I guess my intuition is that the tricks are piled on so thick in your typical raster based FPS engine that in order to simulate lighting, reflections and transparency effects certain things, like the environment, need to remain static.
Lighting, reflections, transparency (and shadows, come to that) can all be done dynamically these days. Is there are particular thing you are thinking of that still requires static items with rasterising?
They were presumably caught planning a break-in to a power plant
If that's true, you can point me to the reference that shows they were caught doing so.
I have no idea whether or not a small group of people were planning on a break in, but either way, there seems to have been a worrying overuse of police force at an otherwise peaceful protest (see my other comment). This article rather misses the point - the board game was just one of many police actions.
Here's the thing: a bunch of people were protesting by chaining themselves to gates and generally impeding operations at a power station.
Your citation for this? Climate Camp was a peaceful legal protest from everything I have read.
Yes, you are right that this is more an issue of the protest than the board game - the article is rather misleading to miss this out. But last time I looked, police confiscating things because they don't like what you are protesting about is just as worrying a thing, if not more so.
Unless you have evidence that the board game was seized as part of crimes committed, please refrain from spreading misinformation about "shutting down a power station", and making the "protester == illegal" assumption.
(Personally I don't have a strong opinion on the issues being protested either way, but I do have concerns about police action, and I was alerted to these events from a friend who was present as a Legal Observer and witnessed these events.)
Most importantly, the fanbois will no longer be special and will find some other shiny, overpriced toy to validate their whiny, shallow, pseudo-intellectual, metrosexual, idiotic existance. They'd probably be much happer(and less whinier) if they spent their hard-earned money at the gay disco instead.
I'm worried that this homophobic trolling gets modded up to +5. Or is it okay, because he's also praising Apple in his post?
Exactly. I really don't understand how video games are any different from VHS or DVD or the web.
Oh don't worry - Mediawatch-UK are happily campaigning to remove all traces of anything not child-friendly, or anything that might offend them, from VHS, DVD and the web too. Everything from swearing on TV to their recent campaigning for possession of all adult pr0n to be criminalised (even entirely private homemade images would be included).
Incidentally, Mediawatch-UK is the renamed organisation that was originally set up by the more well known Mary Whitehouse. Although she's gone, John Beyer tries to continue, claiming to represent the views of the public, whilst telling them what they're allowed to watch. I don't know why anyone gives him any attention, but he's often cited by the media giving his opinion on how offended he is by what other people choose to watch. Even the Government gives them attention - they were one of the lobbyist groups pushing for the recent law that criminalises simple possession of "extreme" images.
But yes, I fully agree with you that games shouldn't be just for kids. Unfortunately, in the UK there is plenty of history of censorship for other mediums, so even treating games as just the same means that games will be demonised or censored.
No one is claiming there should be no rules at all, just that some existing rules about trying to make everything "equal" should be dropped. By your logic, all formula 1 cars should be identical, because otherwise, the race might be won by someone in a jet.
Indeed, formula 1 provides a perfect comparison (yes, it's a car analogy!): it's not just the skill of the driver, but the skill of the engineers and the build of the car itself. This would just be along the same lines, but with people instead of cars.
Another point - as technology advances and things like genetic engineering become feasible, which do you think will be more popular to watch? Sports that demonstrates humans at their best, at high speed, or sports that have everybody prevented from taking advantage of new developments? What about when such things become commonplace for non-athletes too?
Point is, newly bought Mac is ready out of box for average Joe Six-Pack. Newly bought Dell with Vista has to be brought to your geek friend to make out of it something the Joe Six-Pack can use.
My parents had no problem with their first computer, running Vista. It was ready out the box - why wouldn't it be?
That's why I can easily imaging that some people might get religious over stuff which "Just Works" (c).
The "Just Works" mantra is itself something that stems from the enthusiasm - it's not actually a reason, or any claim which makes sense (why wouldn't it work? Do they think that other PCs don't work?)
this is naval gazing and conjecture, no more credible than Intelligent Design.
