Actually Ultima Underworld (the first one) was released before the first successful FPS (Wolfenstein 3D), and used superior technology, so in fact it was Wolfenstein (and Doom, etc.) that had a "FPRPG" look.:-)
Ultima 7 (parts 1 and 2, plus the expansions) and the Underworlds were the golden age of RPGs.
You would interfere with a scientific experiment that involved, say, torture or murder even though that could be said to be bringing politics (or morals, perhaps from belief in God) into science.
No, that would simply be applying the law. You know, that thing people need to comply with unless they're a friend of Dick Cheney.
I'd say opposition toward stem cell research falls into the same category: someone tries to stop it because they consider it to be morally wrong.
If someone considers something they don't understand to be morally wrong, is their opinion relevant? Most religious groups oppose scientific progress in general because they are afraid the research will expose the falsehoods their faith is based on. That would undermine the power the religious leaders have over the followers, so they try to get the sheep mobilised against the research, despite being completely igorant about the subject.
99% of people who oppose stem cell research don't know even what a stem cell is.
It's no coincidence that Adam and Even were kicked out of Eden for eating the fruit of knowledge. God doesn't like smart people; that's why he made so many morons.
Complex 3D worlds, especially those with lots of scenery, are easy to get turned around/lost in. It was either have a compass with objectives and fast travel or have players constantly complaining about getting lost
Guess what, the real world is also complex and 3D, and - amazingly - normal human beings (above the age of 8, at least) seem to have no problem navigating it, given reasonable instructions. There are roads and signposts leading to the main destinations and when you're "exploring the wilderness", well, then you're exploring the wilderness and should feel as if you are exploring the wilderness, not staring at a green arrow. An arrow that doesn't even point (just) at places on the map, mind you. If your next objective is "talk to person X", then the arrow will point to person X even as that person moves around the game world (maybe every NPC in Oblivion has a satellite tracker?)
Did the Ultima games or System Shock or even previous Elder Scrolls games have "full time magical GPS navigation"? No, they did not. Did anyone complain about "getting lost all the time"? No, they did not. Because those games were not designed for console gamers with the attention span of a 5 year old.
Well if an NPC tells you they think the Bandits have a secret base somewhere NW of town and if you head NW of town and find bandits and a cave/fort, wouldn't you think that was the secret base?
Maybe I would, maybe I wouldn't. Even if I did think it, I couldn't be sure about it until I actually found the base, could I? What the game does is pop up windows telling me what I should be thinking (it's not enough to tell me exactly what to do all the time), and telling me exactly what I'm going to find before I actually find it. If they really think their players are that retarded, why not simply write "Secret Base Here" on the actual door, instead of popping up windows tellling me what I'm "thinking"? Or why not go all the way and add a button called "autoplay", where I just sit in front of the monitor and use my two brain cells to drool, while the game plays itself?
The keyboard sucked as an action game controller back in '83 and it sucks now.
So you're admitting Oblivion is "an action game", and not a role-playing game, which was my point (reasonably interesting combat, but not what Bethesda spent years promising). Anyway, anyone who plays online FPS games knows that keyboard + mouse will wipe the floor with just about any other combination of controllers (possible exception to that being mouse + gaming keypad).
If they didn't scale the enemies, it wouldn't be so free-form.
Okay, the IQ level of your post has just dropped below my minimum threshold. I guess by your definition Real Life mustn't be "free form", because other people don't become stronger when you exercise, or smarter when you study. By all means, go play Oblivion on your Playstation; I cannot think of anything more appropriate.
Let's see, maybe it's the fact that, through 99% of the quests, you have a great big arrow pointing at your next objective, and can basically complete it without even looking at the game world (except to kill monsters).
Maybe it's the fact that even when a quest consists of something like "You must find the secret code to open the door... which is two plus two.", some character standing by the door will tell you "Hi there. The code is four.".
Maybe it's the fact that, each time you complete an intermediate objective, a dialog box pops up with your thoughts ("I have found the door that leads to the secret base." - How the hell do "I" know that? The door looks like any other door! Shouldn't I have to actually explore to see if the secret base is there or not?).
The game doesn't just "hold your hand". It picks you up, carries you around and keeps yelling at you, telling you what's happening in case you suffer from short-term amnesia.
Why have one button for character stats, another button for quest log, another button for inventory when you can have ONE button and use a tabbed interface.
Because I already have a "103-tab interface" sitting in front of me (called a keyboard), I have more than one finger, and would like to be able to get to the screen I want without having to move the cursor, look at several virtually identical icons, and click 4 or 5 times each time I want to change a spell or look at the map.
