former asteroid 1 Ceres would surely be a planet, following your definition! Cool.
Exactly. I think there are around 10 or so large asteroids that are (mostly) spherical and which account for most of the mass of the asteroid belt. However, it would be difficult to determine which were formed by gravitational accretion and which were formed by the pulverization of a larger body. Also, I would imagine that most of their orbits criss-cross heavily, which seems un-planetlike to me. Oh, well.
God of War was nothing but one continuous barely-interactive cutscene.
Did you play the same God of War that I did? Because the one I played was highly interactive (except during the real cutscenes, of course). I loved God of War because it had a great mix of solid graphics, exciting combat, non-obnoxious platforming, exceptional level design, and moderately-interesting story. I found myself interacting with the game quite a bit, and, in fact, I found myself unable to progress or even stay alive if I failed to interact with it.
What counts as interactive for you? Having a seizure while wearing a Power Glove, standing on a DDR dance pad in front of your EyeToy, and playing Guitar Hero with your feet?
If it were up to me, I'd define a planet as a body that:
1. Has sufficient gravity to have formed into a spheroid (arbitrarily defined)
2. Orbits a star and not some other body orbiting the star (to exclude moons)
3. Is not a comet
Obviously my definition has as much ambiguity as the original poster's, but it seems to my (non-astronomer's) mind to capture the basic characteristics of a planet.
The majority of the non-EA games, such as Soul Calibur 2 and Street Fighter Alpha 3, have versions on other platforms which are superior.
You obviously missed the point. This list is not claiming that the PS2 version of Soul Calibur 2 is the best version of the game across all platforms. It's claiming that Soul Calibur 2 is one of the top 100 games available for some Sony platform, period.
It is redundant to list Soul Blade when the Dreamcast had both Street Fighter Alpha 3 and Soul Calibur.
Wrong. Dreamcast (and XBox and Gamecube) is irrelevant to this list. Once again, this is not a list of the best 100 Sony-exclusive games. It is a list of the 100 best games available on a Sony platform.
You can argue that some game should or should not be on the list, but arguing that the whole list is crap because such-and-such game is also on Dreamcast or that Gamecube has a better library misses the point completely.
He insisted we "fix" this problem and we spent (and I'm NOT making this up!) the next day's worth of time re-factoring the code (the IDE wasn't up to speed for this -- thanks Microsoft) to "correct" the "problem"
I call bullshit. Visual Studio is easily capable of doing a find-and-replace over the entire project (try CTRL-H). It shouldn't have taken you more than 30 seconds to fix this problem. If you spent the entire day "re-factoring" then you obviously had more serious problems than a simple deviation from the capitalization standard.
If you're going to do any OpenGL programming, get the OpenGL Red Book and the OpenGL Orange Book. These two are definitely the most heavily-used books on my shelf. Another great OpenGL book is Advanced Graphics Programming Using OpenGL by McReynolds and Blythe. Of course, if you don't do any graphics programming, these books will be useless.
It took me 17 keystrokes and 2 mouse clicks to Google "acronym finder" and look up SKU to determine what it meant (I'm not going to do your homework for you). You know, Google's not that hard to use - try it some time!
You're hallucinating, buddy. Let me count the ways.
1. On another note, as polygon counts skyrocket they approach single pixel size
This is not happening. Not anywhere (except maybe production rendering). It is far too time-consuming, expensive, and labor-intensive to produce huge numbers of high-polygon-count models for games. Vertex pipes are currently under-utilized in most games and applications now. Efforts are underway to allow procedural geometry creation on the GPU to better fill the vertex pipe without requiring huge content creation efforts. See this paper for details.
2. A second core that most apps don't know how to take advantage of will make this all the more obvious.
This undercuts the argument you make in the next paragraph. Also, it's not true. Both the PS3 and XBOX 360 have multiple CPU cores. It's true that current-gen engines aren't optimized for this technology, but next-gen engines will be.
3. multicore CPUs are nearing the point where full screen, real time ray tracing will be possible. GPUs will not stand a chance.
