But it contradicts the first sentence of your reply. Hmmm.
I don't see how. Seeing as they are only supplying one layout means that its either text-only-friendly or the new hotness, not both. Supporting text-only does mean losing out on things like collapsible sections, so there is an actual trade off.
So we lose out on new functionality because you get to slack off? Please. What should really happen is they support multiple layout types, so everyone living past 1995 can enjoy graphics using actual pixels, and you still get to fool your boss. Isn't that the point of css anyways?
Heh, Asteroids you say! Sniff, I don't need any fancy graphics to enjoy myself! Give me a dirt field and a tin can and I'll be as happy as a jay bird! Yessiree, none of Mr. Edison's black magic required, no sir!
But wait, the grandparent poster said a "European Company". Maybe they'll outsource that to the US. It could be a booming industry: No one does Bullshit better and cheaper than the US!
I really don't see "high-res texutring" as the issue. It definately is the art pipelines, but one of the main things we're seeing in the next generation world is threading and multiprocessing, something fairly forign to the video game development world. (Obviously not programming multiple specialty chips, that goes back to the old school days, I'm talking more parallel processing). The sheer amount of engineering has increased in complexity pretty much on the order of hardware threads. Taking advantage of that speed means reworking alot of the old engines and code to take advantage of it.
There's also new shading technology to take care of, but that's in the PC world as well as another poster mentioned, which does mean more textures per model (higher res doesn't necessarily mean more work after all). That's even harder to get right, as you need to have more advanced art pipelines to handle all your special lighting shaders, shadowing, etc.
I don't think the scope of games are getting bigger either. Various MUDs have grown to gigantic sizes simply because its quick and easy to add a new section of the world or program a new enemy. Bigger platforms, more memory, and more hardware make it possible to expand the game worlds, it just takes more time to create them. You have to applaud anything that makes creating those worlds easier, and that comes down to development tools. If the Wii has great tools to program the new controller, then I don't think it would be that much more work at all. Similarly, as developers figure out how to create better content and mature their art pipelines, content creation will become a much easier thing. Witness GTA III vs. GTA: SA for a good example of that.
I read it (in the context of the article) that you'll be frustated by the various hardware incompatibilities that your mac may have running windows (no Mac HW in windows, no windows HW in the mac). Of course, the author was being completly speculative that there would be problems at all, so I guess its all FUD anyway. Still, the submitter didn't need to heap it on there by quoting the article out of context.
Right, and now with the 360 you don't need the $300 box anymore. They've cannabalized another failing division to sell a game box AND a media extender in one.
Microsoft is sitting on a mutli multi billion dollar war chest. They don't call it a war chest for nothing. They are prepared to lose another billion on the xbox 360 (like most accounts say they did with Xbox) and from all the financials to date it looks like they'll be no where close to losing that as sales are continuing at a healthy pace. Do you honestly think the "3 versions to get it right" myth is a complete falsehood? MS is in this game for keeps. The 360 is a healthy, fully supported platform with tons of developer support. MS wants to be in the living room, they NEED to be in the living room so they can sell you a MS Media Center PC to be in the office that can beam all that MS DRM'd WMA content you bought down to your MS Entertainment Center. This is a long term growth strategy into a still emerging market. All the pieces are coming into play (for-pay downloadable TV shows, music, movies), and MS wants a piece of the action. They want to be the bridge between content providers and your television, and if it takes losing a billion on some games to get there they are going to do it.
See Postal. You get to burn, kill, maim, destroy the innocent all because you've had a very bad day. Even after people are down you get to pin them down and put a bullet in them, or roast them and get to hear them moan in pain as they're burning. Then see Postal 2, which brings in the "slap stick" you refered to. The first one kind of turns your stomach, the second is pretty stupid. I guess it depends on the reaction they were going for.
On the other hand, I think maybe some of the Mafia type games (Mafia, GTA, the latest one being the Godfather), are pretty good at defining "evil". The games have rules like "don't kill civilians", where various penalties apply when you knock off some guy walking down the street, but hey, halve the fun is blowing people up. Its true you're not really fighting innocent cops in GTA:SA, but the drug thing is wrong. Half the missions are about taking "turf" and delivering "packages" which may or may not be drugs. They don't come out and say it, but its there. In Godfather, you're constantly shaking innocent business owners down for money. That's pretty bad insomuch as you're commiting acts of violence and tyranny against the helpless. These aren't criminals, just regular folks. You don't want to kill them, just scare them a bit, but if you need to mow down joe average to get your way, so be it. I'd say the moral scale for that game are solidly in the black.
