I'm curious about this. Admittedly I'm no expert in either graphics or physics, especially where processors are concerned, but doesn't it make sense to have both combined instead of separate?
Now I don't know how a physics processor works but I'm assuming it's something like the following. You fire bullet (x) and player's head (y). The game feeds the PPU all the physical properties of the objects in question and the PPU figures how the bullet interacts with the player's head (snaps back, tugs the body over, etc). Sounds great, but with games using things like bump mapping more and more to distort the shapes of basic 3D objects, shouldn't this come into play?
For instance, if I roll a ball down a hill and it bounces off a jump at the bottom, that's pretty basic. If I apply a bump mapping to the ball that makes it all spikey, well now the GPU is showing me the spikes, but will the PPU take that into account as well? Wouldn't it make sense to combine the two, maybe making it easier for the end developer to work with one single product instead of two?
I'm not a HUGE fan of first person shooters, but yeah I could see games like that and Half-life 2 having some excellent replay value when one takes into account the mods. Counter-strike, for instance.
Then get an iPod mini. Has a screen, not that much more than a shuffle. Plus you can sync contacts, calendars, etc, and use the spare space as storage if you wish.
Ah, but then you have MMOs like EVE Online, a game that is virtually "path-less". PVP is there, but it's there as a reality of venturing into unregulated space. You don't HAVE to participate in PVP, you can stay in relatively comfy empire space and pursue a research career, manufacturing, etc. There's no singular path defined for a character at all. Sure you can put more skill into science rather than combat skills, but that doesn't mean you can't fight.
Essentially what we have here is a virtual sandbox consisting of thousands of star systems and a player driven economy (that works). So why isn't it as hugely popular as others? If I were to venture a guess, it's that when people play these games they NEED that direction, some path laid out for them to follow. I've heard EVE being described as being "hardcore", and I'd have to agree -- beyond the initial tutorials, you're thrown out into the universe to make your own way. Those of us who play it love it, but I can definitely see a segment of the gamer populace shying away from it for that simple fact.
Personally, I prefer the MMO genre for the very same reasons you listed. Keeping up on new releases is ridiculously expensive right now, and I'd much rather commit myself to a single game and get as much out of it than spend money almost constantly on the new releases of single player games. Games which I'll invariably finish in a weekend or two.
On the other hand, MMOs let me pay once for it in the store, get a "free month", and pay in smaller installments month to month. That might seem like a gouge, but if I stick with a single MMO and play it regularly I'm paying much much less per month to game. And if I get maybe six or twelve months of enjoyment out of the game, that's a hell of a lot more than I've got out of, say Doom 3.
Yeah and guess what -- those things alone would probably make it a worthwhile investment for gaming companies today. Nowadays everyone's releasing their games across as many platforms as they can. If this can make it easier for a company to develop games for two of those (arguably two of the most popular), don't you think that makes it worth at least a look?
Whatever makes Microsoft pull tactics like this to compete with the PS3 will also make Sony (and Nintendo) be innovative with their hardware and software lineup at launch. The winners in the end? The gamers. Not our wallets though, but that's a different story.
Strangely, I've actually played both quite substantially before forming an opinion of either as compared to the other. EQ2 looks great and is a pretty decent game, but doesn't do much that's new or interesting. WoW is probably the better bang for the buck, but that's just my opinion.
My father actually ended up doing that with them on the phone, and to no avail. They generated probably three keys for him, none of them worked at all. It was in fact their suggestion that my father call the activation line, and it was then he was subjected to the annoyance of that phone system. I nearly cried I was laughing so hard, because he ended up mailing photocopies of all the license information to Bill Gates C/O Microsoft, with a nice scathing letter asking him to fix the situation.:)
My father recent ran into a rather stupid issue with the phone based activation. You see it's not a person you're talking to, but one of those recorded voice recognition systems. He had a copy of Microsoft Works that he had to reinstall, and suddenly required activation. For some reason the internet based activation didn't work so he proceeded to do the phone based one.