This might be true, but so what? Ray tracing offers few advantages over the current-gen programmable pipeline. I can only think of 2 things that a ray-tracer can do that the programmable pipeline can't: multilevel reflections and refraction. BRDFs, soft shadows, self-shadowing, etc. can all be handled in the GPU these days. Now, you can get great results by coupling a ray-tracer with a global illumination system like photon mapping, but that technique is nowhere near real-time. Typical acceleration schemes for ray-tracing and photon mapping will not work well in dynamic environments, but the GPU could care less whether a polygon was somewhere else on the previous frame.
Hate to break it to you, but the GPU is here to stay. Why? GPUs are specialized for processing 4-vectors, not single floats (or doubles) like the CPU + FPU. True, there are CPU extensions for this, such as SSE and 3DNOW, but typical CPUs have a single SSE processor, compared to a current-gen GPU with 8 vertex pipes and 24 pixel pipes. Finally, do you really want to burden your extra CPU with rendering when it could be handling physics or AI?
The common code path for new Object() in HotSpot 1.4.2 and later is approximately 10 machine instructions (data provided by Sun; see Resources), whereas the best performing malloc implementations in C require on average between 60 and 100 instructions per call (Detlefs, et. al.; see Resources).
Wow, that's really shocking. Until you actually look at the Detlef paper and realize that it was published in 1994, 11 years ago!! Who knows, maybe things have improved a bit in 11 years. The author certainly thinks Java is getting better; maybe it's possible that C/C++ compilers have improved as well.
Re:But are the problems only limited to the one ch
on
Airbus A380 Under Fire
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· Score: 2
A fault here could, in theory, make need for a complete analysis of every single part used. And in a plane this size, that's a massive amount of time and effort.
Not necessarily. It seems like the defect in question is only found in a particular chip made by this company TTTech. It seems to me that the worst case scenario would call for a reevaluation of all TTTech parts, especially if TTTech is engaged in some kind of cover-up about its chip defects. That wouldn't necessarily bring the Airbus project to a halt, as there is no reason to suspect that parts from other manufacturers are also dangerously defective (at least no reason given in TFA).
You're thinking of a 3d lighting system, which is probaly not the case here.
True. But the problems described by the parent post (lighting a wall and how to draw an object clipped by the top and bottom of the view frustum) are 3D graphics problems. Anyway, I'm not sure what a non-3D lighting system would be. If you are lighting per-pixel, would could avoid 3D geometry processing, but still apply 3D lighting. This would be like deferred shading but using a different method for filling the G-buffer.
Should the wall be lit? Should it be dark? Should half of it be lit?
Well, if the directional light source is directly above the wall, then the dot product of the light direction and the wall's surface normal will be zero (the angle between the two vectors is exactly 90 degrees). Hence under most commonly used lighting models there will be no diffuse lighting on any part of the wall due to the light source. There might be some specular highlights, depending on where the view point is located.
This is really not a complicated graphics problem at all.
Boss: So, Mr. Jones, What did you do on your lunch break?
Mr.Jones: Well, a couple of my coworkers and I played this really cool game of high-tech tag!! I was AWSOME!!
Must have been a looooong lunch break if you have to move around on public transit.
Given a premade map, you can do all of the geometrical calculations beforehand, and with some reasonable approximations you can shine a flashlight in a dark room and have it look good.
Yeah, but that's not global illumination, it's local. You're simply computing the illumination on the visible polygons due to the light source (flashlight), which is quite easy to do in realtime. Global illumination, on the other hand, takes into account the fact that light from the flashlight doesn't always reflect off a surface directly into the camera, but also reflects onto other surfaces and eventually reaches the camera via a potentially long set of intermediate indirect reflections. That cannot be done in realtime, yet.
I think your anti-ATI position might be a little extreme. I have a 9800 Pro at home and a 6800 Ultra at work. Both are rock-stable and fast, though surprisingly the 6800 is only slightly faster than the 9800 (mobo differences are to blame). However, when I first got the ATI card I had stability issues very similar to those you described. It turns out there is an incompatibility between the 9800 and the VIA chipset on the mobo. I bought a new mobo with nForce2 and never had a problem of any kind.