Well, except for the small differences that this is based on evidence, and the claim is falsifiable.
These guys have a few data points, they create a highly convoluted system that seems to account for their data points, then the moment they get more data, they start over.
Which is what they should be doing. If it was like ID, they'd still insist their first version was correct even when they got more data that disagreed with it, and they would insist the new data was incorrect.
A good critical thinker should know when to say "We don't have a fucking clue" if they want to be taken seriously.
"We don't have a clue, so let's try to find out" is science, and is what they are doing. "We don't have a clue, so let's not bother finding out" sounds to me more like ID.
And the courts have ALREADY made rulings that apply copyright infringement to occurring in an unauthorized 'disk to RAM' copy made by that WoW cheat program. (glider?)
Nope, Glider was only a problem because the copying to RAM wasn't part of the software's normal operation. Copying to RAM when you use the software is allowed, as the other commenters have pointed out.
The title of this article should be "Strong Court Ruling Upholds Copyright Law", which isn't really surprising. There's nothing in here that means that any arbitrary one-sided set of claims (e.g., an EULA) suddenly becomes legally enforceable.
My experience is the opposite. Point out a flaw or lacking feature, and you get "Why would you need to do that?" They are happy to have a phone that Just Works.
Free publicity works both ways. The Iphone gets loads of free publicity even if it's just the Daily Mail passing a rumour on some new Apple vaporware (this was a recent Slashdot story). So when there's a flaw, it's not surprising that that gets load of attention too.
Sure, a far more serious problem in another phone might not get mentioned at all. But then, other phones never get publicity on Slashdot full stop, even for far more significant events, so I don't see any reason for Apple to complain.
I'm not talking about a GUI, I'm talking about OpenGL. OpenGL is not a GUI - the GUI in CAD applications would be done in standard UI APIs (Win32 or whatever), not OpenGL. If you meant it as an analogy, rendering is a lot more isolated in a CAD application compared with accessing a GUI.
But to suggest that having OpenGL calls interspersed through half of a CAD/CAM app is "bad design" is perhaps optimistic thinking regarding how cleanly such an app can be separated into modules. The whole point of OpenGL is that it is platform neutral, and that OpenGL is in fact the wrapper to the underlying graphics library on the various ports of your app. So what you are saying is that the developer of a major CAD/CAM package has to have an in-house wrapper to what is already a platform-independent graphics wrapper because use of OpenGL constitutes lock-in to a platform?
No, I'm saying that separating different parts of your functionality in your program is good practice. Most parts of the application shouldn't need to know about the specifics of the renderer - they just need to access it via an interface. This is standard practice. Even I in my hobby programs have managed to do this - and since I'm writing stuff for realtime rendering, I'm using more than what rendering code would be required in a typical CAD application.
Are you seriously telling me that having OpenGL code spread across millions of lines of code is a good thing? It's nothing to do with whether the API claims to be cross-platform, it's about good design. More to the point, this very article is an example of why it is a bad thing. Even though OpenGL is cross-platform, hardware has changed, meaning that now OpenGL has a lot of legacy crap that they want to get rid of. Oh wait, but they can't, because of the way that programmers have used it.
I work for a CAD company, and I haven't touched a line of OpenGL specific code in 8 years of working there. If other companies can't manage basic programming principles, I have no sympathy for them. What are they teaching these days?
So to wrap this up - the title is EXTREMELY misleading and making up a storm where one doesn't exist.
Well, the storm is that losing OpenGL for games means that cutting edge 3D games on anything other than Vista are dead.
I'm not sure what you're saying - yes, this is an issue that only affects games, so I don't see why it's surprising that it's only game developers that are annoyed?
Also - the vast majority of application code that's supported for decades should have no OpenGL specific code in it, unless it's really badly designed.
how many "newest features" are your typical games actually using?
New features take a while to appear in games for obvious reasons, but they inevitably do. Did you not notice the change in 3D real time rendering capabilities in the last 10-15 years?
