Special Effects are practical: makeup, pyro, animatronics.
Visual Effects are what we think of as "CGI" which can include all sorts of 3D, 2 1/2 D and 2D imagery.
Ok, now that that's settled: I work in the industry. I have a rather VFX heavy film I spent the last year of my life on opening this weekend, in fact.
I miss practical sets. I miss DP's that can light worth a shit. I miss having somewhat original scripts (hell, I'll take a script that *wasn't* cobbled together from marketing research for a franchise/reboot) to work on. Most everyone in the biz are huge fans of Guillermo del Toro who has been championing a hybrid approach: CG augmentation of as much real stuff as possible.
That said... the best effects are invisible, or you're so engrossed in the story that you don't notice them. With the exception of films that are supposed to be stylized/fantastical/unreal, if you notice that you're watching an effect, I haven't done my job properly.
I'm tolerant of bad CG as long as there's a decent story. If you don't have a decent story or a somewhat original idea, you're wasting my time as a filmgoer.
About half of the stereo features hitting theaters this year will be last minute planar projection fake conversions in effort to jack up the ticket price. Offshore stereo conversion companies are sprouting up like weeks in the VFX industry currently.
So, you've got stuff like Up and Avatar that actually start driving demand for theatrical stereo, soon to be followed by an avalanche of headache inducing cashgrab.
The industry seems intent on sabotaging itself.
Aside: I'm a VFX artist these days, and I get to work with headsets and stereo monitors on occasion. Save your cash and preview depth with anaglyph glasses for short periods. The tech just isn't there yet for a working "3D" display that is easy enough on the eyes for you to last an entire workday. Maybe soon, but not just yet. But even then, the user won't have a director tweaking inter-occular depth etc to prevent strain.
No offense to the OGG crew and developers, but what you're not getting is that the battle is already lost. The future of web video isn't really in the browser. It's on low-powered appliances like XBoxes, iPhones, iPads, Playstations and the like. And that's now. People are already building libraries in h264 and divx because of this. It's an insurance policy against your media not becoming obsolete like VHS and DVD.
Divx just slides in because most devices will play it hardware assisted even though you need to install the codecs on a desktop.
Without hardware decoding on those low-powered devices, and the ability to play your media anywhere you damn well please with no software installs necessary and no transcoding required, you may as well not exist.
OGG's a fine set of codecs, but if I have to transcode out of it to play on anything but a desktop, basically, I have no use for it and neither does the consumer other than the idea behind it is a quite appealing one.
Installs in Silverlight but doesn't require additional software?
Huh? That's full-on doublespeak.
I'm not sure that the words "standards" and "just works" mean the same thing to some folks. Developing an open source project that uses Silverlight as a platform, while admirable, is pretty suspect on the philosophical front unless there's an angle here.
Just like Adobe, MS wants Silverlight as THE web platform of the future too. And while some folks might deride Apple for lacking plug-in support of any kind on the iPhone/iPad, it's achieved more in the uptick of standards-compliant sites in the last few years than all the other guys combined.
Silverlight's as bad as Flash, long-term, for the web. Worse in-fact because it supports DRM out of the box and can't be cached locally. Yay for big media control and zero benefit for the consumer other than streaming Netflix sucking less than the competition currently. Now if they'd only do something about having decent stuff available to stream.
H264's patent encumbered, but is a supported, documented standard. Ogg will never take off. MKV files don't work on bloody anything reliably except VLC, even though they're theoretically an h264 variant. Then you have various other mpeg4 flavors, and that's pretty much it in terms of getting HD content out there at reasonable bandwidth.
We've been using wrapper plug-ins as a dirty, hacky path to web video since the launch of the web proper. Enough's enough.
I prefer not to use adblock extensions, personally. When a site crosses the line and starts getting in my face with talking / content-covering ads... say with close button trick-throughs... I pull up my activity menu in Safari (there are analogs for other browsers, or you can just comb the source code), and I just nuke the offending ad servers in my hosts file.
I've found that only a small percentage of the ad servers out there carry the nasty stuff (I define nasty as making noise without my consent or covering content and forcing a clickthrough) -- so generally just two or three hosts entries can clear you right up.
No, I'm using the version 100% legit off of steam, purchased "standard edition" -- not "collector's".
They're making a sales pitch for DLC on launch week via the quest givers in-game... on the day of launch. There's a questgiver in your camp that gives you about 3 minutes of dialog tree before "you don't have enough bioware points" -- and another at a mountain pass.
One unlocks the only decent tank NPC in the game, while the other gives you a party chest and an upgraded base with vendors that alleviate the mana potion scarcity in the base game.
I've got to say that the two quest givers that I've run into so far who ask for real life money in order to take some of their quests are about the sleaziest thing I've ever seen in a game.
From what I understand, each of the initial DLC packs are fully integrated into the main campaign, with dialog, new characters, character interaction, etc.
That means more than likely that they stripped side quest stuff out of the core game and decided to sell two chunks as DLC, in effect making a $60 game an $85 game.
I'd be more upset if the game itself wasn't huge and really well done for the most part. I'm enjoying the hell out of the game, but DLC available at launch -- with in-game paywalls soils the experience a great deal.
If this was a "finish it in a single sitting" game like Fable that tried to pull DLC this aggressively, I'd be pretty irate.
That doesn't excuse the strategy that they're using, but it does soften it a bit because there's more than enough game there without the add-ons. I'm pretty sure I haven't seen a game this long since Baldur's Gate 2.
The lack of co-op is likely due to the fact on tougher battles in the game (at least on the PC version), you'll quite literally need to pause every single round to micromanage your troops to keep them alive. The AI's good, but it's not particularly great at:
1. Not standing in fire 2. Spell interrupts 3. Healing intelligently / pre-healing / mana conservation 4. Positioning for backstabs and staying out of caster cones / dragon breath
Pausing isn't any fun at all in co-op, but I can assure you that the depth of strategy required for the combat system outweighs bolting on a multiplayer aspect for this particular title. It has the most punishing/unforgiving combat design I've seen in an RPG in many years... and I like it that way.
