA" teams.
It is much better, and you and I and most of/. probably knows that, but then again with so many sites asking for registration these days do you _really_ take the time to figure out a different password for each one. Do you know them all? Do you write them down somewhere. Or do you have some scheme figured out that helps you remember? Something that a truly motivated attacker could figure out? I use a tiered system myself, where sites I don't care about get a "crap" password (or one from a set), and sites that I want more security (bank, email, website admin, etc) get thier own. Even so, I sometimes forget that password. And I actually _care_ about security.
Probably what most people do is type in a set of passwords (or just the one) and then try them all at different sites. The smart phisher would have their program reject a few passwords each time and get not one but a bunch of different passwords for each user. Tag their name to an email and you're off to the races on a bunch of different sites.
I think the most secure system is one that a) involves a central spot like open id, b) involves an autorotating password. The autorotation should be through a user known password + an RSA keyfob #, and the user known password should have to change regularly.
I'm sorry, I don't really understand what's stopping MS from making their own fork of OpenOffice anyways without Novell? Or the Linux kernel, or anything else for that matter. It is open source, right? Can't IBM do the exact same thing (and has, lots of times). Are you worried about MS suddenly making that code go away, or getting people to use their DRM version, or something of that nature? Given the average Linux user's utter revulsion to anything MS, I imagine its going to be a hard sell. I'm sure there's lots of patents MS could try to sue Linux (or, rather, the people using Linux) over right now, they don't have to go extreme lengths to lock it down by somehow adding source code to it. AFAIK, they can't take OpenOffice and somehow break the GPL (is it GPL? I don't know) and start their own version.
You mean REALLY liking computers won't turn my hair blue and introduce me to a world of leather clad babes and techno music? I thought I just wasn't using mine enough. This is disappointing.
Yeah, I don't really understand why people get mad at "hacker == cracker". They're mislabled as badboys. You wouldn't want them mislabeling you as fat lonely nerds who live in their....
I'm guessing the cost of the game was to offset the publisher manufacturing fee and the entire budget was probably written off, so they weren't expecting to make a dime. (Generally MS, Sony & Nintendo charge upwards of %25 of a title in fees). I doubt though that it mattered much considering the advertising budget for playing all those commercials dwarfed the cost of the actual game. And seeing as the post above got someone to walk into a Burger King who hadn't been there in years I'd say they did the job.
What I'm saying though, is that horsepower will let you do a lot of things previously "undoable" on past systems. Its not all about the graphics. The PS3 and 360 chips aren't gigantic leaps forward in any sense of the word. What really counts is the additional horsepower provided by the cell and the 360 multicore. Not to mention memory. Obviously the "low hanging fruit" is to slap a fresh coat of paint on old games, and that's what you've seen with 360/last-gen hybrids. But with more memory and power to do procedural geometry, texturing, etc. you can have things like Spore or big big open worlds that the Wii just won't be able to handle.
Which isn't necessarily bad. I think you're going to see a divergence with the Wii going for a more casual game markets with smaller, level oriented arcady style games, and the bigger story driven titles heading for the PS3/360.
Puh, you call that jaded? You may not care about several order of magnitude improvement over previous attempts, but _I_ don't want to hear anything until I have a quantum computer wrist watch. Wake me in 2050!
Atarii games were fun, maybe we should of just stopped with the 2600.
Obviously hyperbole, but "bigger isn't always better" doesn't mean "bigger isn't at all better, and smaller is better all the time".
The difference there is that the reviews knocking it for missing those features are comparing them against other games of the type. If I have $50 (ok, $60) I want to know what the best bang for my buck is. Comparing that game to another racing style game might show that "its more fun to play this other game because this game lacks 4 player mode" Your best bet is to just go by the review and forget the number. If the reviewer had fun playing single player and you don't care about 4 player games, then why worry about the (seemingly) arbitrary score?
Actually, all the Wii commercials have left me cringing a bit - nothing in the gameplay their showing looks particularly compelling (basically "hey, what do we do with this new platform for our fighting game...uhhh...just replace the button mashes with weird gestures!") Putting some goofy kid "in the game" (even though its good to show actual game mechanics) makes me giggle and think of late 80s/early 90s ads for the power glove and such. I'd like to see more of the Wii sports games or things like Tiger Woods, where the motion of the character on screen translates more naturally and familiarly to the person playing the game. Sort of like the original teaser ads where it just showed people playing different games with recognizable motions (fishing, sword fighting, etc). But I guess they don't need ads for Zelda!
Or a lack of themes other than sex or violence? There are a lot of males in fashion design and film, and they make a lot of products that appeal to women. They manage to come up with shows, products, plot lines, and characters that appeal to women, and yet somehow its impossible to do for games because there aren't enough women engineers? I think the main problem is that a lot of game designers grew up on a particular diet of certain themes in games, and that's what they know and like. It takes a lot of creativity and ingenuity to break the mold, and maybe that's what's really missing.