Then if we need a competitor to DirectX on Linux/Mac, maybe we could persuade Sony or Nintendo to open source their games engines.
DirectX and OpenGL are not "game engines", they are APIs to hardware. I'm not sure that whatever Sony/Nintendo use to access their console hardware is useful to access PC hardware, and you'd still have all the same problems of getting hardware manufacturers to support any new API by writing drivers (and that's assuming that Sony/Nintendo don't already use some form of OpenGL anyway).
Imagine you were the owner of a CAD or Animation software company. I suppose that when you have multiple OpenGL apps each with 10s of millions of lines of code, it's pretty hard to justify a rewrite from a business standpoint.
Although large apps can easily have 10s of millions of lines of code, I do not see why OpenGL specific code would be more than a tiny fraction of that. I would imagine that the API-specific part of games is typically more complex than that in applications, but even for games, the API specific code is easily contained to a small area. With an application, you ought to just rewrite the API-specific rendering code that displays the data on the screen - those millions of lines of code should be unaffected.
If someone's got 10s of millions of lines of code that all have references to OpenGL spread throughout them, that's pretty disasterous design.
I don't see how that relates to his message? He didn't say "I pirate games and enjoy playing them" he said "I don't like paying for games and then finding they are buggy, short, or downright bad game". I agree with his experience - I've paid for games that are so unstable to be useless.
However if you and others would do what I do and just not buy or pirate the game then that sends the message that the game isn't worthy of your time and they'll try harder at making a good game rather than trying to secure the game.
You wish. Lack of sales would be taken as evidence of increasing piracy.
I choose to run the virus scanner, and I can choose to disable it or run another one in its place if it causes problems.
I love the fuss people are making about this, as if it's a new idea to disable programs on your computer.
I love the tenuous analogies that people try to come up with to justify it, just because it's Apple, when it would never be accepted if it was any other company.
That issue can be handled by requiring them to pay towards legal costs.
you have to acknowledge that breaking the law has consequences, and people who own property are entitled to recovery of costs in protecting their property....
and a little shoplifting can easily cost a few grand.....
Copyright infringement is a civil issue, not a criminal one. We're not talking about property or shoplifting. I'm not saying that makes it right, but let's keep focused on the matter we're actually dealing with.
Sure, if you're talking about the entire cell phone market. Most of those won't be a target for an app store. Smart phones are the market
I don't have a smart phone, but it can still run applications. Things have moved on since the 1990s.
That's why they sold a million 3Gs on the release weekend.
Wow. They were so utterly late to market with a years old technology, so everyone who wanted one had to wait until then. By that same point in time, Motorola (to pick a company at random) has shipped tens of millions (if not many more). Not to mention all the free advertising Apple got before and at launch, which other phone companies do not receive.
Delivering to customers what they actually want, instead of what some misguided "marketing" department would prefer to force down their throats.
Yet everytime I ask about a missing feature (MMS, copy/paste, Java, video recording, until recently 3G), I'm told "Why would you want to do that?" The point is clear - what I want is irrelevant. I'd have to go "Oh, I can't do that - I'm an Apple user". Sure, there are nifty things about the Iphone too, but it's not clear to me that they are putting control into the hands of the users. On the contrary, they withhold features thinking that they know better, and that the user should not need them.
Okay - what's the size of the Iphone market, and how does that compare to say, the number of Java phones?
However many Iphones may have been sold, I think you misunderstand the size of the market. Even compared to just other individual manufacturers, their sales are dwarfed, last time I looked at the figures anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
I guess my intuition is that the tricks are piled on so thick in your typical raster based FPS engine that in order to simulate lighting, reflections and transparency effects certain things, like the environment, need to remain static.
Lighting, reflections, transparency (and shadows, come to that) can all be done dynamically these days. Is there are particular thing you are thinking of that still requires static items with rasterising?
They were presumably caught planning a break-in to a power plant
If that's true, you can point me to the reference that shows they were caught doing so.