Well lo and behold after he enters in his proper key for the product he legitimately purchased when he got his Dell PC, it promptly tells him the key's invalid, buhbye and HANGS UP ON HIM. There was no option to speak to a CSR at all, and he has no recourse (Dell can't do anything about it, and there's no phone numbers to call at Microsoft to talk to someone). The whole experience has pushed him that much further towards getting a Mac and waving a not-so-fond farewell to Windows XP.
Call me strange, but is this really that bad? I mean if I were a diehard purist fan of the original series I might be overly concerned that the new series is missing all the campy silly stuff it has in it. But I'm not missing it. I appreciate the new story's realistic spin. And as a fan of the Wing Commander games (and flame me if you will, the movie too) I really enjoy the similarities between them. But that's just my two cubits.:)
Honestly, as far as open endedness, roleplayability, and complexity goes, EVE Online rules them all. It's one of the few games out there where a single person really can change the course of the gameplay for the rest of people if they so desire. Start a corp, make it into an alliance, start claiming and defending territory.
One of the reasons I think EVE's got the edge up on others is that no matter where in the world you play or how you sign up to the game, you're all in the same universe. There's no sharding, there aren't 50 servers each with their own copy of the game running on it. If you're a pirating bastard in the game, you affect the entire playerbase.
Several months back I was involved in an accident where a woman was on a cell phone. I was stopped at a red light at a 3 lane intersection, I was the only car there. She came around a bend with about a 1/4 mile visiblity to the intersection, and hit me full out doing around 60-70kph. The rearender threw my car across the intersection, I was lucky not to hit anyone else or be hit.
I walked out of the car, but had some bad back issues later (and still to some extent to this day). She was busy dialing her cell phone, one hand and both eyes were completely off the road for the time it took her to dial the number a few times (screwed up the digits or something). So was she impaired more than she would have been had she been drunk? At least equally, I'd say.
Probably because I don't want to be carrying around 40 of them to equal the space on my iPod, and then have to swap them out all the time. Also, with my iPod I can shuffle my whole music collection at once.
They're pretty good, yeah. Lots of administrative options, mysql databases, etc. Can have a lot of email accounts too (which means it's a good thing they give you tons of space). I have an online comic, so the bandwidth was the main attractor for me.
I second that. The service has been great so far. My only problems were encountered at the start, there was some pretty serious lag time to get my account set up, apparently they were pretty understaffed at the time. But the true test is whether you need to contact them for support, and for myself I found that once my account was set up I've never had anything to complain about.:) Awesome prices, great service, tons of administrative options. Best bang for the buck out there, imho.
My girlfriend just bought herself a 12" iBook, and to be honest I was a little skeptical of the thing (seems like the screen would be too small). But the OS and application's use of screen real estate really makes the smaller screen size a complete non-issue. That and the Expose functions really make managing multiple windows and multiple applications a total breeze.
I'm actually considering picking up either the iBook or an iMac, I'm just torn on whether I want to be tethered to my desk or not.:)
Must be 13 or older and a legal resident residing in the U.S. to play.
I'd hoped now that they have a Canadian iTunes Music Store (not to mention all the other international stores) that we'd be able to participate in promotions like these. That's too bad, the non-US market for Pepsi (and ITMS) is not exactly a small percentage of the total.
They may not be what's driving 100% of hardware sales, but I'm sure the percentage is very significant. One of the reasons I bought an iPod (I'm a PC user) is because of the easy to use software and online store. I also like Apple's philosophy behind the whole experience, buying the music and getting it on the device is as easy as a mouse click and putting the hardware in the dock. Of course, I'm not saying others aren't as easy to use, I'm just saying for me the iPod+iTunes gave me the best combination of hardware and software, so in that way the music store did drive my purchase.
I also know I can't be alone in this, given the number of purchased music on iTunes.:-)
And how many text editors come with the average distro of Linux? How many browsers are available? For that matter, how many different non-MS blogging products are out there? If you're going to bash Microsoft for this, then bash MovableType, or Mozilla for daring to develop a competing web browser.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm curious about this. Admittedly I'm no expert in either graphics or physics, especially where processors are concerned, but doesn't it make sense to have both combined instead of separate?