I can guarantee you that's the feeling among third party publishers and developers. What possible gain is it for one manufacturer to have a virtual monopoly. Plus with warring manufacturers you get sweet deals like delayed "exclusives" and the like. Its in no one's best interest to have a console fail other than the competing manufacturers and fanboys.
So are you saying that by merely suggesting that race or sex has anything to do with intelligence or behavioral traits they are a racist? Most scientists don't believe the blank slate theory anymore, I suggest you move into the 21st century.
Last time I looked PS3 and 360 both have support for 4 controllers. What are you talking about? The Wii isn't coming with 4 controllers if that's what "natively" means.
I guess its more like "can't get anywhere because of its sheer awesomeness and power of the PS3" not "can't get it anywhere because of exclusive license deals and you may see it 6 months down the road on 360/Wii" I imagine you'd be pushing really hard to have something 2d that PS3 could do and Wii or even PS2/xbox 1 couldn't.
Probably because they're pushing new hardware and generally there's not much in 2D you couldn't do on last-gen or on the much cheaper Wii. They're trying to sell boxes, and having lots of cool "can't get it anywhere else" content is one way to do it.
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So do you really work out a monthly budget for your computer time? Is everyone in the house timesharing it at their own dumb-terminals? What if someone wants to run a GUI, are the cycles just not there for something else?
And you know you don't code at the hardware level for your PS/2 ports. Stop lying.
Can a compiler flag redesign your code? No? Then it can't do what you're asking. In order to take full advantage of the cell, you have to break your task up into parallel units and have them run on the SPUs. The SPU has a low memory overhead so you can't just throw any old piece of code at it. If you were writing something for a similar architecture I could see it, but otherwise just enabling "cell mode" won't get you much.
It probably means the same thing here as well. But its still "done enough" to let people have an idea of what the final product will be. At this stage if you can't get an idea of how the product will behave end-to-end then you're in deep shit. You don't even have to have final art, or things like all the bells and whistles on the graphics, but you need to have all the gameplay elements finished to let everyone know what they can begin focusing on for the marketing campaigns and whatnot. You are right that a lot of QA probably doesn't filter into it, simply because since so much of the code base can still be in flux (say some places have a framerate of 3, too many memory leaks to do more than one level at a time, etc) that bugs simply won't be helpful because the engineers are full time on finishing the product. Still, you can do usability testing (as "helpful" as that might be) on stuff like the UIs, control scheme etc. which while it is isn't the "find a bug, fix it" mode of QA found after alpha or beta, its still something you can do at this stage.
It means execs/marketing/packaging/etc can take a look at most of the game (bugs & all) and have a reasonable idea of what it will look like and how the major features will work. That way the non-development stuff can really start kicking into gear (not that planning & stuff would have already happened). Testing has assuredly already started, albiet with a smaller more focused QA team, generally in house with the studio as opposed to the bigger "general QA" teams.
It is much better, and you and I and most of /. probably knows that, but then again with so many sites asking for registration these days do you _really_ take the time to figure out a different password for each one. Do you know them all? Do you write them down somewhere. Or do you have some scheme figured out that helps you remember? Something that a truly motivated attacker could figure out? I use a tiered system myself, where sites I don't care about get a "crap" password (or one from a set), and sites that I want more security (bank, email, website admin, etc) get thier own. Even so, I sometimes forget that password. And I actually _care_ about security.
Probably what most people do is type in a set of passwords (or just the one) and then try them all at different sites. The smart phisher would have their program reject a few passwords each time and get not one but a bunch of different passwords for each user. Tag their name to an email and you're off to the races on a bunch of different sites.
I think the most secure system is one that a) involves a central spot like open id, b) involves an autorotating password. The autorotation should be through a user known password + an RSA keyfob #, and the user known password should have to change regularly.
I'm sorry, I don't really understand what's stopping MS from making their own fork of OpenOffice anyways without Novell? Or the Linux kernel, or anything else for that matter. It is open source, right? Can't IBM do the exact same thing (and has, lots of times). Are you worried about MS suddenly making that code go away, or getting people to use their DRM version, or something of that nature? Given the average Linux user's utter revulsion to anything MS, I imagine its going to be a hard sell. I'm sure there's lots of patents MS could try to sue Linux (or, rather, the people using Linux) over right now, they don't have to go extreme lengths to lock it down by somehow adding source code to it. AFAIK, they can't take OpenOffice and somehow break the GPL (is it GPL? I don't know) and start their own version.
You mean REALLY liking computers won't turn my hair blue and introduce me to a world of leather clad babes and techno music? I thought I just wasn't using mine enough. This is disappointing.
Yeah, I don't really understand why people get mad at "hacker == cracker". They're mislabled as badboys. You wouldn't want them mislabeling you as fat lonely nerds who live in their....