Before you write off ATI for good, check your hardware configuration and consult hardware forums, particularly forums for your mobo and/or chipset. You will probably find other people with similar problems who can help or at least diagnose the hardware incompatibility problems.
In my case, since the ATI card runs perfectly with the nForce2 chipset, I think the problem is with VIA, not ATI.
Anyway, ATI is not as bad as you may think (unless you run linux, which is a completely different issue...).
Seriously though, the most effective form of government is a dictatorship. Any government based on freedom is bound to be (at least somewhat) inept and inefficient.
Not necessarily. Consider Iceland. They have the oldest continuously functioning democratic body in the world, the Althingi (Icelandic parliament), which has existed since 930. In medieval times, Iceland lacked a chief executive of any kind - the parliament functioned as both a congress and supreme court. Their society is open, free, democratic, efficient, and equitable. No dictatorship necessary.
On the other hand, Iceland is unique in a couple of ways. They have a small, ethnically homogeneous population, geographic isolation, and excellent natural resources. The Icelandic model might not scale up to larger, geographically and culturally diverse societies.
ound effects in space ( without air, how are the sound waves travelling? ), the little Buzz droids in the begining being blown off the wing of Annakin's ship...
The space battle referred to takes place in the upper atmosphere of Coruscant, not in space.
Let me respond to your objections and add a couple of my own.
1. 3PO and R2 have their memory wiped... why doesn't Vader recognize them? There are probably millions of R2 units and protocol droids across the galaxy. Think about this: the stormtroopers in Episode IV who find 3PO and R2 hiding in a closet don't think there is anything strange about finding encountering these droids - meaning that they must be extremely common, even in Imperial bases. Anyway, why would Vader care if he saw a couple of droids he knew 20+ years earlier? Besides Vader was much more interested in capturing his son than reminiscing about the good old days with a couple of stupid droids.
2. Luke and Leia are born and the grand idea to protect them is... Well, Obi-wan is stationed on Tatooine himself to protect Luke. Second, Luke, Yoda, and Obi-wan's comments in Episode VI notwithstanding, we never see any evidence at all that Leia had any Force abilities early in life. She wouldn't have been noticed by Vader or the Emperor as a potential enemy. Vader gets face-to-face with her several times, but never detects any hint of the Force. (Yes, there's the telepathy scene in Episode V, but that's it for Leia and the Force.) Why would it be unusual for some Senator to have an adopted daughter? Besides, Vader thinks Padme died before giving birth - what possible reason would he have for seeking out children he doesn't know existed?
3. 3. Padme dies of a 'broken heart'? I agree with your basic point here. But in Episode III, Padme is extremely pregnant, mere days away from giving birth. Not exactly the physical conditions for kicking ass, I'd say.
4. 4. Yoda 'failed'? How did he fail? Uh, how about the fact that he could not beat Palpatine in combat and he knew it?
5. What exactly compelled Yoda and Obi to go into exile? Well, the Dark Side is ascendant, and the Jedi have been exterminated with remarkable ease by the agents of the Emperor. My opinion is that Yoda and Obi-wan were planning for the future. Obi-wan needed to protect Luke and send him to be trained by Yoda at the appropriate time, not trusting himself to train another Skywalker. Also, I think you are hallucinating: Even the Emperor gets his ass handed to him by Mace Windu, it's only Anakin's surprise intervention that shifted the scales then. Did you see the same movie I did? Palpatine had vast amounts of strength left to deal with Windu - he was playing weak to lure Anakin into the situation. Didn't you see how easily Palpatine destroyed Windu after Anakin got involved? Didn't you hear his sinister cackling as he blasted him out the window? Didn't you see Palpatine destroy the 3 other Jedi that arrived with Windu in like 2 seconds? Palpatine needed Anakin to do something unredeemable to bring him fully over to the Dark Side.