Hell, the game won't even let you add a description to your saved games or add comments to the map (even Ultima Underworld let you do that, and UU came out in 1992), that's how "anti-keyboard" it is.
I'm playing the PS3 version myself, which is a "Greatest Hit" now, it's a fine game.
Oh, if it's a "greatest hit" it must be good. Glad you're enjoying it. And thanks to the auto-levelling enemies and loot, you can be sure that the experience you're having now will be exactly the same experience you'll have through the next 400 identical quests of the game. Never too easy, never too hard. Why feel vastly superior to an enemy or why feel afraid of a big monster when they can all feel exactly the same? There's nothing quite like improving your magical abilities by 10% and knowing that all the enemies just had their magic resistance increased by 10%, too. The fact they used the same 5 voices for all NPCs also helps give the game a sense of comfortable "unity".
Speaking of which, I've just noticed some of the exact same voices in the Fallout 3 demo, so the transition should be easy.
Don't get me wrong; I think Oblivion looks very nice and is a pretty decent "medieval combat" game. Just as I'm convinced that Fallout 3 will be a decent shooter. But Oblivion is not even close to the believable, consistent, "living" RPG that Bethesda spent years promising, and - I'm convinced - neither will Fallout 3 be.
Oblivion is a 3D Diablo clone with some serious balancing issues and Fallout 3 will be a nice-looking first-person shooter with "stats", (repetitive) dialogues and a bigger world than Half-Life 2, but inferior to HL in every other aspect (because Bethesda simply don't have visionary designers like Origin had, and don't spend three years playtesting and refining like Valve does).
That wouldn't make it dumber, it would only make it shorter (which might in fact count as an improvement, because it saves you all the anxiety of thinking "surely, the game must get better at some point?" as you follow an arrow and click through pointless repetitve dialogue, hour after hour after hour...).
You mean like RPG players were tricked into buying Oblivion with talk of a "living world" and "revolutionary AI", only to get a first-person combat game with auto-levelling enemies, quests designed for 8 year olds with ADD and an interface designed for the Xbox?
I hope I'm wrong, but I suspect that, with Fallout 3, the FPS gamers "tricked" into buying it will turn out to be the ones that weren't tricked at all.
The demos show a cross between Oblivion and Half Life 2 with a hint of Max Payne. Might be fun to play, and doesn't look bad (then again, there are better-looking games out now), but it's definitely not looking like an RPG (and that has nothing to do with the POV; many milestone RPGs had a 1st person perspective - Dungeon Master, Ultima Underworld, etc.).
Hopefully this time Bethesda will at least have the game properly playtested (Oblivion was only tested internally), and catch the most obvious design / gameplay bugs.
[...] and would not have tolerance for both AC units
Yeah, Anonymous Cowards get on my nerves, too.
Seriously now, in my experience portable air conditioning is a joke (noisy, inefficient, and they still need an exhaust duct for the hot air, of course). But I doubt you'll find any satisfactory solution for less than $600, unless you plan to build the AC unit yourself.
Well, yes and no. The problem isn't how you use the map (to fake the normals or actually displace vertices), the problem is what kind of maps this technique can create. And my point is that it can't handle (for example) the Z-range of something like a person's face. Anything deep enough to actually cast shadows over other (relevant) parts of the geometry will break it (a shadow will appear much darker and the algorithm will assume it's a suface facing away from the light (or a hole). Use the result as a displacement map and it'll look very weird.
Panasonic (IIRC, possibly JVC or someone else) was working on a video camera that could capture a Z-buffer in real time (meant to be used as a replacement for chroma-keying), but I don't think they ever put a usable product out the door. The techniques used in Radiohead's "House of Cards" video look interesting, too, but also not really usable in most cases.
Anyway, the technique mentioned in this article should still be practical for bas-reliefs and shallow matte surfaces, which is what archaeologists deal with most of the time.
P.S. - Dense geometry (required by displacement maps) isn't particularly slower to render for any high-end shaders (raytracing / photons / GI / QMC / whatever). But those are always painfully slow (compared to basic non-GI, shadow mapped, non-bouncing renderers), and the denser meshes required for good displacement mapping still take up huge amounts of RAM, so bump still has its place.
This is just a way to automatically generate surface bump maps. It does not really capture depth information (like a Z-buffer).
Conceptually it seems simple enough (take a photo with shadows from a light source not in line with the camera, take another where all the shadows are in line with the camera (making them virtually invisible), tell the software which direction the light is coming from in the first photo, and let it figure out the relative height of each pixel, by analysing the difference between it and the uniform (flash-lit) version, after averaging the brightness of the two. It's similar to the technique some film scanners use to automatically remove scratches.
