A few have touched upon the real issue here ever so slightly, but miss the point by a mile:
The huge rise in tech is a good thing, and won't lead to ruin. Why?
Because now (or at least in a couple years time)the tech is at a level where you can make stuff as good as it needs to be.
Think about that sentence. Not everything needs a zillion poly's. Less can be more: stylisation leads to differentiation; sometimes a character looks just as good with fewer polies/shaders etc than with twice that amount.
Graphics have become so good and advanced that we have reached a point of diminishing returns on the realistic side, too. Shit, you can hardly spot the difference between a game model of 500.000 polygons and one with 1.000.000 poly's on todays computer screens.
Does anyone else realise this? We are reaching the point where technology doesn't make stuff cooler anymore...only cool art direction and game logic will, because that is what the player sees and plays with.
Sure, tech will get better, and we will see marginal gains because of that, but tech driven advances in 'coolness' are over...the jump from PSX to PS2 shows that very well: nes was cool, but the gfx of a snes blew it away. Then the psx came out, and blew the 16 bit era away; psx games just looked cooler. But did the ps2 give us an equal jump in coolness? No. Sure, things looked better, but not in the wayyou got a buzz from the difference between a 16 bit console and the 32 bit ones. This argument goes for game engines too, only consoles are easier to spot the generation gap with.
Anyway, this will lead to an unfettering of the imagination: it doesn't really matter what you make, as long as it's cool. Sometimes big budget (and the art direction, production quality etc that entails) is cool, sometimes a simple budget suffices. As mentioned before, the movie analogy shows what's going to happen: there will be Lord of the Rings and Clerks. And both are cool, not because of their budget, but because of what they are.
-What in hells bells makes you think a skilled sculptor is cheaper than a CGI modeler? They're gonna cost about the same...talent is always expensive.
-even photographs (actually, especially photos) need to be touched up. Just ask the guys who did Max Payne how much using photosourcing is a pain in the arse.
-scanning is not something which gives you a good game model. It needs to be cleaned up (a hell of a lot), unneccessary polys need to be removed and others need to be added...and the model still needs to be made fit to work with the game. The process works great for ovies, 'cos they can deal with the rendertimes, but games have to be realtime.
As for your main intent, you are correct; the whole games process needs to be higher level...and that includes outsourcing as well as higherlevel logic for for example dialog trees (with their reactions to different types of people), filling up a city with people and content (auto-content generation) as well as AI and many other aspects. But it's gonna take a while before thjose tools are developed and ready for implementation.
Spoken like someone who hasn't really looked into the real effort involved in modeling, texturing and animation. To do those things well takes skill and talent, even when shooting for something not entirely up to AAA title standards. Even worse, your stuff has to at least hit a minimum standard of quality and style to be accepted/bearable, no matter how fun your game logic is.
Not to put you down, but considering the time it takes to model, skin and animate just one model means you won't have time to program.
And if you do want to do everythiong yourself, I just hope you have five years (minimum!) to spare in which to code everything, learn how to model/skin/animate/make music and sound and then apply those skills to your project.
No mattre what people say about gameplay (and they are right when they say that without it your tittle goes bust), gameplay without a modicum of style/quality in the artwork just doesn't cut it anymore. Nethack just isn't as fun as it used to be; without the new frontends I doubt that many would still be playing it.
I think the whole "computer-learns-human style of doing things vs. human-learns-computer" thing quite funny; I mean, we have to learn how to write, don't we? Everything (ok, not everything) a human does is taught...so wtf is this debate about? Just learn a differnt way to adapt to computers...or just learn how to write graffitti style (or whatever) from the start! Who cares, as long as everyone learns that way and it is an accepted standard of doing things.
You, dear sir, are bloody mad. I expect an ATC to direct the air-traffic in his sector, be damn good at that, and not a single thing else.
And seeing as ATC is pretty fault in-tolerant, whilst in hardware/software design making a mistake just means you're not finished with your task yet, I damn well hope the ATC knows absolute bupkiss about software, excepting the UI.