As for the "genocide" simulator, yeah, Civ is as close as you get. But then, when you think about it, most evil dictators don't see the results of their acts right up close and personal, and definately aren't taking too much part in the direct execution of their orders.
Oh come on, this gives IE a competitive advantage. No way they open it up for competing browsers. This is Microsoft! You must be thinking of their lesser known competitor Microsft and their mostly accidentally used product Internt Explrer.
Would we have to have a complete understanding of how it reacts, or just start with the simulation of an embryo with a correct and complete genome mapping as its data. Then we let the embryo behave as it would behave (assuming it has all the necessary input, read, food, oxygen molecules, etc.) You could let the embryo "come to term" naturally by letting the cells run. The program to grow a dog or human is already embedded in the cells, you just need to give them an emulator to run in.
I think what this is for is at your end points. The article (brief as it was) describes the intent of the semiconductors as "extracting/analyzing data". So the light comes in and instead of going through a traditional end point it is fed into one of these "computing tubes" which process/adds data faster than current tech can do. They're certainly not pulling up cable to replace semiconductors. Think of this as your data going McDonalds and heading through the drive through vs. getting out of the car and ordering at the counter.
Not passing ACID2 and willfully subverting standards to gain market dominance are a bit different. I could make up the same comment about Firefox - last I heard they weren't passing ACID2 either, and from what I've read here they won't for a while at least.
I'm not much of a MS fan myself, but can you really say "paraphrased without bias" and not be trolling?
From your link: "I want to be clear that our intent is to build a platform that fully complies with the appropriate web standards, in particular CSS 2 ( 2.1, once it's been Recommended)."
Its not really paraphrasing when you make up ideas. That's called "reading between the lines", and you didn't even do that.
No, actually, literal biblical creation means you believe in a 6000 year old earth, the creation of the Earth in 7 days, that every animal ever made was born at the same time, dinasaurs walked with man, etc, etc. Oh yeah, don't forget the floodgates! That's how rain comes down, you know!
I would agree with you if this was a "get the best score at space invaders game". I just actually happened to attend my first ever tournement for a popular online game (as a spectator), and you're really watching two or more players who are the best in their category facing off in a game of skill. Its no different than poker or chess that someone mentioned. People watch chess (admittedly its not a super televised game), how is that different than the nuances and split second decisions of an RTS game. As for the tournement, I knew this game well and play it often, and seeing the amount of coordination and timing each team had was amazing. Just like playing basketball with friends and seeing a pro game on TV. There is NO difference between what I saw and watching a competitive match between two highly skilled individuals at a game or sport. Its just that one is familiar to most people, and one isn't.
I think the main difference is that if you don't know counterstrike, you won't know whats happening, what good plays were, etc. If you don't know say cricket or football, you won't know whats happening, but on a lower level you can relate to the athletisism (he's fast!) or prowess (how the hell did he catch that ball!) rather than appreciate the tactical or strategic facets of the game. Its a little hard to convey "man, that's good hand-eye coordination!" to the general public. My Mom would think I'm a top FPS player because I can run around the world using the mouse.
Finally, I think they need to figure out the best ways to show these games. I think any game needs a spectator mode, and the equivilent of camera operators and a director switching between interesting views. If the same level of production quality isn't applied to these games as a football broadcast, people won't be interested in watching them because it will be hard to get a good grasp on the action.
Man, that'll be great! Movies put together by amatuers on their off hours from GameStop. And crappy sci-fi parodies to boot! That'll certainly make me want to go to the movies! You get your tricorder, I'll bring the popcorn.
No thanks. Having someone hire people for performances and provide money to purchase items needed to produce the film in exchange for the right to make money off it seems perfectly reasonable to me. And in the end we don't need to see people who can't act and shouldn't be in spandex winking at the camera with stupid hardcore fan in-jokes.
The in game menu is called the Guide. It takes up half the screen usually, or all of it depending on the action (sign-in, etc). The dashboard is an entirely seperate application that has things like the Xbox arcade, etc. Its true you will see the in-game Guide a lot, but only when taking actions it services, and at that point its replacing UI that was found on in-game screens in Xbox 1 titles.
The thing is, its really not. What he's refering to is the new Dashboard, the thing that comes up when you don't put a game in and start the machine. This is the "control panel" of the machine, and if you're just playing games you'd never see it. If you need to create a new xbox live account, or download a new game, or tweak your gamer profile this is place to do it.
The main point of the article was actually about its WMC integration, and how you can stream your songs and pictures from your PC to your 360. Its a pretty neat thing, and allows those of us with large digital music collections an easy way to get from PC->Stereo without any special hardware. Just run a (free, as in beer) program on your PC, and go into the dashboard and click "Find PC". Now all the songs you're sharing can be played in game, through your stereo.