I have no idea whether or not a small group of people were planning on a break in, but either way, there seems to have been a worrying overuse of police force at an otherwise peaceful protest (see my other comment). This article rather misses the point - the board game was just one of many police actions.
Here's the thing: a bunch of people were protesting by chaining themselves to gates and generally impeding operations at a power station.
Your citation for this? Climate Camp was a peaceful legal protest from everything I have read.
Yes, you are right that this is more an issue of the protest than the board game - the article is rather misleading to miss this out. But last time I looked, police confiscating things because they don't like what you are protesting about is just as worrying a thing, if not more so.
The actions of the police have been criticised by politicans (one MEP was at the event)
Also see:
http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2008/08/405874.html
http://www.hippyshopper.com/2008/08/climate_camp_a_report_from_the_front_line.html
Unless you have evidence that the board game was seized as part of crimes committed, please refrain from spreading misinformation about "shutting down a power station", and making the "protester == illegal" assumption.
(Personally I don't have a strong opinion on the issues being protested either way, but I do have concerns about police action, and I was alerted to these events from a friend who was present as a Legal Observer and witnessed these events.)
Most importantly, the fanbois will no longer be special and will find some other shiny, overpriced toy to validate their whiny, shallow, pseudo-intellectual, metrosexual, idiotic existance. They'd probably be much happer(and less whinier) if they spent their hard-earned money at the gay disco instead.
I'm worried that this homophobic trolling gets modded up to +5. Or is it okay, because he's also praising Apple in his post?
Exactly. I really don't understand how video games are any different from VHS or DVD or the web.
Oh don't worry - Mediawatch-UK are happily campaigning to remove all traces of anything not child-friendly, or anything that might offend them, from VHS, DVD and the web too. Everything from swearing on TV to their recent campaigning for possession of all adult pr0n to be criminalised (even entirely private homemade images would be included).
Incidentally, Mediawatch-UK is the renamed organisation that was originally set up by the more well known Mary Whitehouse. Although she's gone, John Beyer tries to continue, claiming to represent the views of the public, whilst telling them what they're allowed to watch. I don't know why anyone gives him any attention, but he's often cited by the media giving his opinion on how offended he is by what other people choose to watch. Even the Government gives them attention - they were one of the lobbyist groups pushing for the recent law that criminalises simple possession of "extreme" images.
But yes, I fully agree with you that games shouldn't be just for kids. Unfortunately, in the UK there is plenty of history of censorship for other mediums, so even treating games as just the same means that games will be demonised or censored.
And Formula 1 isn't an arms race?
No one is claiming there should be no rules at all, just that some existing rules about trying to make everything "equal" should be dropped. By your logic, all formula 1 cars should be identical, because otherwise, the race might be won by someone in a jet.
Indeed, formula 1 provides a perfect comparison (yes, it's a car analogy!): it's not just the skill of the driver, but the skill of the engineers and the build of the car itself. This would just be along the same lines, but with people instead of cars.
Another point - as technology advances and things like genetic engineering become feasible, which do you think will be more popular to watch? Sports that demonstrates humans at their best, at high speed, or sports that have everybody prevented from taking advantage of new developments? What about when such things become commonplace for non-athletes too?
Point is, newly bought Mac is ready out of box for average Joe Six-Pack. Newly bought Dell with Vista has to be brought to your geek friend to make out of it something the Joe Six-Pack can use.
My parents had no problem with their first computer, running Vista. It was ready out the box - why wouldn't it be?
That's why I can easily imaging that some people might get religious over stuff which "Just Works" (c).
The "Just Works" mantra is itself something that stems from the enthusiasm - it's not actually a reason, or any claim which makes sense (why wouldn't it work? Do they think that other PCs don't work?)
this is naval gazing and conjecture, no more credible than Intelligent Design.
Well, except for the small differences that this is based on evidence, and the claim is falsifiable.
These guys have a few data points, they create a highly convoluted system that seems to account for their data points, then the moment they get more data, they start over.
Which is what they should be doing. If it was like ID, they'd still insist their first version was correct even when they got more data that disagreed with it, and they would insist the new data was incorrect.