I can think of a lot of cases where it won't work at all (shiny objects, detached layers, photos with multiple "natural" light sources, photos with long shadows), but still, for stuff like rock or tree bark textures it should save a lot of time. As the video suggests, this should be very pretty useful for archaeologists.
Didn't understand the end of the video, did you? The "other faces" you're talking about are simply isolated channels (diffuse / specular / etc.) of the same face. It's still Emily's face with a superimposed render of... Emily's face (just using a different shader).
So they make a 3D model of Emily's face (using a 3D scanner, presumably), then they film Emily moving her face, then they deform the model to match Emily's facial expressions, then they superimpose the model on Emily's head.
Er... what for?
At best they'll end up with something identical to the original (but they don't - the model doesn't wrinkle properly and sometimes the tracking is slightly off - you can see her face "float" relative to the hairline and ears).
I could understand the point if they could take expressions from one person's face and replicate them on another person's face (which is something you can do with motion capture - and some clean-up work). But obviously they can't do that automatically, or they would have done it for the demo.
I can see this kind of technology being useful to disguise the transition between an actor's real face and a 3D face (which will later be deformed by hand, or morphed into some creature, etc.), but the demo is so limited (camera doesn't move, the 3D face is almost identical to the real face, etc.) that it seems a long way off from being an alternative to motion capture and manual tweaking. This is like showing some (supposedly) revolutionary new GPU by making it print "Hello World" on the screen. If the technology is so great, why such a limited demo?
The question is: are they being legally mandated to do so, or are they doing so out of self-protection?
It's irrelevant considering that:
a) Most of them will simply turn over that information to the government, without asking for a court order.
b) The ones that do so are very likely to get magical retroactive immunity if anyone finds out and complains that what they did was illegal.
c) Failing that, the government can wiretap the communications directly, and give retroactive immunity to itself.
Like the OP said, at least in China they tell you what the rules are from the start; they don't pretend that you have rights and then do whatever they want. The rules might be too strict, and even "unfair", but you know what they are.
So they are Americans?
No, they're not. Believe it or not, americans are not God's chosen people. That's the jews.
I have said this many times on/. to people who have merely "traveled" to China for days, weeks, months, or even "several years". And I'll say it again: no, you have not lived in China.
I see. So they lived there for nearly 30 years, spoke the language fluently (two languages, in fact, IIRC), one of them actually worked for the public administration, but they never lived in China...?
I was born in China, and lived there for 25 years
What? Just 25 years? Then I guess by your own definition you never lived in China.
And you still haven't explained why you think people wouldn't be able to post on Slashdot from China. I'm particularly curious since Slashdot isn't mentioned anywhere as being blocked in China, and since I've seen several posts here made by people claiming to be in China. Maybe they are also mistaken and they never really lived there? Maybe no one has lived in China except you...?
I rest my case. If they can make you pay the bill, they can trace your online activities.
As to using a cellphone, locating you while you are connected (by triangulation) is trivial for most operators, with modern equipment. The question is whether those operators will roll over and provide that data to the government / police / etc. or if they'll demand to see a court order first.
And, again, I'd rather be in a place where I know the rules (even if those rules are very strict, like "the government has access to every call that you make") than in a place where supposedly it takes a warrant to have access to my private data, but then it turns out the government does as it pleases, ignores the law, and promises retroactive immunity to the telecoms that play along in spying on their clients without any court supervision.
Have you ever used an internet cafe? Did you _have_ to register with your id before getting online?
I have, and I did. The last thing an internet café wants is to be charged with downloading copyrighted material (or uploading child porn, or being the source of a DoS attack, etc.). Lots of internet cafes ask for ID, to cover their own asses. They won't go out of their way to verify that the ID is real, but they do ask for it. A lot of them also have security cameras, and keep a full log of what you do online, so it wouldn't be too hard to trace a client.
Although I've never been to China, a couple of relatives of mine lived there for several years (they speak Mandarin fluently). They came back with all their limbs and were never questioned by men in black (or maybe they erased their memories, OMG!). They actually lived pretty well there (they retired and came back to be with their grandchildren).
And why wouldn't I be able to get on Slashdot from China...?
You seem to be under the impression that China is a big concentration camp. It isn't.
Here in Malaysia you can pay for your dialup using scratch cards available at 7-Eleven
You connect through a phone line, right? That phone line is registered to you, right? How hard do you think it is to trace you...?
They ask for your national identity card number when you first register online but if you say you're a foreigner they just ask for your passport number which they have no way of validating.
You think the government and the criminal police are unable to contact another country's agency to verify your passport number, if they really want to? Dream on.