Just to clear things up: the BBC had a source that said the UK government was lying about the evidence in the Iraq affair. The government denied it and tried to discredit the source, trying to get the bbc to give their source up. The bbc refused to give up their source, upon which/the government allowed other news people to guess the identity of the source, and they (gov.) would only respond if the news people guesses right!/ Aftyer a bit, of course, the news media guessed right, and it turned out not only was the BBC's source quite highly placed, but he was also right. Then, apparently, due to all the media attention and public shit going on, the BBC's source commited suicide. The BBC handled this utterly correctly, and remembered one of the most important things in reporting; always protect your source; never give him up...and they didn't; the government let him out to dry.
Infinity is not a number; it's not a value...it's a concept. Go look on kuroshin and do a search for infinity...they had a article which explained it pretty decently.
Disc's of tron...man, I loved that. I think the quality you ascribe to it also applies to street fighter 2, windjammers (neogeo game), speedball 2 and many others. It's a question of a few simple rules whose interaction leads up to a system with more complexity than the sum of it's parts, yet small enough to be encompassed and mastered from basic principles.
nihilistic critisism is a form of subjective reasoning (albeit somewhat fatalistic). Not only that, after that statement you make an assertion...an assertion utterly devoid of reasoning (subjective or objective), but just a statement out of the blue.
You didn't learn how to translate the genetic code in highschool; all you learnt was about adenine, guanine, cytocyne and tauine...you might even know the difference between RNA and DNA and the barest of what happens when the latter gets transcibed. But I think the only sequence you might have learnt is the stop codon, and you'll have forgotten that one by now too.
Trust me, you know as little about genetics as you know how engines work when you just see a diagram...the real work is taught at universities.
Anyway, how's your geographical knowledge? What about your algebra and calculus? Hell, seeing how many people can't read or write after they went to school (in the US) shows me that the US school system is being dumbed down...as is the proliferation of A's (just because a B would be too low for colleges etc). The american school system lets two A grade students differ way too much in their levels of education...which is a sign of a broken system.
Cute, but a gauss-curve (or a bell curve for those of the dumbed down genereation;) ) of intelligence (NOT IQ!) over population will show you that more than two thirds to three quarters of the population is just not smart...no matter the distribution.
I take it the whole setup was these 8 servers with the gamers connecting to them through ethernet? Or did they remotely connect?
Also, how are the bots handles? If they move to another sector, is the AI handed off to that server too? Or is that what's being re-written in the bot code?
You can't be happy with yourself when you're dead.
Anyway, I'd say someone who wears one of these is more happy with themselves then you are: they accept their condition and strive to overcome it. It is one thing to be at peace with the concept of death and another thing entirely to be able to live longer and better (ie get around, in this case) and then say 'fuck it, I wanna be dead' (which is what you're advertising).
What, you don't think the military has it's eyes on this? Bet you the americans are going nuts now, seeing this; their exoskeleton research is only in the think-tank stages (go google) fudging about over possible power sources etc...the japanese now have a fully functional prototype (albeit with a weak power source).
Just imagine this thing over dimensioned 50x with kevlar plating and a howitzer...mobile personal infantary, here we are.
Yup...using what's called a messe-sensor (in german, at least, if I remember correctly). They use 'em now in factories on lifting equipment; you push/pull on the armgrip sensor, and the lifting machinery allows you to lift as many tons as it's certified for with you handling it as if it where light as a feather.
I saw this tech demonstrated to me in the factory which developed the fitting machinery for the doors to the Audi TT...which was cool, because at that time, no-one knew the Audi TT existed:)
Anyway, this tech is real responsive...but that's not so strange considering it takes measurements a hundred times a second, at least. The time delay for swithcing directions is effectively zero.
Usually I'm not at all a stickler for semantics, but in this case I definitely think the story submitter should have used 'based on a story by', instead of 'written by'.
Not only is it the first correct and the second just plain wrong, but it also confeys much more info to someone reading it who is out of the loop. The difference between something based on a book and 'worked over' by a dozen screenwriters and an author (competently) writing the screenplay makes a huge difference.
Well, in a company you'd just have a central server...just like IM is done if implemented properly (you don't want your internal comms to travel around for the whole net to see). But for non-conference calls, you just set up an IP to IP connection. No NAT problems.
For gaming conference calls, everyone would have to run both a client and server...but with modern gsm compression (which works well over even a 56k6 modem! You wouldn't want to play a game at the same time with such a connection though) and the low footprint (and the huge amounts of ram found in pc's nowadays) of that client and server (just look at what can be used right now...tiny!), the only remaining problem is latency...which people can live with very well (just ask people in developing countries...voice over pc is big there as it costs less than telephone). As for NAT issues when gaming...wouldn't you have those anyway?