A good critical thinker should know when to say "We don't have a fucking clue" if they want to be taken seriously.
"We don't have a clue, so let's try to find out" is science, and is what they are doing. "We don't have a clue, so let's not bother finding out" sounds to me more like ID.
And the courts have ALREADY made rulings that apply copyright infringement to occurring in an unauthorized 'disk to RAM' copy made by that WoW cheat program. (glider?)
Nope, Glider was only a problem because the copying to RAM wasn't part of the software's normal operation. Copying to RAM when you use the software is allowed, as the other commenters have pointed out.
The title of this article should be "Strong Court Ruling Upholds Copyright Law", which isn't really surprising. There's nothing in here that means that any arbitrary one-sided set of claims (e.g., an EULA) suddenly becomes legally enforceable.
My experience is the opposite. Point out a flaw or lacking feature, and you get "Why would you need to do that?" They are happy to have a phone that Just Works.
Free publicity works both ways. The Iphone gets loads of free publicity even if it's just the Daily Mail passing a rumour on some new Apple vaporware (this was a recent Slashdot story). So when there's a flaw, it's not surprising that that gets load of attention too.
Sure, a far more serious problem in another phone might not get mentioned at all. But then, other phones never get publicity on Slashdot full stop, even for far more significant events, so I don't see any reason for Apple to complain.
I'm not talking about a GUI, I'm talking about OpenGL. OpenGL is not a GUI - the GUI in CAD applications would be done in standard UI APIs (Win32 or whatever), not OpenGL. If you meant it as an analogy, rendering is a lot more isolated in a CAD application compared with accessing a GUI.
But to suggest that having OpenGL calls interspersed through half of a CAD/CAM app is "bad design" is perhaps optimistic thinking regarding how cleanly such an app can be separated into modules. The whole point of OpenGL is that it is platform neutral, and that OpenGL is in fact the wrapper to the underlying graphics library on the various ports of your app. So what you are saying is that the developer of a major CAD/CAM package has to have an in-house wrapper to what is already a platform-independent graphics wrapper because use of OpenGL constitutes lock-in to a platform?
No, I'm saying that separating different parts of your functionality in your program is good practice. Most parts of the application shouldn't need to know about the specifics of the renderer - they just need to access it via an interface. This is standard practice. Even I in my hobby programs have managed to do this - and since I'm writing stuff for realtime rendering, I'm using more than what rendering code would be required in a typical CAD application.
Are you seriously telling me that having OpenGL code spread across millions of lines of code is a good thing? It's nothing to do with whether the API claims to be cross-platform, it's about good design. More to the point, this very article is an example of why it is a bad thing. Even though OpenGL is cross-platform, hardware has changed, meaning that now OpenGL has a lot of legacy crap that they want to get rid of. Oh wait, but they can't, because of the way that programmers have used it.
I work for a CAD company, and I haven't touched a line of OpenGL specific code in 8 years of working there. If other companies can't manage basic programming principles, I have no sympathy for them. What are they teaching these days?
So to wrap this up - the title is EXTREMELY misleading and making up a storm where one doesn't exist.
Well, the storm is that losing OpenGL for games means that cutting edge 3D games on anything other than Vista are dead.
I'm not sure what you're saying - yes, this is an issue that only affects games, so I don't see why it's surprising that it's only game developers that are annoyed?
Also - the vast majority of application code that's supported for decades should have no OpenGL specific code in it, unless it's really badly designed.
how many "newest features" are your typical games actually using?
New features take a while to appear in games for obvious reasons, but they inevitably do. Did you not notice the change in 3D real time rendering capabilities in the last 10-15 years?
Then if we need a competitor to DirectX on Linux/Mac, maybe we could persuade Sony or Nintendo to open source their games engines.
DirectX and OpenGL are not "game engines", they are APIs to hardware. I'm not sure that whatever Sony/Nintendo use to access their console hardware is useful to access PC hardware, and you'd still have all the same problems of getting hardware manufacturers to support any new API by writing drivers (and that's assuming that Sony/Nintendo don't already use some form of OpenGL anyway).