Did you guys know that in China everybody has to disclose their real life identity before they get online?
You mean your ISP accepts false identities...? How do they know where to send the bills?
And don't say "disclose it to the government, not just to the ISP", because in the USA most ISPs will roll over and give government agencies whatever they ask for, without even asking for (let alone demanding) a warrant.
I'll take a country no elections over one with rigged elections any day. In the former there's at least the chance that the people will decide to fight for democracy. In the latter, they won't fight for it because they think they already have it. No one is disputing that China restricts its citizens' freedom more than the USA does. The question is whether the people are aware of those restrictions or whether they live under the illusion that they are completely free from (warrantless, secret, arbitrary) government surveillance.
Your "zoologist" analogy would only make sense if the species we study had any concept of technology. And in any case, I doubt you can say they are "unaware" of the cameras (or of the zoologists themselves). They can certainly see them and smell them. They just decide that those things are not worth running away from or trying to eat. Most primates (who are still not really "technological") will actually tinker with "alien" artifacts (cameras, microphones, tape recorders) if they feel they are not in danger - as anyone who has tried to film chimps in the wild knows very well.
But anyway, the question isn't the solar system. The question is the Earth. The (ex) astronaut quoted in the the article says that Earth has been / is being visited by little gray men from outer space. And yet, despite all the people constantly looking through telescopes and radars, and all the people walking around the countryside with video cameras looking for them, no one has managed to get any evidence of those little gray men's (or their flying saucers') existence. That is pretty "compelling" evidence of absence.
Could there be life on other planets in the solar system? Absolutely. In fact, I think the probability of that is higher than 50%. But we're talking "extremophile" bacteria or, at best, non-technological life forms. Any civilisation with even a basic control over electricity would shine out like a beacon.
Alien anthropologists could be among us now, and there'd be no evidence, if they had the motivation and the technology.
And there could be a pink elephant living on top of the Eiffel tower.
[we] have no real evidence one way or the other about many other reasonable alien visit scenarios.
No, you see, the thing is... we do. We have evidence "one way". Just not "the other". The absence of something (not just its presence) carries information. If no one had been looking, then we'd have no evidence "one way or the other". But people have been looking.
Little gray men on flying saucers may one day visit us (what happened to the green ones, BTW, weren't aliens green before the 80s?), but all evidence points to the conclusion that, until now, they have not.
Well, the Milky Way is 100 thousand light years across. Since mankind has only been able to send out / receive signals for about 100 years, there could technically be thousands of civilisations of our level in the Milky Way (not to mention non-technological civilisations); their signals simply haven't reached us yet (or they reached us before we were able to detect them).
Even if there are other "intelligences", operating at a level that we can understand (i.e., not too fast or too slow, using transmission methods that we can detect, etc.), though, I doubt they'll be close enough to make any sort of communication viable or relevant. At best we'll be able to detect each others' presence.
If aliens existed, why haven't they colonized Earth yet?
Maybe they have. How do you know you're not evolved from some bacteria that reached Earth on a meteorite?
In any case, given the rate of expansion of the universe and the maximum speed at which mass can travel (given the current laws of physics), it would be more or less impossible for one civilisation to colonise the entire universe, even if they managed to expand their empire at light speed. And that's assuming we'd even understand that "civilisation" if we came across it (maybe we've seen it, and just don't understand what it is). The Fermi paradox is really more of a "clever question" than a true paradox. In fact, the article you mention lists several explanations for it.
No idea what you are replying to, but it's clearly not to what I wrote (and which you quoted). None of what you say supports the notion that humanoid life forms are somehow more likely than non-humanoid life forms, given a different environment.
Even on Earth, and restricting "life" to [D|R]NA-based organisms, there are billions of non-humanoid life forms, versus only a few hundred humanoid ones. And we're not even the majority, whether in terms of number of individuals or total mass. Plus we've only been around for a couple of cosmic minutes.
I would disagree. Life, or at least life that we could recognise as life, would have to start on planets with the right conditions, i.e. Earth-like.
So this isn't life? The conditions in which many of these organisms live are extremely rare on Earth and extremely common on other planets, or even meteorites.
I propose that in fact, humanoid life is probably more likely than people would expect.
Nice scientific statement there "probably more likely than people would expect". How much is that in Volkswagens?
By your own previous statement (which I disagree with, but you obviosuly don't), life requires an Earth-like planet. Since the number of known Earth-like planets is one, life (humanoid or otherwise) is, by your reasoning, extremely unlikely.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, in Underworld you could stop time, walk on water, and summon imps. Top that, Blazkowicz!