When I came across my first "real" dragon in the game (near some plot-related ashes), I must have reloaded that battle from scratch for around 4 hours before I beat it, pausing every 1/2 second each battle. That's no fun at all multiplayer.
Going to have to politely disagree here. Appliances such as coffee makers, toasters and electric kettles most certainly benefit from 220.
There's a reason you don't see many electric kettles in the U.S... they take longer than the stove to almost boil a pot of water, compared to the 20 seconds or so you get in the UK for a rolling boil.
I also quite like the switches on UK outlets, although the size of the sockets is somewhat ridiculous.
I'll never forget my first trip to London (about 15 years ago)... the flat I stayed in was in a 150 year old building. Switches on all the outlets, and a central touchscreen that controlled the AC, heat and scheduled the water heater to kick on and off. Hot water in the kitchen sink was on-demand (much like the "electric showers" you see in small flats now).
At the time, it was absolute magic to my teenage American brain, and I began wondering why we don't do more in the U.S. to curtail wasted power.
Then there was the ubiquitous gas broiler on every stove I came across...
But the combo washer-dryer deals that take 5 hours for a load suck. And they're generally in the kitchen for some reason.
I'll come out and suggest the same codebase and be shocked if it wasn't a straight up PC-EFI 9 or the latest Chameleon + EFI combo. All Pystar has done is slap their own branding on existing OSX86 tools since the beginning.
They're more than kinda shady and I feel really sorry for folks who bought one of their insta-hackintoshes and didn't have the technical know-how to compile drivers / hack efi strings etc to keep their "Mac" running properly.
Moral of the story: if you're gonna do it, build one yourself so you can learn how to support your own build.
Pystar's gonna get sued into oblivion soon, and good riddance.
Gotta love MS, always two steps behind when they crib their strategy from elsewhere (in this case the big box stores that love overpriced accessories).
Here's hoping that extended warranty scams and increased online competition force some sense into the big boxes at some point, but the writing's on the wall.
Amazon's already trialing same-day shipping in major markets. Other etailers won't be far behind.
Yeah, we were the same way. No rules lawyering at the table, 30 sec max for lookups then best judgement. Keep everything rolling so the laughs and momentum didn't start to lag.
Funny you mentioned Tunnels & Trolls. I'm still using the old grievous injury chart from that set just to spice stuff up and give the folks a little acting fodder for their characters.
I'm still considering going back to 1E right now... the interesting bit is that the wives/kids that get pulled into my games now "get" the talent tree/spec style system that 4E introduced. I like the concept of the eberron-style "dramatic actions" to use. I like the concept of powers for everyone (poor fighters in 1E)... I even like the care that's been taken into balancing everything this time out.
I just don't like a perfectly good story to be made tedious with an hour-long combat session and micromanagement for dots, bloody, focus, challenge, aoe, movement, opportunity... all that stuff. If I want that, I'll play Warhammer or Axis & Allies or any number of perfectly good wargames.
But for D&D, roll initiative, say what your character does with feeling and get your THAC0 on. You're doing something wrong at my table if you aren't trying to chew scenery or crack everyone up when it's your turn.
Chainmail (D&D's spiritual daddy) was a tactical wargame, as is Warhammer.
D&D is a Role Playing Game. You know: tell stories, have adventures.
Tactics are all well and good if that's the kind of game you want to play. It's not the kind of game I want to play, and it's not the kind of game most folks at my table want to play, either.
I want to get through an "episode" per 4ish hour session, not a paragraph of story progress and maybe two encounters.
There's a reason I've been holding onto my huge collection of 1st edition books for all these years -- they work, the rules are flexible, and most people at my table have them more or less memorized. I can put a few figures on a mat, not sweat the finer strategery of combat, and kill a few orcs in 10 minutes with almost zero bookkeeping apart from initiative and hit points.
This keeps the story moving and keeps combat fun.
Might come as a shock to you, but I encourage my players to act. Tunnels & Trolls had it right way back when with their grievous injury chart. Roleplaying is about far more than magical hit point numbers.
I've likely been DMing longer than you've been alive, so I'm just gonna laugh at the rest.
It's a pretty cool proof of concept, but I absolutely shudder at the amount of additional setup time something like this would require for campaigns.
I've run a couple of 4E campaigns after finally letting go of my 1E rules, and not to put too fine a point on things... combat takes way the hell too long when you're forced to deal with miniatures and it just bogs everything down -- don't get me started on the amount of stickers and markers that are required for bookkeeping now.
A couple people at my table like the more strategic combat options that minis offer, but the majority prefer that the story advances more than a paragraph per play session. As the DM, I'm one of them. I'd rather roll initiative and talk through fast-paced combat.
WOTC wants to sell their absolutely hideous plastic minis, and lots of them, so it's in their best interest to make the game mini focused. There are so many rules that depend on movement and proximity that you've basically got to remove the entire combat system and house-rule over it if you forego the minis.
I've seen some folks that use an LCD projector and Photoshop in lieu of a battlemat, but that's still an enormous amount of prep time for a campaign.
People hate advertising. They're inundated with it. People in advertising hate advertising (at least on the creative side)... but they recognize that it's a necessary evil, and it's one of the most reliable ways for slacker artist types like myself to get gainful career employment. I have no illusions. I'm helping sell shit to people that they don't want or need.
Usually, I work in business to business stuff, so I don't have to do the soul-searching thing as often as folks who market for consumer brands/retail.
Occasionally people might enjoy a Superbowl spot, or the like, but those are generally narratives, and they account for the tiniest fraction of a percent of all advertising.
I appreciate the craft and thought process that goes into making effective marketing in the same way that I can appreciate move recaps of classic chess games. That doesn't mean I want to experience them in real-time. I want to experience them on my own terms... marketers' responses have been to simply scream louder and louder so that the advertising can't be avoided.
My $12 movie ticket buys me 20 minutes of advertorial (not including previews) if I want to get a decent seat. I get congratulated on my free nano or wii 200x a day if I forget to disable Flash. Same thing on a different scale.