Now I don't know how a physics processor works but I'm assuming it's something like the following. You fire bullet (x) and player's head (y). The game feeds the PPU all the physical properties of the objects in question and the PPU figures how the bullet interacts with the player's head (snaps back, tugs the body over, etc). Sounds great, but with games using things like bump mapping more and more to distort the shapes of basic 3D objects, shouldn't this come into play?
For instance, if I roll a ball down a hill and it bounces off a jump at the bottom, that's pretty basic. If I apply a bump mapping to the ball that makes it all spikey, well now the GPU is showing me the spikes, but will the PPU take that into account as well? Wouldn't it make sense to combine the two, maybe making it easier for the end developer to work with one single product instead of two?
I'm not a HUGE fan of first person shooters, but yeah I could see games like that and Half-life 2 having some excellent replay value when one takes into account the mods. Counter-strike, for instance.
Then get an iPod mini. Has a screen, not that much more than a shuffle. Plus you can sync contacts, calendars, etc, and use the spare space as storage if you wish.
Ah, but then you have MMOs like EVE Online, a game that is virtually "path-less". PVP is there, but it's there as a reality of venturing into unregulated space. You don't HAVE to participate in PVP, you can stay in relatively comfy empire space and pursue a research career, manufacturing, etc. There's no singular path defined for a character at all. Sure you can put more skill into science rather than combat skills, but that doesn't mean you can't fight.
Essentially what we have here is a virtual sandbox consisting of thousands of star systems and a player driven economy (that works). So why isn't it as hugely popular as others? If I were to venture a guess, it's that when people play these games they NEED that direction, some path laid out for them to follow. I've heard EVE being described as being "hardcore", and I'd have to agree -- beyond the initial tutorials, you're thrown out into the universe to make your own way. Those of us who play it love it, but I can definitely see a segment of the gamer populace shying away from it for that simple fact.
Personally, I prefer the MMO genre for the very same reasons you listed. Keeping up on new releases is ridiculously expensive right now, and I'd much rather commit myself to a single game and get as much out of it than spend money almost constantly on the new releases of single player games. Games which I'll invariably finish in a weekend or two.
On the other hand, MMOs let me pay once for it in the store, get a "free month", and pay in smaller installments month to month. That might seem like a gouge, but if I stick with a single MMO and play it regularly I'm paying much much less per month to game. And if I get maybe six or twelve months of enjoyment out of the game, that's a hell of a lot more than I've got out of, say Doom 3.
Yeah and guess what -- those things alone would probably make it a worthwhile investment for gaming companies today. Nowadays everyone's releasing their games across as many platforms as they can. If this can make it easier for a company to develop games for two of those (arguably two of the most popular), don't you think that makes it worth at least a look?
Whatever makes Microsoft pull tactics like this to compete with the PS3 will also make Sony (and Nintendo) be innovative with their hardware and software lineup at launch. The winners in the end? The gamers. Not our wallets though, but that's a different story.
Strangely, I've actually played both quite substantially before forming an opinion of either as compared to the other. EQ2 looks great and is a pretty decent game, but doesn't do much that's new or interesting. WoW is probably the better bang for the buck, but that's just my opinion.
... and probably thus continuing the Everquest II tradition of poorly implementing other games' features. Come on SOE, lets see some innovation here.
My father actually ended up doing that with them on the phone, and to no avail. They generated probably three keys for him, none of them worked at all. It was in fact their suggestion that my father call the activation line, and it was then he was subjected to the annoyance of that phone system. I nearly cried I was laughing so hard, because he ended up mailing photocopies of all the license information to Bill Gates C/O Microsoft, with a nice scathing letter asking him to fix the situation. :)
My father recent ran into a rather stupid issue with the phone based activation. You see it's not a person you're talking to, but one of those recorded voice recognition systems. He had a copy of Microsoft Works that he had to reinstall, and suddenly required activation. For some reason the internet based activation didn't work so he proceeded to do the phone based one.