Wait.
Shit.
I'm guessing the cost of the game was to offset the publisher manufacturing fee and the entire budget was probably written off, so they weren't expecting to make a dime. (Generally MS, Sony & Nintendo charge upwards of %25 of a title in fees). I doubt though that it mattered much considering the advertising budget for playing all those commercials dwarfed the cost of the actual game. And seeing as the post above got someone to walk into a Burger King who hadn't been there in years I'd say they did the job.
??? Microsoft mailed me a box, I put the 360 in, they sent it back. Total cost? $0. Total time? 2 weeks.
What I'm saying though, is that horsepower will let you do a lot of things previously "undoable" on past systems. Its not all about the graphics. The PS3 and 360 chips aren't gigantic leaps forward in any sense of the word. What really counts is the additional horsepower provided by the cell and the 360 multicore. Not to mention memory. Obviously the "low hanging fruit" is to slap a fresh coat of paint on old games, and that's what you've seen with 360/last-gen hybrids. But with more memory and power to do procedural geometry, texturing, etc. you can have things like Spore or big big open worlds that the Wii just won't be able to handle.
Which isn't necessarily bad. I think you're going to see a divergence with the Wii going for a more casual game markets with smaller, level oriented arcady style games, and the bigger story driven titles heading for the PS3/360.
Puh, you call that jaded? You may not care about several order of magnitude improvement over previous attempts, but _I_ don't want to hear anything until I have a quantum computer wrist watch. Wake me in 2050!
Atarii games were fun, maybe we should of just stopped with the 2600. Obviously hyperbole, but "bigger isn't always better" doesn't mean "bigger isn't at all better, and smaller is better all the time".
Or maybe its because editors are playing on machines they actually have, and the rest are speculative fanboys?
Nahhhh....
The difference there is that the reviews knocking it for missing those features are comparing them against other games of the type. If I have $50 (ok, $60) I want to know what the best bang for my buck is. Comparing that game to another racing style game might show that "its more fun to play this other game because this game lacks 4 player mode" Your best bet is to just go by the review and forget the number. If the reviewer had fun playing single player and you don't care about 4 player games, then why worry about the (seemingly) arbitrary score?
Actually, all the Wii commercials have left me cringing a bit - nothing in the gameplay their showing looks particularly compelling (basically "hey, what do we do with this new platform for our fighting game...uhhh...just replace the button mashes with weird gestures!") Putting some goofy kid "in the game" (even though its good to show actual game mechanics) makes me giggle and think of late 80s/early 90s ads for the power glove and such. I'd like to see more of the Wii sports games or things like Tiger Woods, where the motion of the character on screen translates more naturally and familiarly to the person playing the game. Sort of like the original teaser ads where it just showed people playing different games with recognizable motions (fishing, sword fighting, etc). But I guess they don't need ads for Zelda!
This is something I would have thought that the builders would have figured out.
;)
Yeah, now we're going to have to start over from scratch! Damn!
Because they materialize out of midair with no discussion what-so-ever. Why are you reading Slashdot again?
You of course forget that for the average gamer not seeing your feet IS more realistic.
Or a lack of themes other than sex or violence? There are a lot of males in fashion design and film, and they make a lot of products that appeal to women. They manage to come up with shows, products, plot lines, and characters that appeal to women, and yet somehow its impossible to do for games because there aren't enough women engineers? I think the main problem is that a lot of game designers grew up on a particular diet of certain themes in games, and that's what they know and like. It takes a lot of creativity and ingenuity to break the mold, and maybe that's what's really missing.
Actually, You. Must. Drink. More. Beer. And. Stop. Writing. One. Word. Sentences.
This. Post. Powered. By. Burning. Karma.
I can guarantee you that's the feeling among third party publishers and developers. What possible gain is it for one manufacturer to have a virtual monopoly. Plus with warring manufacturers you get sweet deals like delayed "exclusives" and the like. Its in no one's best interest to have a console fail other than the competing manufacturers and fanboys.
So are you saying that by merely suggesting that race or sex has anything to do with intelligence or behavioral traits they are a racist? Most scientists don't believe the blank slate theory anymore, I suggest you move into the 21st century.
Last time I looked PS3 and 360 both have support for 4 controllers. What are you talking about? The Wii isn't coming with 4 controllers if that's what "natively" means.
I guess its more like "can't get anywhere because of its sheer awesomeness and power of the PS3" not "can't get it anywhere because of exclusive license deals and you may see it 6 months down the road on 360/Wii" I imagine you'd be pushing really hard to have something 2d that PS3 could do and Wii or even PS2/xbox 1 couldn't.
Probably because they're pushing new hardware and generally there's not much in 2D you couldn't do on last-gen or on the much cheaper Wii. They're trying to sell boxes, and having lots of cool "can't get it anywhere else" content is one way to do it.