TLDR: Don't think you know too many folks who create advertising... just ones who sell it. There's a difference.
I doubt it. I've had negative reviews published on Newegg, and their reviews are absolutely essential for some of the cheapie parts you can score... for example, making sure a SATA external chassis actually supports 1gb drives, etc (which is often not in the specs).
In fact, I'd go a step further. Newegg leaves up flames and reviews by 'tards who don't know what they're talking about -- as long as you don't post competitive store URLs or prices, and they let manufacturers (or distributors) reply to reviews directly.
I think their system works about as well as Amazon, personally, and I'm generally confident when I buy from there that I know what I'm getting (again, pretty useful with no-name knockoffs).
They're the evil empire. I don't think they'll ever be seen as cool without being split into smaller companies that can develop their own personalities. And no, having the XBox team dabble in UI doesn't really help. Give me back a programs menu that works!
Honestly, the DoJ would have been doing them a favor to split them up like Ma Bell way back when. I'm not sure they'd have been doing the consumer any favors over the long run, though.
From a marketing standpoint, they need their own messaging: not kneejerk responses to Apple and Google. Speak with confidence on their strengths, but set yourself apart from the competition. Speak on your own terms.
It's really marketing 101. A leader in the industry with that kind of marketshare shouldn't even acknowledge the other guys, let alone focus neurotically on Apple who has like 12% market share (on a good day).
When you're that big, you lead -- not follow. It's just so weird to me that they're determined to acknowledge barbarians at the gate at every opportunity.
People who aren't cool enough for a Mac. Haven't you seen laptop hunters?
In fact, they're marketing to people who have enormous chips on their shoulders about being so entirely uncool (or poor) for Macs.
I jest. They're talking to themselves. Microsoft's insecurities have been laid utterly bare in all their marketing attempts for a decade.
There was a joint interview with Jobs and Gates not too long ago that I'm too lazy to dig up, and a question was asked "what do you envy about the other" -- Gates' answer came off as snide, yet honest: "I wish I had your taste"
They've been at this since the Zune came out and they started marketing to the Wal-Mart demographic. Because Wal-Mart folks like brown things that work almost sorta as well as an iPod at the same price. Because you're not cool enough for an iPod, and you've got a chip on your shoulder about it.
The weird part is... that demographic's pretty much stuck with MS out of ignorance, and MS is tilting at windmills whenever they go against apple. They inevitably end up looking as insane (and sad) as Don Quixote himself.
They're trying so hard to astroturf these days, build a viral movement. I'm not sure they understand that apart from a handful of lunatics/idiots/middle managers out there, there is nobody on earth who actually likes Microsoft. Maybe they do understand, and they're trying to overcompensate?
Their messaging isn't helping any.
So, as a career advertising guy (15 years & counting) I don't get it either.
Round about Vista/Zune, MS and their various agencies of record starting shooting themselves in the foot. I'm here to tell you Crispin/Porter is a great, kooky agency... but they just can't speak to the Wal-Mart moms that MS thinks they're in danger of losing.
Microsoft's achilles heels are Office (in the near term) and Mobile (in the long term). If they lose control over file formats and Exchange lock-in, Microsoft as we know it gets pushed over their tipping point. Over the long term, so many of our common tasks will be moving to mobiles or embedded devices instead of PCs -- and MS let Mobile languish as a steaming pile for the better part of a decade.
But now they're just shitting out me-too copies of consumer electronics.
Maybe the whole thing is misdirection? I don't think so, but there has to be a few smart folks at that company who can see the forest for the trees.
Actually, Mental Ray satellite (as craptastically buggy as it is) still had a 8-thread limit under Maya 2009 sp1a (patch notes say they removed the restriction, but watch your CPU usage with a dual Nehalem and tell me it's not locked to 8 cores still)....
But it's not so much that... I mean if you've got the budget for Renderman Pro or Mental Ray standalone, you've got the budget to build a farm properly, and yeah an i7 is most definitely worth every penny, Nehalem Xeons are great too if someone else is paying the tab. If you're buying Renderman Pro, you're likely getting Xeons.
I've got 3 identical i7s, a core 2 quad and a core 2 duo for rendering here, and whenever I'm doing hair (shave in particular) or some dynamics plug-in work, I get significantly better render time using the core 2 duo due to the nature of multithreading. If you're only using 1 thread on a hyperthreaded quad, you're only using 12% of the available processing power, and it's more efficient to use a slower processor that you can utilize more of, if that makes sense. Same goes for a few repeat offending after effects plug ins (cinelook and magic bullet come to mind here). I mean you could go a step further and run 8 single core VMs on an i7 to saturate the CPU doing a hair scene (actually works pretty well with linux VMs in a pinch).
I do love the i7s from the very bottom of my heart, though. I'm getting almost a 50% gain in frames rendered between q4400s and i7 920s using Mental Ray in most cases.
I'm a big fan of imaging my boxes, as you mentioned. Particularly with a small shop it can be an absolutely maddening time sink to troubleshoot faulty nodes.
I can't think of the last time I ran into the video card issue... might have been lightwave way back when, but I've seen it. The real point here is "make sure the stuff you're buying is suitable for the work you're doing". If the bulk of your software is single threaded still, an i7 box really might not be the best choice. For most folks doing this professionally, it's an awesome choice though. If you're editing HD or 2k/4k over a network, you need to spend a little extra cash to make sure your disk reads and net throughput are up to snuff.
With that goes: if you're using enormous float textures and displacement maps out the ass, you're going to lose a substantial amount of time on disk & network throughput. Go gigabit ethernet at a minimum (it's cheap) and get a nice, fast raid 5 or 6 for your primary storage (and get another big disk to back it up with, at a minimum). Just because you don't need much storage on those render doesn't mean you can cheap out on the drives (ie 5400 rpm throwaways). Disk and network throughput matter and the matter more as you add more render slaves.