My major problem is: why didn't Obi-wan kill Vader when he had the chance? Either he couldn't bring himself to do it, or he thought Anakin would simply die there. If he couldn't bring himself to do it, that's a major weakness on his part, but it is hinted at earlier. If he thought Vader was going to die there, why not do the deed himself and save Anakin the suffering? This could have easily been handled better: have Palpatine arrive and drive Obi-wan away, or have Obi-wan and Vader be separated by a lava flow or something. This is the one thing that bothered me the most about the movie.
VR is being used quite a bit in psychology research, particularly visual perception and locomotion. Check out the VEN Lab at Brown University. This lab studies navigation and obstacle avoidance in an emersive VR environment. Very cool technology.
Also, the Vision Sciences Society conference in Saratosa this May has a satellite session about virtual reality in vision research.
So quite a bit is still going on in VR. Just because it's not the buzzword du jour doesn't mean VR has gone away.
Slashdot Mirror
0 = 0 + 0 + 0 + ... ... ... ...
= (1-1) + (1-1) + (1-1) +
= 1 + (-1+1) + (-1+1) +
= 1 + 0 + 0 +
Therefore,
0 = 1
Exactly. I think there are around 10 or so large asteroids that are (mostly) spherical and which account for most of the mass of the asteroid belt. However, it would be difficult to determine which were formed by gravitational accretion and which were formed by the pulverization of a larger body. Also, I would imagine that most of their orbits criss-cross heavily, which seems un-planetlike to me. Oh, well.
Did you play the same God of War that I did? Because the one I played was highly interactive (except during the real cutscenes, of course). I loved God of War because it had a great mix of solid graphics, exciting combat, non-obnoxious platforming, exceptional level design, and moderately-interesting story. I found myself interacting with the game quite a bit, and, in fact, I found myself unable to progress or even stay alive if I failed to interact with it.
What counts as interactive for you? Having a seizure while wearing a Power Glove, standing on a DDR dance pad in front of your EyeToy, and playing Guitar Hero with your feet?
1. Has sufficient gravity to have formed into a spheroid (arbitrarily defined)
2. Orbits a star and not some other body orbiting the star (to exclude moons)
3. Is not a comet
Obviously my definition has as much ambiguity as the original poster's, but it seems to my (non-astronomer's) mind to capture the basic characteristics of a planet.
You obviously missed the point. This list is not claiming that the PS2 version of Soul Calibur 2 is the best version of the game across all platforms. It's claiming that Soul Calibur 2 is one of the top 100 games available for some Sony platform, period.
It is redundant to list Soul Blade when the Dreamcast had both Street Fighter Alpha 3 and Soul Calibur.
Wrong. Dreamcast (and XBox and Gamecube) is irrelevant to this list. Once again, this is not a list of the best 100 Sony-exclusive games. It is a list of the 100 best games available on a Sony platform.
You can argue that some game should or should not be on the list, but arguing that the whole list is crap because such-and-such game is also on Dreamcast or that Gamecube has a better library misses the point completely.
Stop trolling.
And for a rebuttal of Lewis' Miracles and other works, see C. S. Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion by John Beversluis.
I call bullshit. Visual Studio is easily capable of doing a find-and-replace over the entire project (try CTRL-H). It shouldn't have taken you more than 30 seconds to fix this problem. If you spent the entire day "re-factoring" then you obviously had more serious problems than a simple deviation from the capitalization standard.
If you're going to do any OpenGL programming, get the OpenGL Red Book and the OpenGL Orange Book. These two are definitely the most heavily-used books on my shelf. Another great OpenGL book is Advanced Graphics Programming Using OpenGL by McReynolds and Blythe. Of course, if you don't do any graphics programming, these books will be useless.
I attached a Pentium 90 MHz chip to the dashboard of my old Mitsubishi Eclipse. It failed to produce noticable performance benefits, though.
It took me 17 keystrokes and 2 mouse clicks to Google "acronym finder" and look up SKU to determine what it meant (I'm not going to do your homework for you). You know, Google's not that hard to use - try it some time!