Actually Ultima Underworld (the first one) was released before the first successful FPS (Wolfenstein 3D), and used superior technology, so in fact it was Wolfenstein (and Doom, etc.) that had a "FPRPG" look. :-)
Ultima 7 (parts 1 and 2, plus the expansions) and the Underworlds were the golden age of RPGs.
RPG style of Diablo? Is that like the flight simulation style of Super Mario? Or maybe like the FPS style of Ultima 7?
You would interfere with a scientific experiment that involved, say, torture or murder even though that could be said to be bringing politics (or morals, perhaps from belief in God) into science.
No, that would simply be applying the law. You know, that thing people need to comply with unless they're a friend of Dick Cheney.
I'd say opposition toward stem cell research falls into the same category: someone tries to stop it because they consider it to be morally wrong.
If someone considers something they don't understand to be morally wrong, is their opinion relevant? Most religious groups oppose scientific progress in general because they are afraid the research will expose the falsehoods their faith is based on. That would undermine the power the religious leaders have over the followers, so they try to get the sheep mobilised against the research, despite being completely igorant about the subject.
99% of people who oppose stem cell research don't know even what a stem cell is.
It's no coincidence that Adam and Even were kicked out of Eden for eating the fruit of knowledge. God doesn't like smart people; that's why he made so many morons.
Complex 3D worlds, especially those with lots of scenery, are easy to get turned around/lost in. It was either have a compass with objectives and fast travel or have players constantly complaining about getting lost
Guess what, the real world is also complex and 3D, and - amazingly - normal human beings (above the age of 8, at least) seem to have no problem navigating it, given reasonable instructions. There are roads and signposts leading to the main destinations and when you're "exploring the wilderness", well, then you're exploring the wilderness and should feel as if you are exploring the wilderness, not staring at a green arrow. An arrow that doesn't even point (just) at places on the map, mind you. If your next objective is "talk to person X", then the arrow will point to person X even as that person moves around the game world (maybe every NPC in Oblivion has a satellite tracker?)
Did the Ultima games or System Shock or even previous Elder Scrolls games have "full time magical GPS navigation"? No, they did not. Did anyone complain about "getting lost all the time"? No, they did not. Because those games were not designed for console gamers with the attention span of a 5 year old.
Well if an NPC tells you they think the Bandits have a secret base somewhere NW of town and if you head NW of town and find bandits and a cave/fort, wouldn't you think that was the secret base?
Maybe I would, maybe I wouldn't. Even if I did think it, I couldn't be sure about it until I actually found the base, could I? What the game does is pop up windows telling me what I should be thinking (it's not enough to tell me exactly what to do all the time), and telling me exactly what I'm going to find before I actually find it. If they really think their players are that retarded, why not simply write "Secret Base Here" on the actual door, instead of popping up windows tellling me what I'm "thinking"? Or why not go all the way and add a button called "autoplay", where I just sit in front of the monitor and use my two brain cells to drool, while the game plays itself?
The keyboard sucked as an action game controller back in '83 and it sucks now.
So you're admitting Oblivion is "an action game", and not a role-playing game, which was my point (reasonably interesting combat, but not what Bethesda spent years promising). Anyway, anyone who plays online FPS games knows that keyboard + mouse will wipe the floor with just about any other combination of controllers (possible exception to that being mouse + gaming keypad).
If they didn't scale the enemies, it wouldn't be so free-form.
Okay, the IQ level of your post has just dropped below my minimum threshold. I guess by your definition Real Life mustn't be "free form", because other people don't become stronger when you exercise, or smarter when you study. By all means, go play Oblivion on your Playstation; I cannot think of anything more appropriate.
Could you explain that reasoning?
Let's see, maybe it's the fact that, through 99% of the quests, you have a great big arrow pointing at your next objective, and can basically complete it without even looking at the game world (except to kill monsters).
Maybe it's the fact that even when a quest consists of something like "You must find the secret code to open the door... which is two plus two.", some character standing by the door will tell you "Hi there. The code is four.".
Maybe it's the fact that, each time you complete an intermediate objective, a dialog box pops up with your thoughts ("I have found the door that leads to the secret base." - How the hell do "I" know that? The door looks like any other door! Shouldn't I have to actually explore to see if the secret base is there or not?).
The game doesn't just "hold your hand". It picks you up, carries you around and keeps yelling at you, telling you what's happening in case you suffer from short-term amnesia.
Why have one button for character stats, another button for quest log, another button for inventory when you can have ONE button and use a tabbed interface.
Because I already have a "103-tab interface" sitting in front of me (called a keyboard), I have more than one finger, and would like to be able to get to the screen I want without having to move the cursor, look at several virtually identical icons, and click 4 or 5 times each time I want to change a spell or look at the map.