Regarding Vista: it depends on your hardware. Up through SP1, I still had a couple of mainboards with unstable (*cough*nforce*cough) drivers in Vista 64, as well as a few pieces of software that required UAC off (eww). Gave up on Vista then and I've had really good, rock solid stability in XP64. Win 7 seems to be shaping up nicely on my 2 oldish Athlon x2 test sandboxes. I think this really depends on preference and available hardware, personally, but it's going to be a non-issue come October anyhow (and thankfully).
All fair points, but I must say that the Mental Ray workflow that's so prevalent among pro-sumer/small studio CG (now that Autodesk owns most everything and bundles MR) is terribly hard on memory usage, displacement or no, 32-bit float or no, physically accurate shading/lighting or no. Renderman is far far more efficient, however due to the licensing costs, not many of the little shops are using it.
The article suggests buying a crapload of boxes with 4GB RAM mainboards, and my argument is that if you find yourself in need of building a render farm of more than a box or two, you're doing yourself a huge disservice by following that advice.
I can tell you first hand that it's a nightmare best avoided to assemble a bunch of assets into layout only to find that you're throwing memory exceptions right & left on deadline.
I stand by that advice: if you're actually to the point of investing a fair bit of cash for some render boxes, spend just a couple more bucks on the mainboard and RAM so you don't build yourself into a corner. I'm talking about a $50 difference (including ram and mainboard) per machine to safeguard against blowing deadlines.
Sure, there are lots and lots of workarounds for memory/detail/physics/computation issues, but on deadline you don't always have the luxury of using those cheats... and sometimes you've just got to brute-force your way through a sequence. Dynamics and rendering in Maya with Shave & a Haircut come to mind. Incredibly powerful, but single-threaded. You'd be better off rendering hair and contact shadow passes on a single P4 than an i7 unless you're using Renderman in this case.
I think you misunderstood me on the crap GPU issue: there are some apps that literally won't launch at all without a certain level of hardware acceleration under Windows. Most pro-level apps have a CLI-only render interface that's commonly invoked by farm management software -- but not all do. The point I was making is: if you're buying a ton of anything, make sure it's going to do what you want it to do ahead of time. It would suck to get a bunch of motherboards in 1U cases that can't even take an AGP/PCI-E video card, and that was preventing you from using the software that you built the farm for.
The main message was really: these guys give you a low-end, once-size-fits-all recipe for building a 16U farm, basically, and at that level of game, I think their advice is pretty poor hardware-wise. You'd be insane to fork over the cash for that much kit and stick 4GB mainboards in there. Imagine someone who had a need for that kind of horsepower but were limiting themselves to the low end of the capability spectrum on such a major purchase when the price difference in the grand scheme of things to future-proof is so small. Not that there's such a thing as future-proofing, but if you're trying to render anything using mental ray with a 4GB system, I can guarantee you that you'll hit a memory wall after playing with ZBrush or mia* physically accurate materials for a few weeks. Or real global illumination etc etc. Particularly under Win32. Sure there are cheats for everything, but they take time too, and sometimes you just need to hit render and know that 1200 frames will be done by Monday AM without spending a huge amount of time tuning cheats.
If you're a small shop, in the vast majority of cases an Autodesk product (or XSI) with Mental Ray bundled, and it's an engine that is not at all comfortable with a 4GB RAM limit.
The article neatly sums up how to build a render box from about 5 years ago, or for a hobbyist who doesn't really push the hardware.
In the last few years, with the prevalence of displacement mapping and linear workflow, file sizes and memory usage to get renders at the quality folks expect of CG work have skyrocketed.
As someone working as a freelance CG/VFX artist, I can tell you a few practical truths:
1. You may not need XP 64 but you need 64-bit if you hope to do high-resolution, or detailed renders in a single pass. An addendum to this is: don't even consider a motherboard that supports less than 8 gigs of ram, and max the thing out. If you are rendering under Windows, you're shooting yourself in the foot if you're stuck on 32-bit, in particular. You will hit a memory wall with a 4gb RAM system very very quickly. Linux 64 is fine. XP 64 (and even my tests with Win7 64 are good). Avoid Vista 64 like the plague.
2. Depending on your primary rendering usage, a Core i7 may actually be working against you with hyperthreading. Quite a few of the big boys (Renderman, Mental Ray) are still licensed per thread. With hyperthreading enabled on the motherboard, an i7 looks like 8 cores to many rendering apps. Relevant example: A dual quad Xeon Mac pro can only use half of the machine's processing power as a Mental Ray satellite node with Maya, because it's licensed to only use 8 threads total. In addition, a lot of compositing apps -- and LOTS of plug-ins -- are single-threaded (I'm looking at you, random After Effects plug-in, and just about any dynamics plug-in for a 3d app). The short of it: if you're going to be rendering with something that's actually capable of saturating a multi-threaded CPU, go for it. But do some research and tests first.
3. You might be able to get away with a crap mainboard video card -- but make sure of it. A few CG apps don't have command-line rendering available, and it'll suck to learn after the fact that the app you're trying to launch on your pile of new 1U servers won't launch because you don't have a decent video card. Linux & Mac OS (even Hackintoshes) are far superior to Windows in this regard -- you'll rarely find an app that refuses to run due to the card. Crap interactivity is fine as long as you can initiate a render.
4. Standardize your render boxes AND WORKSTATIONS on a single platform (ie Linux 64, Win 64, MacOS X 10.5 intel). Lots of apps require shaders to be recompiled per platform, and small studios generally use share/freeware stuff that might not be available on all platforms -- it's much better to work around this issue when you're creating your assets, versus when you've got a delivery deadline looming and you realize that your fancy layered shader looked great on your Win64 previews, but the code isn't available for Linux 64 to render within your lifetime.
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Obligatory pedantry:
Special Effects are practical: makeup, pyro, animatronics.
Visual Effects are what we think of as "CGI" which can include all sorts of 3D, 2 1/2 D and 2D imagery.
Ok, now that that's settled: I work in the industry. I have a rather VFX heavy film I spent the last year of my life on opening this weekend, in fact.