1. On another note, as polygon counts skyrocket they approach single pixel size
This is not happening. Not anywhere (except maybe production rendering). It is far too time-consuming, expensive, and labor-intensive to produce huge numbers of high-polygon-count models for games. Vertex pipes are currently under-utilized in most games and applications now. Efforts are underway to allow procedural geometry creation on the GPU to better fill the vertex pipe without requiring huge content creation efforts. See this paper for details.
2. A second core that most apps don't know how to take advantage of will make this all the more obvious.
This undercuts the argument you make in the next paragraph. Also, it's not true. Both the PS3 and XBOX 360 have multiple CPU cores. It's true that current-gen engines aren't optimized for this technology, but next-gen engines will be.
3. multicore CPUs are nearing the point where full screen, real time ray tracing will be possible. GPUs will not stand a chance.
This might be true, but so what? Ray tracing offers few advantages over the current-gen programmable pipeline. I can only think of 2 things that a ray-tracer can do that the programmable pipeline can't: multilevel reflections and refraction. BRDFs, soft shadows, self-shadowing, etc. can all be handled in the GPU these days. Now, you can get great results by coupling a ray-tracer with a global illumination system like photon mapping, but that technique is nowhere near real-time. Typical acceleration schemes for ray-tracing and photon mapping will not work well in dynamic environments, but the GPU could care less whether a polygon was somewhere else on the previous frame.
Hate to break it to you, but the GPU is here to stay. Why? GPUs are specialized for processing 4-vectors, not single floats (or doubles) like the CPU + FPU. True, there are CPU extensions for this, such as SSE and 3DNOW, but typical CPUs have a single SSE processor, compared to a current-gen GPU with 8 vertex pipes and 24 pixel pipes. Finally, do you really want to burden your extra CPU with rendering when it could be handling physics or AI?
The common code path for new Object() in HotSpot 1.4.2 and later is approximately 10 machine instructions (data provided by Sun; see Resources), whereas the best performing malloc implementations in C require on average between 60 and 100 instructions per call (Detlefs, et. al.; see Resources).
Wow, that's really shocking. Until you actually look at the Detlef paper and realize that it was published in 1994, 11 years ago!! Who knows, maybe things have improved a bit in 11 years. The author certainly thinks Java is getting better; maybe it's possible that C/C++ compilers have improved as well.
Not necessarily. It seems like the defect in question is only found in a particular chip made by this company TTTech. It seems to me that the worst case scenario would call for a reevaluation of all TTTech parts, especially if TTTech is engaged in some kind of cover-up about its chip defects. That wouldn't necessarily bring the Airbus project to a halt, as there is no reason to suspect that parts from other manufacturers are also dangerously defective (at least no reason given in TFA).
RTFA. The new Battlestar Galactica came in #2, behind only the original Star Trek.
Or BFGs, if they train with Doom 3.
True. But the problems described by the parent post (lighting a wall and how to draw an object clipped by the top and bottom of the view frustum) are 3D graphics problems. Anyway, I'm not sure what a non-3D lighting system would be. If you are lighting per-pixel, would could avoid 3D geometry processing, but still apply 3D lighting. This would be like deferred shading but using a different method for filling the G-buffer.
Well, if the directional light source is directly above the wall, then the dot product of the light direction and the wall's surface normal will be zero (the angle between the two vectors is exactly 90 degrees). Hence under most commonly used lighting models there will be no diffuse lighting on any part of the wall due to the light source. There might be some specular highlights, depending on where the view point is located.
This is really not a complicated graphics problem at all.
Must have been a looooong lunch break if you have to move around on public transit.
Yeah, but that's not global illumination, it's local. You're simply computing the illumination on the visible polygons due to the light source (flashlight), which is quite easy to do in realtime. Global illumination, on the other hand, takes into account the fact that light from the flashlight doesn't always reflect off a surface directly into the camera, but also reflects onto other surfaces and eventually reaches the camera via a potentially long set of intermediate indirect reflections. That cannot be done in realtime, yet.
Before you write off ATI for good, check your hardware configuration and consult hardware forums, particularly forums for your mobo and/or chipset. You will probably find other people with similar problems who can help or at least diagnose the hardware incompatibility problems.