The other half of the UI is the Xbox Guide, which is the "in game" menu and takes the place of a _lot_ of stuff that was done custom and differently for every game on the Xbox 1. Your friends, messaging, voice chat, music tracks, even if you prefer inverted up/down for FPS games are all in a standardized UI accessable anytime from any game.
I find on a whole that these standardizations will _help_ UI become non-intrusive merely because game teams don't have to focus on writing it. I can't tell you how many bugs I've had on "remove the controller, stop the game" in previous titles, and any time spent reducing the overhead of writing system glue code and more time spent writing game features is a true boon to the industry as a whole.
Hey cool, wild speculation! I'm actually thinking its going to be a giant rack of xboxes that take input from the controller and download the video stream from Xbox Live! That's just as plausible!!!
For one, there's a wide variety of games on that list from a wide variety of publishers and developers. Independent developers do not give their game code to anyone, especially not their publishers. Where are they compiling these binaries from? Second, the executables (plus patches!) can run from 4-8 MB per game. They're putting this thing on an ordinary CD. You do the math. Third, could they really keep it a secret if there was a whole "redo your code" movement going on throughout the industry. Shit like that leaks. Lastly, "using the orignal games assets"...uh, you do realize that there's no standard way of doing assets in a game. Therefore you would once again need the game teams' help to put the project together. Again, not happening. And if they were going to all that trouble, why not change the code to write to a memcard instead of a harddrive, so people with the Core system could do it???
Your problem here is that people are eating primarily processed foods! The easiest way to ensure your diet consists of what you want is to make everything yourself. Start from the simplest blocks you can find that don't contain the ingredients your avoiding and you're all set. You mean that frozen dinner isn't good for me? Shocking! Cooking for yourself is often healthier and cheaper, and I personally find it enjoyable.
Right, but mainly I was replying to the grandparent's implication that console gaming leaves a pile of hardware laying around, where your own post confirms that plenty of people have hardware laying around for PC gaming. The fact is that to get a consistantly good experience on a PC you have to upgrade every 2-3 years as opposed to 4-5 for consoles.
Slashdot Mirror
But it contradicts the first sentence of your reply. Hmmm. I don't see how. Seeing as they are only supplying one layout means that its either text-only-friendly or the new hotness, not both. Supporting text-only does mean losing out on things like collapsible sections, so there is an actual trade off.
So we lose out on new functionality because you get to slack off? Please. What should really happen is they support multiple layout types, so everyone living past 1995 can enjoy graphics using actual pixels, and you still get to fool your boss. Isn't that the point of css anyways?
Heh, Asteroids you say! Sniff, I don't need any fancy graphics to enjoy myself! Give me a dirt field and a tin can and I'll be as happy as a jay bird! Yessiree, none of Mr. Edison's black magic required, no sir!
But wait, the grandparent poster said a "European Company". Maybe they'll outsource that to the US. It could be a booming industry: No one does Bullshit better and cheaper than the US!
I really don't see "high-res texutring" as the issue. It definately is the art pipelines, but one of the main things we're seeing in the next generation world is threading and multiprocessing, something fairly forign to the video game development world. (Obviously not programming multiple specialty chips, that goes back to the old school days, I'm talking more parallel processing). The sheer amount of engineering has increased in complexity pretty much on the order of hardware threads. Taking advantage of that speed means reworking alot of the old engines and code to take advantage of it. There's also new shading technology to take care of, but that's in the PC world as well as another poster mentioned, which does mean more textures per model (higher res doesn't necessarily mean more work after all). That's even harder to get right, as you need to have more advanced art pipelines to handle all your special lighting shaders, shadowing, etc. I don't think the scope of games are getting bigger either. Various MUDs have grown to gigantic sizes simply because its quick and easy to add a new section of the world or program a new enemy. Bigger platforms, more memory, and more hardware make it possible to expand the game worlds, it just takes more time to create them. You have to applaud anything that makes creating those worlds easier, and that comes down to development tools. If the Wii has great tools to program the new controller, then I don't think it would be that much more work at all. Similarly, as developers figure out how to create better content and mature their art pipelines, content creation will become a much easier thing. Witness GTA III vs. GTA: SA for a good example of that.
I read it (in the context of the article) that you'll be frustated by the various hardware incompatibilities that your mac may have running windows (no Mac HW in windows, no windows HW in the mac). Of course, the author was being completly speculative that there would be problems at all, so I guess its all FUD anyway. Still, the submitter didn't need to heap it on there by quoting the article out of context.