I miss practical sets. I miss DP's that can light worth a shit. I miss having somewhat original scripts (hell, I'll take a script that *wasn't* cobbled together from marketing research for a franchise/reboot) to work on. Most everyone in the biz are huge fans of Guillermo del Toro who has been championing a hybrid approach: CG augmentation of as much real stuff as possible.
That said... the best effects are invisible, or you're so engrossed in the story that you don't notice them. With the exception of films that are supposed to be stylized/fantastical/unreal, if you notice that you're watching an effect, I haven't done my job properly.
I'm tolerant of bad CG as long as there's a decent story. If you don't have a decent story or a somewhat original idea, you're wasting my time as a filmgoer.
Dunno if you were in Toronto, part of the G20 festivities this year, but... ...it's already *been* deployed.
Thank the powers that be Ruby's in the basement, but seriously... the search engine utterly explodes.
Not really the most persuasive argument.
--D
Speaking of expensive parlor tricks...
About half of the stereo features hitting theaters this year will be last minute planar projection fake conversions in effort to jack up the ticket price. Offshore stereo conversion companies are sprouting up like weeks in the VFX industry currently.
So, you've got stuff like Up and Avatar that actually start driving demand for theatrical stereo, soon to be followed by an avalanche of headache inducing cashgrab.
The industry seems intent on sabotaging itself.
Aside: I'm a VFX artist these days, and I get to work with headsets and stereo monitors on occasion. Save your cash and preview depth with anaglyph glasses for short periods. The tech just isn't there yet for a working "3D" display that is easy enough on the eyes for you to last an entire workday. Maybe soon, but not just yet. But even then, the user won't have a director tweaking inter-occular depth etc to prevent strain.
Wow, got a flamebait in record time for that one.
No offense to the OGG crew and developers, but what you're not getting is that the battle is already lost. The future of web video isn't really in the browser. It's on low-powered appliances like XBoxes, iPhones, iPads, Playstations and the like. And that's now. People are already building libraries in h264 and divx because of this. It's an insurance policy against your media not becoming obsolete like VHS and DVD.
Divx just slides in because most devices will play it hardware assisted even though you need to install the codecs on a desktop.
Without hardware decoding on those low-powered devices, and the ability to play your media anywhere you damn well please with no software installs necessary and no transcoding required, you may as well not exist.
OGG's a fine set of codecs, but if I have to transcode out of it to play on anything but a desktop, basically, I have no use for it and neither does the consumer other than the idea behind it is a quite appealing one.
Installs in Silverlight but doesn't require additional software?
Huh? That's full-on doublespeak.
I'm not sure that the words "standards" and "just works" mean the same thing to some folks. Developing an open source project that uses Silverlight as a platform, while admirable, is pretty suspect on the philosophical front unless there's an angle here.
Just like Adobe, MS wants Silverlight as THE web platform of the future too. And while some folks might deride Apple for lacking plug-in support of any kind on the iPhone/iPad, it's achieved more in the uptick of standards-compliant sites in the last few years than all the other guys combined.
Silverlight's as bad as Flash, long-term, for the web. Worse in-fact because it supports DRM out of the box and can't be cached locally. Yay for big media control and zero benefit for the consumer other than streaming Netflix sucking less than the competition currently. Now if they'd only do something about having decent stuff available to stream.
H264's patent encumbered, but is a supported, documented standard. Ogg will never take off. MKV files don't work on bloody anything reliably except VLC, even though they're theoretically an h264 variant. Then you have various other mpeg4 flavors, and that's pretty much it in terms of getting HD content out there at reasonable bandwidth.
We've been using wrapper plug-ins as a dirty, hacky path to web video since the launch of the web proper. Enough's enough.
So TLDR: no, no, no, no no
Curious how Patrick Stewart got a mention here, but Peter Jackson slipped under the radar:
http://www.stuff.co.nz/dominion-post/local/3199875/Peter-Jackson-says-knighthood-a-tribute-to-parents
I prefer not to use adblock extensions, personally. When a site crosses the line and starts getting in my face with talking / content-covering ads... say with close button trick-throughs... I pull up my activity menu in Safari (there are analogs for other browsers, or you can just comb the source code), and I just nuke the offending ad servers in my hosts file.
I've found that only a small percentage of the ad servers out there carry the nasty stuff (I define nasty as making noise without my consent or covering content and forcing a clickthrough) -- so generally just two or three hosts entries can clear you right up.
That's just what they want!
The printer manufacturers are after your precious bodily fluids!
No, I'm using the version 100% legit off of steam, purchased "standard edition" -- not "collector's".
They're making a sales pitch for DLC on launch week via the quest givers in-game... on the day of launch. There's a questgiver in your camp that gives you about 3 minutes of dialog tree before "you don't have enough bioware points" -- and another at a mountain pass.
One unlocks the only decent tank NPC in the game, while the other gives you a party chest and an upgraded base with vendors that alleviate the mana potion scarcity in the base game.
It's really, really, really sleazy.
I've got to say that the two quest givers that I've run into so far who ask for real life money in order to take some of their quests are about the sleaziest thing I've ever seen in a game.
From what I understand, each of the initial DLC packs are fully integrated into the main campaign, with dialog, new characters, character interaction, etc.
That means more than likely that they stripped side quest stuff out of the core game and decided to sell two chunks as DLC, in effect making a $60 game an $85 game.
I'd be more upset if the game itself wasn't huge and really well done for the most part. I'm enjoying the hell out of the game, but DLC available at launch -- with in-game paywalls soils the experience a great deal.
If this was a "finish it in a single sitting" game like Fable that tried to pull DLC this aggressively, I'd be pretty irate.
That doesn't excuse the strategy that they're using, but it does soften it a bit because there's more than enough game there without the add-ons. I'm pretty sure I haven't seen a game this long since Baldur's Gate 2.
The lack of co-op is likely due to the fact on tougher battles in the game (at least on the PC version), you'll quite literally need to pause every single round to micromanage your troops to keep them alive. The AI's good, but it's not particularly great at:
1. Not standing in fire
2. Spell interrupts
3. Healing intelligently / pre-healing / mana conservation
4. Positioning for backstabs and staying out of caster cones / dragon breath
Pausing isn't any fun at all in co-op, but I can assure you that the depth of strategy required for the combat system outweighs bolting on a multiplayer aspect for this particular title. It has the most punishing/unforgiving combat design I've seen in an RPG in many years... and I like it that way.