Well lo and behold after he enters in his proper key for the product he legitimately purchased when he got his Dell PC, it promptly tells him the key's invalid, buhbye and HANGS UP ON HIM. There was no option to speak to a CSR at all, and he has no recourse (Dell can't do anything about it, and there's no phone numbers to call at Microsoft to talk to someone). The whole experience has pushed him that much further towards getting a Mac and waving a not-so-fond farewell to Windows XP.
Call me strange, but is this really that bad? I mean if I were a diehard purist fan of the original series I might be overly concerned that the new series is missing all the campy silly stuff it has in it. But I'm not missing it. I appreciate the new story's realistic spin. And as a fan of the Wing Commander games (and flame me if you will, the movie too) I really enjoy the similarities between them. But that's just my two cubits. :)
/agree
Honestly, as far as open endedness, roleplayability, and complexity goes, EVE Online rules them all. It's one of the few games out there where a single person really can change the course of the gameplay for the rest of people if they so desire. Start a corp, make it into an alliance, start claiming and defending territory.
One of the reasons I think EVE's got the edge up on others is that no matter where in the world you play or how you sign up to the game, you're all in the same universe. There's no sharding, there aren't 50 servers each with their own copy of the game running on it. If you're a pirating bastard in the game, you affect the entire playerbase.
The developers of EVE Online utilize Python for their game logic. Linkage
Several months back I was involved in an accident where a woman was on a cell phone. I was stopped at a red light at a 3 lane intersection, I was the only car there. She came around a bend with about a 1/4 mile visiblity to the intersection, and hit me full out doing around 60-70kph. The rearender threw my car across the intersection, I was lucky not to hit anyone else or be hit.
I walked out of the car, but had some bad back issues later (and still to some extent to this day). She was busy dialing her cell phone, one hand and both eyes were completely off the road for the time it took her to dial the number a few times (screwed up the digits or something). So was she impaired more than she would have been had she been drunk? At least equally, I'd say.
Probably because I don't want to be carrying around 40 of them to equal the space on my iPod, and then have to swap them out all the time. Also, with my iPod I can shuffle my whole music collection at once.
They're pretty good, yeah. Lots of administrative options, mysql databases, etc. Can have a lot of email accounts too (which means it's a good thing they give you tons of space). I have an online comic, so the bandwidth was the main attractor for me.
I second that. The service has been great so far. My only problems were encountered at the start, there was some pretty serious lag time to get my account set up, apparently they were pretty understaffed at the time. But the true test is whether you need to contact them for support, and for myself I found that once my account was set up I've never had anything to complain about. :) Awesome prices, great service, tons of administrative options. Best bang for the buck out there, imho.
Looks an awful lot like Neocron to me. Looks like Face of Mankind is really "cutting edge".
My girlfriend just bought herself a 12" iBook, and to be honest I was a little skeptical of the thing (seems like the screen would be too small). But the OS and application's use of screen real estate really makes the smaller screen size a complete non-issue. That and the Expose functions really make managing multiple windows and multiple applications a total breeze.
:)
I'm actually considering picking up either the iBook or an iMac, I'm just torn on whether I want to be tethered to my desk or not.
Will the season end with Troi being offered to take the Enterprise for a spin at the helm? :)
Hasn't this already been proven by games like Rez and sites like GGA? :D
They may not be what's driving 100% of hardware sales, but I'm sure the percentage is very significant. One of the reasons I bought an iPod (I'm a PC user) is because of the easy to use software and online store. I also like Apple's philosophy behind the whole experience, buying the music and getting it on the device is as easy as a mouse click and putting the hardware in the dock. Of course, I'm not saying others aren't as easy to use, I'm just saying for me the iPod+iTunes gave me the best combination of hardware and software, so in that way the music store did drive my purchase.
:-)
I also know I can't be alone in this, given the number of purchased music on iTunes.
And how many text editors come with the average distro of Linux? How many browsers are available? For that matter, how many different non-MS blogging products are out there? If you're going to bash Microsoft for this, then bash MovableType, or Mozilla for daring to develop a competing web browser.