Right, and now with the 360 you don't need the $300 box anymore. They've cannabalized another failing division to sell a game box AND a media extender in one.
Microsoft is sitting on a mutli multi billion dollar war chest. They don't call it a war chest for nothing. They are prepared to lose another billion on the xbox 360 (like most accounts say they did with Xbox) and from all the financials to date it looks like they'll be no where close to losing that as sales are continuing at a healthy pace. Do you honestly think the "3 versions to get it right" myth is a complete falsehood? MS is in this game for keeps. The 360 is a healthy, fully supported platform with tons of developer support. MS wants to be in the living room, they NEED to be in the living room so they can sell you a MS Media Center PC to be in the office that can beam all that MS DRM'd WMA content you bought down to your MS Entertainment Center. This is a long term growth strategy into a still emerging market. All the pieces are coming into play (for-pay downloadable TV shows, music, movies), and MS wants a piece of the action. They want to be the bridge between content providers and your television, and if it takes losing a billion on some games to get there they are going to do it.
See Postal. You get to burn, kill, maim, destroy the innocent all because you've had a very bad day. Even after people are down you get to pin them down and put a bullet in them, or roast them and get to hear them moan in pain as they're burning. Then see Postal 2, which brings in the "slap stick" you refered to. The first one kind of turns your stomach, the second is pretty stupid. I guess it depends on the reaction they were going for.
On the other hand, I think maybe some of the Mafia type games (Mafia, GTA, the latest one being the Godfather), are pretty good at defining "evil". The games have rules like "don't kill civilians", where various penalties apply when you knock off some guy walking down the street, but hey, halve the fun is blowing people up. Its true you're not really fighting innocent cops in GTA:SA, but the drug thing is wrong. Half the missions are about taking "turf" and delivering "packages" which may or may not be drugs. They don't come out and say it, but its there. In Godfather, you're constantly shaking innocent business owners down for money. That's pretty bad insomuch as you're commiting acts of violence and tyranny against the helpless. These aren't criminals, just regular folks. You don't want to kill them, just scare them a bit, but if you need to mow down joe average to get your way, so be it. I'd say the moral scale for that game are solidly in the black.
As for the "genocide" simulator, yeah, Civ is as close as you get. But then, when you think about it, most evil dictators don't see the results of their acts right up close and personal, and definately aren't taking too much part in the direct execution of their orders.
Oh come on, this gives IE a competitive advantage. No way they open it up for competing browsers. This is Microsoft! You must be thinking of their lesser known competitor Microsft and their mostly accidentally used product Internt Explrer.
Would we have to have a complete understanding of how it reacts, or just start with the simulation of an embryo with a correct and complete genome mapping as its data. Then we let the embryo behave as it would behave (assuming it has all the necessary input, read, food, oxygen molecules, etc.) You could let the embryo "come to term" naturally by letting the cells run. The program to grow a dog or human is already embedded in the cells, you just need to give them an emulator to run in.
I think what this is for is at your end points. The article (brief as it was) describes the intent of the semiconductors as "extracting/analyzing data". So the light comes in and instead of going through a traditional end point it is fed into one of these "computing tubes" which process/adds data faster than current tech can do. They're certainly not pulling up cable to replace semiconductors. Think of this as your data going McDonalds and heading through the drive through vs. getting out of the car and ordering at the counter.
Not passing ACID2 and willfully subverting standards to gain market dominance are a bit different. I could make up the same comment about Firefox - last I heard they weren't passing ACID2 either, and from what I've read here they won't for a while at least.
I'm not much of a MS fan myself, but can you really say "paraphrased without bias" and not be trolling?
From your link:
"I want to be clear that our intent is to build a platform that fully complies with the appropriate web standards, in particular CSS 2 ( 2.1, once it's been Recommended)."
Its not really paraphrasing when you make up ideas. That's called "reading between the lines", and you didn't even do that.
No, actually, literal biblical creation means you believe in a 6000 year old earth, the creation of the Earth in 7 days, that every animal ever made was born at the same time, dinasaurs walked with man, etc, etc. Oh yeah, don't forget the floodgates! That's how rain comes down, you know!
I would agree with you if this was a "get the best score at space invaders game". I just actually happened to attend my first ever tournement for a popular online game (as a spectator), and you're really watching two or more players who are the best in their category facing off in a game of skill. Its no different than poker or chess that someone mentioned. People watch chess (admittedly its not a super televised game), how is that different than the nuances and split second decisions of an RTS game. As for the tournement, I knew this game well and play it often, and seeing the amount of coordination and timing each team had was amazing. Just like playing basketball with friends and seeing a pro game on TV. There is NO difference between what I saw and watching a competitive match between two highly skilled individuals at a game or sport. Its just that one is familiar to most people, and one isn't.