When I came across my first "real" dragon in the game (near some plot-related ashes), I must have reloaded that battle from scratch for around 4 hours before I beat it, pausing every 1/2 second each battle. That's no fun at all multiplayer.
Going to have to politely disagree here. Appliances such as coffee makers, toasters and electric kettles most certainly benefit from 220.
There's a reason you don't see many electric kettles in the U.S... they take longer than the stove to almost boil a pot of water, compared to the 20 seconds or so you get in the UK for a rolling boil.
I also quite like the switches on UK outlets, although the size of the sockets is somewhat ridiculous.
I'll never forget my first trip to London (about 15 years ago)... the flat I stayed in was in a 150 year old building. Switches on all the outlets, and a central touchscreen that controlled the AC, heat and scheduled the water heater to kick on and off. Hot water in the kitchen sink was on-demand (much like the "electric showers" you see in small flats now).
At the time, it was absolute magic to my teenage American brain, and I began wondering why we don't do more in the U.S. to curtail wasted power.
Then there was the ubiquitous gas broiler on every stove I came across...
But the combo washer-dryer deals that take 5 hours for a load suck. And they're generally in the kitchen for some reason.
I'll come out and suggest the same codebase and be shocked if it wasn't a straight up PC-EFI 9 or the latest Chameleon + EFI combo. All Pystar has done is slap their own branding on existing OSX86 tools since the beginning.
They're more than kinda shady and I feel really sorry for folks who bought one of their insta-hackintoshes and didn't have the technical know-how to compile drivers / hack efi strings etc to keep their "Mac" running properly.
Moral of the story: if you're gonna do it, build one yourself so you can learn how to support your own build.
Pystar's gonna get sued into oblivion soon, and good riddance.
Gotta love MS, always two steps behind when they crib their strategy from elsewhere (in this case the big box stores that love overpriced accessories).
Marking the hell out of cheap commodity accessories stopped being a viable business model a few years ago.
Here's hoping that extended warranty scams and increased online competition force some sense into the big boxes at some point, but the writing's on the wall.
Amazon's already trialing same-day shipping in major markets. Other etailers won't be far behind.
Yeah, we were the same way. No rules lawyering at the table, 30 sec max for lookups then best judgement. Keep everything rolling so the laughs and momentum didn't start to lag.
Funny you mentioned Tunnels & Trolls. I'm still using the old grievous injury chart from that set just to spice stuff up and give the folks a little acting fodder for their characters.
I'm still considering going back to 1E right now... the interesting bit is that the wives/kids that get pulled into my games now "get" the talent tree/spec style system that 4E introduced. I like the concept of the eberron-style "dramatic actions" to use. I like the concept of powers for everyone (poor fighters in 1E)... I even like the care that's been taken into balancing everything this time out.
I just don't like a perfectly good story to be made tedious with an hour-long combat session and micromanagement for dots, bloody, focus, challenge, aoe, movement, opportunity... all that stuff. If I want that, I'll play Warhammer or Axis & Allies or any number of perfectly good wargames.
But for D&D, roll initiative, say what your character does with feeling and get your THAC0 on. You're doing something wrong at my table if you aren't trying to chew scenery or crack everyone up when it's your turn.
Poor attempt at a troll, but I'll bite, Mr. AC.
Chainmail (D&D's spiritual daddy) was a tactical wargame, as is Warhammer.
D&D is a Role Playing Game. You know: tell stories, have adventures.
Tactics are all well and good if that's the kind of game you want to play. It's not the kind of game I want to play, and it's not the kind of game most folks at my table want to play, either.
I want to get through an "episode" per 4ish hour session, not a paragraph of story progress and maybe two encounters.
There's a reason I've been holding onto my huge collection of 1st edition books for all these years -- they work, the rules are flexible, and most people at my table have them more or less memorized. I can put a few figures on a mat, not sweat the finer strategery of combat, and kill a few orcs in 10 minutes with almost zero bookkeeping apart from initiative and hit points.
This keeps the story moving and keeps combat fun.
Might come as a shock to you, but I encourage my players to act. Tunnels & Trolls had it right way back when with their grievous injury chart. Roleplaying is about far more than magical hit point numbers.
I've likely been DMing longer than you've been alive, so I'm just gonna laugh at the rest.
It's a pretty cool proof of concept, but I absolutely shudder at the amount of additional setup time something like this would require for campaigns.
I've run a couple of 4E campaigns after finally letting go of my 1E rules, and not to put too fine a point on things... combat takes way the hell too long when you're forced to deal with miniatures and it just bogs everything down -- don't get me started on the amount of stickers and markers that are required for bookkeeping now.
A couple people at my table like the more strategic combat options that minis offer, but the majority prefer that the story advances more than a paragraph per play session. As the DM, I'm one of them. I'd rather roll initiative and talk through fast-paced combat.
WOTC wants to sell their absolutely hideous plastic minis, and lots of them, so it's in their best interest to make the game mini focused. There are so many rules that depend on movement and proximity that you've basically got to remove the entire combat system and house-rule over it if you forego the minis.
I've seen some folks that use an LCD projector and Photoshop in lieu of a battlemat, but that's still an enormous amount of prep time for a campaign.
I work in advertising.
People hate advertising. They're inundated with it. People in advertising hate advertising (at least on the creative side)... but they recognize that it's a necessary evil, and it's one of the most reliable ways for slacker artist types like myself to get gainful career employment. I have no illusions. I'm helping sell shit to people that they don't want or need.
Usually, I work in business to business stuff, so I don't have to do the soul-searching thing as often as folks who market for consumer brands/retail.
Occasionally people might enjoy a Superbowl spot, or the like, but those are generally narratives, and they account for the tiniest fraction of a percent of all advertising.