Imagine you were the owner of a CAD or Animation software company. I suppose that when you have multiple OpenGL apps each with 10s of millions of lines of code, it's pretty hard to justify a rewrite from a business standpoint.
Although large apps can easily have 10s of millions of lines of code, I do not see why OpenGL specific code would be more than a tiny fraction of that. I would imagine that the API-specific part of games is typically more complex than that in applications, but even for games, the API specific code is easily contained to a small area. With an application, you ought to just rewrite the API-specific rendering code that displays the data on the screen - those millions of lines of code should be unaffected.
If someone's got 10s of millions of lines of code that all have references to OpenGL spread throughout them, that's pretty disasterous design.
The Gamedev.net thread on this is marked with an Angry Red Demon Breathing Fire emoticon - I knew it was bad just by looking at it!
OOI, what's the current market share of Vista (the only platform that DirectX 10 will run on)?
More so as the "none-MS" OSes continue to grow in numbers.
Not just non-MS - I use OpenGL so I can write cross-platform code to run on obscure operating systems such as Windows XP ;)
I don't see how that relates to his message? He didn't say "I pirate games and enjoy playing them" he said "I don't like paying for games and then finding they are buggy, short, or downright bad game". I agree with his experience - I've paid for games that are so unstable to be useless.
However if you and others would do what I do and just not buy or pirate the game then that sends the message that the game isn't worthy of your time and they'll try harder at making a good game rather than trying to secure the game.
You wish. Lack of sales would be taken as evidence of increasing piracy.
I choose to run the virus scanner, and I can choose to disable it or run another one in its place if it causes problems.
I love the fuss people are making about this, as if it's a new idea to disable programs on your computer.
I love the tenuous analogies that people try to come up with to justify it, just because it's Apple, when it would never be accepted if it was any other company.
That issue can be handled by requiring them to pay towards legal costs.
you have to acknowledge that breaking the law has consequences, and people who own property are entitled to recovery of costs in protecting their property. ...
and a little shoplifting can easily cost a few grand.....
Copyright infringement is a civil issue, not a criminal one. We're not talking about property or shoplifting. I'm not saying that makes it right, but let's keep focused on the matter we're actually dealing with.
What if they made a copy of your window, and then threw a rock at that?
Sure, if you're talking about the entire cell phone market. Most of those won't be a target for an app store. Smart phones are the market
I don't have a smart phone, but it can still run applications. Things have moved on since the 1990s.
That's why they sold a million 3Gs on the release weekend.
Wow. They were so utterly late to market with a years old technology, so everyone who wanted one had to wait until then. By that same point in time, Motorola (to pick a company at random) has shipped tens of millions (if not many more). Not to mention all the free advertising Apple got before and at launch, which other phone companies do not receive.
Delivering to customers what they actually want, instead of what some misguided "marketing" department would prefer to force down their throats.
Yet everytime I ask about a missing feature (MMS, copy/paste, Java, video recording, until recently 3G), I'm told "Why would you want to do that?" The point is clear - what I want is irrelevant. I'd have to go "Oh, I can't do that - I'm an Apple user". Sure, there are nifty things about the Iphone too, but it's not clear to me that they are putting control into the hands of the users. On the contrary, they withhold features thinking that they know better, and that the user should not need them.
Okay - what's the size of the Iphone market, and how does that compare to say, the number of Java phones?
However many Iphones may have been sold, I think you misunderstand the size of the market. Even compared to just other individual manufacturers, their sales are dwarfed, last time I looked at the figures anyway.
Developing for the iPhone is easy. There is only one platform.
But Windows Mobile, Android, and Java are three completely different platforms.
Developing for Windows Mobile is easy. There is only one platform.
Developing for Android is easy. There is only one platform.
Developing for Java is easy. There is only one platform.
Am I missing your point? What's so special about the Iphone?