I think the main difference is that if you don't know counterstrike, you won't know whats happening, what good plays were, etc. If you don't know say cricket or football, you won't know whats happening, but on a lower level you can relate to the athletisism (he's fast!) or prowess (how the hell did he catch that ball!) rather than appreciate the tactical or strategic facets of the game. Its a little hard to convey "man, that's good hand-eye coordination!" to the general public. My Mom would think I'm a top FPS player because I can run around the world using the mouse.
Finally, I think they need to figure out the best ways to show these games. I think any game needs a spectator mode, and the equivilent of camera operators and a director switching between interesting views. If the same level of production quality isn't applied to these games as a football broadcast, people won't be interested in watching them because it will be hard to get a good grasp on the action.
Man, that'll be great! Movies put together by amatuers on their off hours from GameStop. And crappy sci-fi parodies to boot! That'll certainly make me want to go to the movies! You get your tricorder, I'll bring the popcorn. No thanks. Having someone hire people for performances and provide money to purchase items needed to produce the film in exchange for the right to make money off it seems perfectly reasonable to me. And in the end we don't need to see people who can't act and shouldn't be in spandex winking at the camera with stupid hardcore fan in-jokes.
The link is just to an .mp3 file. Shouldn't I need an apple product to listen to this?
The in game menu is called the Guide. It takes up half the screen usually, or all of it depending on the action (sign-in, etc). The dashboard is an entirely seperate application that has things like the Xbox arcade, etc. Its true you will see the in-game Guide a lot, but only when taking actions it services, and at that point its replacing UI that was found on in-game screens in Xbox 1 titles.
The thing is, its really not. What he's refering to is the new Dashboard, the thing that comes up when you don't put a game in and start the machine. This is the "control panel" of the machine, and if you're just playing games you'd never see it. If you need to create a new xbox live account, or download a new game, or tweak your gamer profile this is place to do it.
The main point of the article was actually about its WMC integration, and how you can stream your songs and pictures from your PC to your 360. Its a pretty neat thing, and allows those of us with large digital music collections an easy way to get from PC->Stereo without any special hardware. Just run a (free, as in beer) program on your PC, and go into the dashboard and click "Find PC". Now all the songs you're sharing can be played in game, through your stereo.
The other half of the UI is the Xbox Guide, which is the "in game" menu and takes the place of a _lot_ of stuff that was done custom and differently for every game on the Xbox 1. Your friends, messaging, voice chat, music tracks, even if you prefer inverted up/down for FPS games are all in a standardized UI accessable anytime from any game.
I find on a whole that these standardizations will _help_ UI become non-intrusive merely because game teams don't have to focus on writing it. I can't tell you how many bugs I've had on "remove the controller, stop the game" in previous titles, and any time spent reducing the overhead of writing system glue code and more time spent writing game features is a true boon to the industry as a whole.
Don't forget $200 personal burial money!
Hey cool, wild speculation! I'm actually thinking its going to be a giant rack of xboxes that take input from the controller and download the video stream from Xbox Live! That's just as plausible!!! For one, there's a wide variety of games on that list from a wide variety of publishers and developers. Independent developers do not give their game code to anyone, especially not their publishers. Where are they compiling these binaries from? Second, the executables (plus patches!) can run from 4-8 MB per game. They're putting this thing on an ordinary CD. You do the math. Third, could they really keep it a secret if there was a whole "redo your code" movement going on throughout the industry. Shit like that leaks. Lastly, "using the orignal games assets"...uh, you do realize that there's no standard way of doing assets in a game. Therefore you would once again need the game teams' help to put the project together. Again, not happening. And if they were going to all that trouble, why not change the code to write to a memcard instead of a harddrive, so people with the Core system could do it???
Your problem here is that people are eating primarily processed foods! The easiest way to ensure your diet consists of what you want is to make everything yourself. Start from the simplest blocks you can find that don't contain the ingredients your avoiding and you're all set. You mean that frozen dinner isn't good for me? Shocking! Cooking for yourself is often healthier and cheaper, and I personally find it enjoyable.
HBO is not attacking BitTorrent the program, they're attacking people misusing BitTorrent to share copyrighted material illegally.
Right, but mainly I was replying to the grandparent's implication that console gaming leaves a pile of hardware laying around, where your own post confirms that plenty of people have hardware laying around for PC gaming. The fact is that to get a consistantly good experience on a PC you have to upgrade every 2-3 years as opposed to 4-5 for consoles.