In my case, since the ATI card runs perfectly with the nForce2 chipset, I think the problem is with VIA, not ATI.
Anyway, ATI is not as bad as you may think (unless you run linux, which is a completely different issue...).
Not necessarily. Consider Iceland. They have the oldest continuously functioning democratic body in the world, the Althingi (Icelandic parliament), which has existed since 930. In medieval times, Iceland lacked a chief executive of any kind - the parliament functioned as both a congress and supreme court. Their society is open, free, democratic, efficient, and equitable. No dictatorship necessary.
On the other hand, Iceland is unique in a couple of ways. They have a small, ethnically homogeneous population, geographic isolation, and excellent natural resources. The Icelandic model might not scale up to larger, geographically and culturally diverse societies.
How could they sense the droids? The Force is created by living things, which the droids are not.
The space battle referred to takes place in the upper atmosphere of Coruscant, not in space.
1. 3PO and R2 have their memory wiped... why doesn't Vader recognize them? There are probably millions of R2 units and protocol droids across the galaxy. Think about this: the stormtroopers in Episode IV who find 3PO and R2 hiding in a closet don't think there is anything strange about finding encountering these droids - meaning that they must be extremely common, even in Imperial bases. Anyway, why would Vader care if he saw a couple of droids he knew 20+ years earlier? Besides Vader was much more interested in capturing his son than reminiscing about the good old days with a couple of stupid droids.
2. Luke and Leia are born and the grand idea to protect them is... Well, Obi-wan is stationed on Tatooine himself to protect Luke. Second, Luke, Yoda, and Obi-wan's comments in Episode VI notwithstanding, we never see any evidence at all that Leia had any Force abilities early in life. She wouldn't have been noticed by Vader or the Emperor as a potential enemy. Vader gets face-to-face with her several times, but never detects any hint of the Force. (Yes, there's the telepathy scene in Episode V, but that's it for Leia and the Force.) Why would it be unusual for some Senator to have an adopted daughter? Besides, Vader thinks Padme died before giving birth - what possible reason would he have for seeking out children he doesn't know existed?
3. 3. Padme dies of a 'broken heart'? I agree with your basic point here. But in Episode III, Padme is extremely pregnant, mere days away from giving birth. Not exactly the physical conditions for kicking ass, I'd say.
4. 4. Yoda 'failed'? How did he fail? Uh, how about the fact that he could not beat Palpatine in combat and he knew it?
5. What exactly compelled Yoda and Obi to go into exile? Well, the Dark Side is ascendant, and the Jedi have been exterminated with remarkable ease by the agents of the Emperor. My opinion is that Yoda and Obi-wan were planning for the future. Obi-wan needed to protect Luke and send him to be trained by Yoda at the appropriate time, not trusting himself to train another Skywalker. Also, I think you are hallucinating: Even the Emperor gets his ass handed to him by Mace Windu, it's only Anakin's surprise intervention that shifted the scales then. Did you see the same movie I did? Palpatine had vast amounts of strength left to deal with Windu - he was playing weak to lure Anakin into the situation. Didn't you see how easily Palpatine destroyed Windu after Anakin got involved? Didn't you hear his sinister cackling as he blasted him out the window? Didn't you see Palpatine destroy the 3 other Jedi that arrived with Windu in like 2 seconds? Palpatine needed Anakin to do something unredeemable to bring him fully over to the Dark Side.
My major problem is: why didn't Obi-wan kill Vader when he had the chance? Either he couldn't bring himself to do it, or he thought Anakin would simply die there. If he couldn't bring himself to do it, that's a major weakness on his part, but it is hinted at earlier. If he thought Vader was going to die there, why not do the deed himself and save Anakin the suffering? This could have easily been handled better: have Palpatine arrive and drive Obi-wan away, or have Obi-wan and Vader be separated by a lava flow or something. This is the one thing that bothered me the most about the movie.
Also, the Vision Sciences Society conference in Saratosa this May has a satellite session about virtual reality in vision research.
So quite a bit is still going on in VR. Just because it's not the buzzword du jour doesn't mean VR has gone away.