Hell, the game won't even let you add a description to your saved games or add comments to the map (even Ultima Underworld let you do that, and UU came out in 1992), that's how "anti-keyboard" it is.
I'm playing the PS3 version myself, which is a "Greatest Hit" now, it's a fine game.
Oh, if it's a "greatest hit" it must be good. Glad you're enjoying it. And thanks to the auto-levelling enemies and loot, you can be sure that the experience you're having now will be exactly the same experience you'll have through the next 400 identical quests of the game. Never too easy, never too hard. Why feel vastly superior to an enemy or why feel afraid of a big monster when they can all feel exactly the same? There's nothing quite like improving your magical abilities by 10% and knowing that all the enemies just had their magic resistance increased by 10%, too. The fact they used the same 5 voices for all NPCs also helps give the game a sense of comfortable "unity".
Speaking of which, I've just noticed some of the exact same voices in the Fallout 3 demo, so the transition should be easy.
Don't get me wrong; I think Oblivion looks very nice and is a pretty decent "medieval combat" game. Just as I'm convinced that Fallout 3 will be a decent shooter. But Oblivion is not even close to the believable, consistent, "living" RPG that Bethesda spent years promising, and - I'm convinced - neither will Fallout 3 be.
Oblivion is a 3D Diablo clone with some serious balancing issues and Fallout 3 will be a nice-looking first-person shooter with "stats", (repetitive) dialogues and a bigger world than Half-Life 2, but inferior to HL in every other aspect (because Bethesda simply don't have visionary designers like Origin had, and don't spend three years playtesting and refining like Valve does).
That wouldn't make it dumber, it would only make it shorter (which might in fact count as an improvement, because it saves you all the anxiety of thinking "surely, the game must get better at some point?" as you follow an arrow and click through pointless repetitve dialogue, hour after hour after hour...).
It's not technically possible to dumb down Oblivion.
You mean like RPG players were tricked into buying Oblivion with talk of a "living world" and "revolutionary AI", only to get a first-person combat game with auto-levelling enemies, quests designed for 8 year olds with ADD and an interface designed for the Xbox?
I hope I'm wrong, but I suspect that, with Fallout 3, the FPS gamers "tricked" into buying it will turn out to be the ones that weren't tricked at all.
The demos show a cross between Oblivion and Half Life 2 with a hint of Max Payne. Might be fun to play, and doesn't look bad (then again, there are better-looking games out now), but it's definitely not looking like an RPG (and that has nothing to do with the POV; many milestone RPGs had a 1st person perspective - Dungeon Master, Ultima Underworld, etc.).
Hopefully this time Bethesda will at least have the game properly playtested (Oblivion was only tested internally), and catch the most obvious design / gameplay bugs.
[...] and would not have tolerance for both AC units
Yeah, Anonymous Cowards get on my nerves, too.
Seriously now, in my experience portable air conditioning is a joke (noisy, inefficient, and they still need an exhaust duct for the hot air, of course). But I doubt you'll find any satisfactory solution for less than $600, unless you plan to build the AC unit yourself.
Well, yes and no. The problem isn't how you use the map (to fake the normals or actually displace vertices), the problem is what kind of maps this technique can create. And my point is that it can't handle (for example) the Z-range of something like a person's face. Anything deep enough to actually cast shadows over other (relevant) parts of the geometry will break it (a shadow will appear much darker and the algorithm will assume it's a suface facing away from the light (or a hole). Use the result as a displacement map and it'll look very weird.
Panasonic (IIRC, possibly JVC or someone else) was working on a video camera that could capture a Z-buffer in real time (meant to be used as a replacement for chroma-keying), but I don't think they ever put a usable product out the door. The techniques used in Radiohead's "House of Cards" video look interesting, too, but also not really usable in most cases.
Anyway, the technique mentioned in this article should still be practical for bas-reliefs and shallow matte surfaces, which is what archaeologists deal with most of the time.
P.S. - Dense geometry (required by displacement maps) isn't particularly slower to render for any high-end shaders (raytracing / photons / GI / QMC / whatever). But those are always painfully slow (compared to basic non-GI, shadow mapped, non-bouncing renderers), and the denser meshes required for good displacement mapping still take up huge amounts of RAM, so bump still has its place.
This is just a way to automatically generate surface bump maps. It does not really capture depth information (like a Z-buffer).
Conceptually it seems simple enough (take a photo with shadows from a light source not in line with the camera, take another where all the shadows are in line with the camera (making them virtually invisible), tell the software which direction the light is coming from in the first photo, and let it figure out the relative height of each pixel, by analysing the difference between it and the uniform (flash-lit) version, after averaging the brightness of the two. It's similar to the technique some film scanners use to automatically remove scratches.