I appreciate the craft and thought process that goes into making effective marketing in the same way that I can appreciate move recaps of classic chess games. That doesn't mean I want to experience them in real-time. I want to experience them on my own terms... marketers' responses have been to simply scream louder and louder so that the advertising can't be avoided.
My $12 movie ticket buys me 20 minutes of advertorial (not including previews) if I want to get a decent seat. I get congratulated on my free nano or wii 200x a day if I forget to disable Flash. Same thing on a different scale.
TLDR: Don't think you know too many folks who create advertising... just ones who sell it. There's a difference.
I doubt it. I've had negative reviews published on Newegg, and their reviews are absolutely essential for some of the cheapie parts you can score... for example, making sure a SATA external chassis actually supports 1gb drives, etc (which is often not in the specs).
In fact, I'd go a step further. Newegg leaves up flames and reviews by 'tards who don't know what they're talking about -- as long as you don't post competitive store URLs or prices, and they let manufacturers (or distributors) reply to reviews directly.
I think their system works about as well as Amazon, personally, and I'm generally confident when I buy from there that I know what I'm getting (again, pretty useful with no-name knockoffs).
They're the evil empire. I don't think they'll ever be seen as cool without being split into smaller companies that can develop their own personalities. And no, having the XBox team dabble in UI doesn't really help. Give me back a programs menu that works!
Honestly, the DoJ would have been doing them a favor to split them up like Ma Bell way back when. I'm not sure they'd have been doing the consumer any favors over the long run, though.
From a marketing standpoint, they need their own messaging: not kneejerk responses to Apple and Google. Speak with confidence on their strengths, but set yourself apart from the competition. Speak on your own terms.
It's really marketing 101. A leader in the industry with that kind of marketshare shouldn't even acknowledge the other guys, let alone focus neurotically on Apple who has like 12% market share (on a good day).
When you're that big, you lead -- not follow. It's just so weird to me that they're determined to acknowledge barbarians at the gate at every opportunity.
People who aren't cool enough for a Mac. Haven't you seen laptop hunters?
In fact, they're marketing to people who have enormous chips on their shoulders about being so entirely uncool (or poor) for Macs.
I jest. They're talking to themselves. Microsoft's insecurities have been laid utterly bare in all their marketing attempts for a decade.
There was a joint interview with Jobs and Gates not too long ago that I'm too lazy to dig up, and a question was asked "what do you envy about the other" -- Gates' answer came off as snide, yet honest: "I wish I had your taste"
They've been at this since the Zune came out and they started marketing to the Wal-Mart demographic. Because Wal-Mart folks like brown things that work almost sorta as well as an iPod at the same price. Because you're not cool enough for an iPod, and you've got a chip on your shoulder about it.
The weird part is... that demographic's pretty much stuck with MS out of ignorance, and MS is tilting at windmills whenever they go against apple. They inevitably end up looking as insane (and sad) as Don Quixote himself.
They're trying so hard to astroturf these days, build a viral movement. I'm not sure they understand that apart from a handful of lunatics/idiots/middle managers out there, there is nobody on earth who actually likes Microsoft. Maybe they do understand, and they're trying to overcompensate?
Their messaging isn't helping any.
So, as a career advertising guy (15 years & counting) I don't get it either.
Round about Vista/Zune, MS and their various agencies of record starting shooting themselves in the foot. I'm here to tell you Crispin/Porter is a great, kooky agency... but they just can't speak to the Wal-Mart moms that MS thinks they're in danger of losing.
Microsoft's achilles heels are Office (in the near term) and Mobile (in the long term). If they lose control over file formats and Exchange lock-in, Microsoft as we know it gets pushed over their tipping point. Over the long term, so many of our common tasks will be moving to mobiles or embedded devices instead of PCs -- and MS let Mobile languish as a steaming pile for the better part of a decade.
But now they're just shitting out me-too copies of consumer electronics.
Maybe the whole thing is misdirection? I don't think so, but there has to be a few smart folks at that company who can see the forest for the trees.
Actually, Mental Ray satellite (as craptastically buggy as it is) still had a 8-thread limit under Maya 2009 sp1a (patch notes say they removed the restriction, but watch your CPU usage with a dual Nehalem and tell me it's not locked to 8 cores still)....
But it's not so much that... I mean if you've got the budget for Renderman Pro or Mental Ray standalone, you've got the budget to build a farm properly, and yeah an i7 is most definitely worth every penny, Nehalem Xeons are great too if someone else is paying the tab. If you're buying Renderman Pro, you're likely getting Xeons.
I've got 3 identical i7s, a core 2 quad and a core 2 duo for rendering here, and whenever I'm doing hair (shave in particular) or some dynamics plug-in work, I get significantly better render time using the core 2 duo due to the nature of multithreading. If you're only using 1 thread on a hyperthreaded quad, you're only using 12% of the available processing power, and it's more efficient to use a slower processor that you can utilize more of, if that makes sense. Same goes for a few repeat offending after effects plug ins (cinelook and magic bullet come to mind here). I mean you could go a step further and run 8 single core VMs on an i7 to saturate the CPU doing a hair scene (actually works pretty well with linux VMs in a pinch).
I do love the i7s from the very bottom of my heart, though. I'm getting almost a 50% gain in frames rendered between q4400s and i7 920s using Mental Ray in most cases.
I'm a big fan of imaging my boxes, as you mentioned. Particularly with a small shop it can be an absolutely maddening time sink to troubleshoot faulty nodes.
I can't think of the last time I ran into the video card issue... might have been lightwave way back when, but I've seen it. The real point here is "make sure the stuff you're buying is suitable for the work you're doing". If the bulk of your software is single threaded still, an i7 box really might not be the best choice. For most folks doing this professionally, it's an awesome choice though. If you're editing HD or 2k/4k over a network, you need to spend a little extra cash to make sure your disk reads and net throughput are up to snuff.