I can think of a lot of cases where it won't work at all (shiny objects, detached layers, photos with multiple "natural" light sources, photos with long shadows), but still, for stuff like rock or tree bark textures it should save a lot of time. As the video suggests, this should be very pretty useful for archaeologists.
Didn't understand the end of the video, did you? The "other faces" you're talking about are simply isolated channels (diffuse / specular / etc.) of the same face. It's still Emily's face with a superimposed render of... Emily's face (just using a different shader).
So they make a 3D model of Emily's face (using a 3D scanner, presumably), then they film Emily moving her face, then they deform the model to match Emily's facial expressions, then they superimpose the model on Emily's head.
Er... what for?
At best they'll end up with something identical to the original (but they don't - the model doesn't wrinkle properly and sometimes the tracking is slightly off - you can see her face "float" relative to the hairline and ears).
I could understand the point if they could take expressions from one person's face and replicate them on another person's face (which is something you can do with motion capture - and some clean-up work). But obviously they can't do that automatically, or they would have done it for the demo.
I can see this kind of technology being useful to disguise the transition between an actor's real face and a 3D face (which will later be deformed by hand, or morphed into some creature, etc.), but the demo is so limited (camera doesn't move, the 3D face is almost identical to the real face, etc.) that it seems a long way off from being an alternative to motion capture and manual tweaking. This is like showing some (supposedly) revolutionary new GPU by making it print "Hello World" on the screen. If the technology is so great, why such a limited demo?
The question is: are they being legally mandated to do so, or are they doing so out of self-protection?
It's irrelevant considering that:
a) Most of them will simply turn over that information to the government, without asking for a court order.
b) The ones that do so are very likely to get magical retroactive immunity if anyone finds out and complains that what they did was illegal.
c) Failing that, the government can wiretap the communications directly, and give retroactive immunity to itself.
Like the OP said, at least in China they tell you what the rules are from the start; they don't pretend that you have rights and then do whatever they want. The rules might be too strict, and even "unfair", but you know what they are.
So they are Americans?
No, they're not. Believe it or not, americans are not God's chosen people. That's the jews.
I have said this many times on /. to people who have merely "traveled" to China for days, weeks, months, or even "several years". And I'll say it again: no, you have not lived in China.
I see. So they lived there for nearly 30 years, spoke the language fluently (two languages, in fact, IIRC), one of them actually worked for the public administration, but they never lived in China...?
I was born in China, and lived there for 25 years
What? Just 25 years? Then I guess by your own definition you never lived in China.
And you still haven't explained why you think people wouldn't be able to post on Slashdot from China. I'm particularly curious since Slashdot isn't mentioned anywhere as being blocked in China, and since I've seen several posts here made by people claiming to be in China. Maybe they are also mistaken and they never really lived there? Maybe no one has lived in China except you...?
Of course they can still work out the location,
I rest my case. If they can make you pay the bill, they can trace your online activities.
As to using a cellphone, locating you while you are connected (by triangulation) is trivial for most operators, with modern equipment. The question is whether those operators will roll over and provide that data to the government / police / etc. or if they'll demand to see a court order first.
And, again, I'd rather be in a place where I know the rules (even if those rules are very strict, like "the government has access to every call that you make") than in a place where supposedly it takes a warrant to have access to my private data, but then it turns out the government does as it pleases, ignores the law, and promises retroactive immunity to the telecoms that play along in spying on their clients without any court supervision.
Have you ever used an internet cafe? Did you _have_ to register with your id before getting online?
I have, and I did. The last thing an internet café wants is to be charged with downloading copyrighted material (or uploading child porn, or being the source of a DoS attack, etc.). Lots of internet cafes ask for ID, to cover their own asses. They won't go out of their way to verify that the ID is real, but they do ask for it. A lot of them also have security cameras, and keep a full log of what you do online, so it wouldn't be too hard to trace a client.
Although I've never been to China, a couple of relatives of mine lived there for several years (they speak Mandarin fluently). They came back with all their limbs and were never questioned by men in black (or maybe they erased their memories, OMG!). They actually lived pretty well there (they retired and came back to be with their grandchildren).
And why wouldn't I be able to get on Slashdot from China...?
You seem to be under the impression that China is a big concentration camp. It isn't.
Here in Malaysia you can pay for your dialup using scratch cards available at 7-Eleven
You connect through a phone line, right? That phone line is registered to you, right? How hard do you think it is to trace you...?
They ask for your national identity card number when you first register online but if you say you're a foreigner they just ask for your passport number which they have no way of validating.
You think the government and the criminal police are unable to contact another country's agency to verify your passport number, if they really want to? Dream on.
Did you guys know that in China everybody has to disclose their real life identity before they get online?
You mean your ISP accepts false identities...? How do they know where to send the bills?
And don't say "disclose it to the government, not just to the ISP", because in the USA most ISPs will roll over and give government agencies whatever they ask for, without even asking for (let alone demanding) a warrant.
I'll take a country no elections over one with rigged elections any day. In the former there's at least the chance that the people will decide to fight for democracy. In the latter, they won't fight for it because they think they already have it. No one is disputing that China restricts its citizens' freedom more than the USA does. The question is whether the people are aware of those restrictions or whether they live under the illusion that they are completely free from (warrantless, secret, arbitrary) government surveillance.
Your "zoologist" analogy would only make sense if the species we study had any concept of technology. And in any case, I doubt you can say they are "unaware" of the cameras (or of the zoologists themselves). They can certainly see them and smell them. They just decide that those things are not worth running away from or trying to eat. Most primates (who are still not really "technological") will actually tinker with "alien" artifacts (cameras, microphones, tape recorders) if they feel they are not in danger - as anyone who has tried to film chimps in the wild knows very well.
But anyway, the question isn't the solar system. The question is the Earth. The (ex) astronaut quoted in the the article says that Earth has been / is being visited by little gray men from outer space. And yet, despite all the people constantly looking through telescopes and radars, and all the people walking around the countryside with video cameras looking for them, no one has managed to get any evidence of those little gray men's (or their flying saucers') existence. That is pretty "compelling" evidence of absence.
Could there be life on other planets in the solar system? Absolutely. In fact, I think the probability of that is higher than 50%. But we're talking "extremophile" bacteria or, at best, non-technological life forms. Any civilisation with even a basic control over electricity would shine out like a beacon.
Alien anthropologists could be among us now, and there'd be no evidence, if they had the motivation and the technology.
And there could be a pink elephant living on top of the Eiffel tower.
[we] have no real evidence one way or the other about many other reasonable alien visit scenarios.
No, you see, the thing is... we do. We have evidence "one way". Just not "the other". The absence of something (not just its presence) carries information. If no one had been looking, then we'd have no evidence "one way or the other". But people have been looking.
Little gray men on flying saucers may one day visit us (what happened to the green ones, BTW, weren't aliens green before the 80s?), but all evidence points to the conclusion that, until now, they have not.
Well, the Milky Way is 100 thousand light years across. Since mankind has only been able to send out / receive signals for about 100 years, there could technically be thousands of civilisations of our level in the Milky Way (not to mention non-technological civilisations); their signals simply haven't reached us yet (or they reached us before we were able to detect them).
Even if there are other "intelligences", operating at a level that we can understand (i.e., not too fast or too slow, using transmission methods that we can detect, etc.), though, I doubt they'll be close enough to make any sort of communication viable or relevant. At best we'll be able to detect each others' presence.
If aliens existed, why haven't they colonized Earth yet?
Maybe they have. How do you know you're not evolved from some bacteria that reached Earth on a meteorite?
In any case, given the rate of expansion of the universe and the maximum speed at which mass can travel (given the current laws of physics), it would be more or less impossible for one civilisation to colonise the entire universe, even if they managed to expand their empire at light speed. And that's assuming we'd even understand that "civilisation" if we came across it (maybe we've seen it, and just don't understand what it is). The Fermi paradox is really more of a "clever question" than a true paradox. In fact, the article you mention lists several explanations for it.
No idea what you are replying to, but it's clearly not to what I wrote (and which you quoted). None of what you say supports the notion that humanoid life forms are somehow more likely than non-humanoid life forms, given a different environment.
Even on Earth, and restricting "life" to [D|R]NA-based organisms, there are billions of non-humanoid life forms, versus only a few hundred humanoid ones. And we're not even the majority, whether in terms of number of individuals or total mass. Plus we've only been around for a couple of cosmic minutes.
I would disagree. Life, or at least life that we could recognise as life, would have to start on planets with the right conditions, i.e. Earth-like.
So this isn't life? The conditions in which many of these organisms live are extremely rare on Earth and extremely common on other planets, or even meteorites.
I propose that in fact, humanoid life is probably more likely than people would expect.
Nice scientific statement there "probably more likely than people would expect". How much is that in Volkswagens?
By your own previous statement (which I disagree with, but you obviosuly don't), life requires an Earth-like planet. Since the number of known Earth-like planets is one, life (humanoid or otherwise) is, by your reasoning, extremely unlikely.