With that goes: if you're using enormous float textures and displacement maps out the ass, you're going to lose a substantial amount of time on disk & network throughput. Go gigabit ethernet at a minimum (it's cheap) and get a nice, fast raid 5 or 6 for your primary storage (and get another big disk to back it up with, at a minimum). Just because you don't need much storage on those render doesn't mean you can cheap out on the drives (ie 5400 rpm throwaways). Disk and network throughput matter and the matter more as you add more render slaves.
Regarding Vista: it depends on your hardware. Up through SP1, I still had a couple of mainboards with unstable (*cough*nforce*cough) drivers in Vista 64, as well as a few pieces of software that required UAC off (eww). Gave up on Vista then and I've had really good, rock solid stability in XP64. Win 7 seems to be shaping up nicely on my 2 oldish Athlon x2 test sandboxes. I think this really depends on preference and available hardware, personally, but it's going to be a non-issue come October anyhow (and thankfully).
All fair points, but I must say that the Mental Ray workflow that's so prevalent among pro-sumer/small studio CG (now that Autodesk owns most everything and bundles MR) is terribly hard on memory usage, displacement or no, 32-bit float or no, physically accurate shading/lighting or no. Renderman is far far more efficient, however due to the licensing costs, not many of the little shops are using it.
The article suggests buying a crapload of boxes with 4GB RAM mainboards, and my argument is that if you find yourself in need of building a render farm of more than a box or two, you're doing yourself a huge disservice by following that advice.
I can tell you first hand that it's a nightmare best avoided to assemble a bunch of assets into layout only to find that you're throwing memory exceptions right & left on deadline.
I stand by that advice: if you're actually to the point of investing a fair bit of cash for some render boxes, spend just a couple more bucks on the mainboard and RAM so you don't build yourself into a corner. I'm talking about a $50 difference (including ram and mainboard) per machine to safeguard against blowing deadlines.
Sure, there are lots and lots of workarounds for memory/detail/physics/computation issues, but on deadline you don't always have the luxury of using those cheats... and sometimes you've just got to brute-force your way through a sequence. Dynamics and rendering in Maya with Shave & a Haircut come to mind. Incredibly powerful, but single-threaded. You'd be better off rendering hair and contact shadow passes on a single P4 than an i7 unless you're using Renderman in this case.
I think you misunderstood me on the crap GPU issue: there are some apps that literally won't launch at all without a certain level of hardware acceleration under Windows. Most pro-level apps have a CLI-only render interface that's commonly invoked by farm management software -- but not all do. The point I was making is: if you're buying a ton of anything, make sure it's going to do what you want it to do ahead of time. It would suck to get a bunch of motherboards in 1U cases that can't even take an AGP/PCI-E video card, and that was preventing you from using the software that you built the farm for.
The main message was really: these guys give you a low-end, once-size-fits-all recipe for building a 16U farm, basically, and at that level of game, I think their advice is pretty poor hardware-wise. You'd be insane to fork over the cash for that much kit and stick 4GB mainboards in there. Imagine someone who had a need for that kind of horsepower but were limiting themselves to the low end of the capability spectrum on such a major purchase when the price difference in the grand scheme of things to future-proof is so small. Not that there's such a thing as future-proofing, but if you're trying to render anything using mental ray with a 4GB system, I can guarantee you that you'll hit a memory wall after playing with ZBrush or mia* physically accurate materials for a few weeks. Or real global illumination etc etc. Particularly under Win32. Sure there are cheats for everything, but they take time too, and sometimes you just need to hit render and know that 1200 frames will be done by Monday AM without spending a huge amount of time tuning cheats.
If you're a small shop, in the vast majority of cases an Autodesk product (or XSI) with Mental Ray bundled, and it's an engine that is not at all comfortable with a 4GB RAM limit.
The article neatly sums up how to build a render box from about 5 years ago, or for a hobbyist who doesn't really push the hardware.
In the last few years, with the prevalence of displacement mapping and linear workflow, file sizes and memory usage to get renders at the quality folks expect of CG work have skyrocketed.
As someone working as a freelance CG/VFX artist, I can tell you a few practical truths:
1. You may not need XP 64 but you need 64-bit if you hope to do high-resolution, or detailed renders in a single pass. An addendum to this is: don't even consider a motherboard that supports less than 8 gigs of ram, and max the thing out. If you are rendering under Windows, you're shooting yourself in the foot if you're stuck on 32-bit, in particular. You will hit a memory wall with a 4gb RAM system very very quickly. Linux 64 is fine. XP 64 (and even my tests with Win7 64 are good). Avoid Vista 64 like the plague.
2. Depending on your primary rendering usage, a Core i7 may actually be working against you with hyperthreading. Quite a few of the big boys (Renderman, Mental Ray) are still licensed per thread. With hyperthreading enabled on the motherboard, an i7 looks like 8 cores to many rendering apps. Relevant example: A dual quad Xeon Mac pro can only use half of the machine's processing power as a Mental Ray satellite node with Maya, because it's licensed to only use 8 threads total. In addition, a lot of compositing apps -- and LOTS of plug-ins -- are single-threaded (I'm looking at you, random After Effects plug-in, and just about any dynamics plug-in for a 3d app). The short of it: if you're going to be rendering with something that's actually capable of saturating a multi-threaded CPU, go for it. But do some research and tests first.
3. You might be able to get away with a crap mainboard video card -- but make sure of it. A few CG apps don't have command-line rendering available, and it'll suck to learn after the fact that the app you're trying to launch on your pile of new 1U servers won't launch because you don't have a decent video card. Linux & Mac OS (even Hackintoshes) are far superior to Windows in this regard -- you'll rarely find an app that refuses to run due to the card. Crap interactivity is fine as long as you can initiate a render.
4. Standardize your render boxes AND WORKSTATIONS on a single platform (ie Linux 64, Win 64, MacOS X 10.5 intel). Lots of apps require shaders to be recompiled per platform, and small studios generally use share/freeware stuff that might not be available on all platforms -- it's much better to work around this issue when you're creating your assets, versus when you've got a delivery deadline looming and you realize that your fancy layered shader looked great on your Win64 previews, but the code isn't available for Linux 64 to render within your lifetime.