Anyway, the point is that thanks to the power of modern pc's and broadband, I don't think the hardware is the limitation; the voice software can run without making the rest of the system significantly slower or breaking the bandwidth barrier. It'll have to be budgetted in during game development, but it'll run fine alongside office programs.
Not only that, but right now it's perfectly feasable to use something like Roger Wilco to do this (not optimal, not always usefull...but then again, IM and e-mail are only suitable for certain situations too).
Slashdot Mirror
I take it your assuming those who have disabled the messenger service are smart enough not to have let blaster in?
A few have touched upon the real issue here ever so slightly, but miss the point by a mile:
The huge rise in tech is a good thing, and won't lead to ruin. Why?
Because now (or at least in a couple years time)the tech is at a level where you can make stuff as good as it needs to be.
Think about that sentence. Not everything needs a zillion poly's. Less can be more: stylisation leads to differentiation; sometimes a character looks just as good with fewer polies/shaders etc than with twice that amount.
Graphics have become so good and advanced that we have reached a point of diminishing returns on the realistic side, too. Shit, you can hardly spot the difference between a game model of 500.000 polygons and one with 1.000.000 poly's on todays computer screens.
Does anyone else realise this? We are reaching the point where technology doesn't make stuff cooler anymore...only cool art direction and game logic will, because that is what the player sees and plays with.
Sure, tech will get better, and we will see marginal gains because of that, but tech driven advances in 'coolness' are over...the jump from PSX to PS2 shows that very well: nes was cool, but the gfx of a snes blew it away. Then the psx came out, and blew the 16 bit era away; psx games just looked cooler. But did the ps2 give us an equal jump in coolness? No. Sure, things looked better, but not in the wayyou got a buzz from the difference between a 16 bit console and the 32 bit ones. This argument goes for game engines too, only consoles are easier to spot the generation gap with.
Anyway, this will lead to an unfettering of the imagination: it doesn't really matter what you make, as long as it's cool. Sometimes big budget (and the art direction, production quality etc that entails) is cool, sometimes a simple budget suffices. As mentioned before, the movie analogy shows what's going to happen: there will be Lord of the Rings and Clerks. And both are cool, not because of their budget, but because of what they are.
Acouple of points:
-What in hells bells makes you think a skilled sculptor is cheaper than a CGI modeler? They're gonna cost about the same...talent is always expensive.
-even photographs (actually, especially photos) need to be touched up. Just ask the guys who did Max Payne how much using photosourcing is a pain in the arse.
-scanning is not something which gives you a good game model. It needs to be cleaned up (a hell of a lot), unneccessary polys need to be removed and others need to be added...and the model still needs to be made fit to work with the game. The process works great for ovies, 'cos they can deal with the rendertimes, but games have to be realtime.
As for your main intent, you are correct; the whole games process needs to be higher level...and that includes outsourcing as well as higherlevel logic for for example dialog trees (with their reactions to different types of people), filling up a city with people and content (auto-content generation) as well as AI and many other aspects. But it's gonna take a while before thjose tools are developed and ready for implementation.
Uh...I believe that Rockstar games used the Renderware engine to make GTA3...which AFAIK doesn't use Havok, but it's own proprietary physics module.
Spoken like someone who hasn't really looked into the real effort involved in modeling, texturing and animation.
To do those things well takes skill and talent, even when shooting for something not entirely up to AAA title standards. Even worse, your stuff has to at least hit a minimum standard of quality and style to be accepted/bearable, no matter how fun your game logic is.
Not to put you down, but considering the time it takes to model, skin and animate just one model means you won't have time to program.
And if you do want to do everythiong yourself, I just hope you have five years (minimum!) to spare in which to code everything, learn how to model/skin/animate/make music and sound and then apply those skills to your project.
No mattre what people say about gameplay (and they are right when they say that without it your tittle goes bust), gameplay without a modicum of style/quality in the artwork just doesn't cut it anymore. Nethack just isn't as fun as it used to be; without the new frontends I doubt that many would still be playing it.
I think the whole "computer-learns-human style of doing things vs. human-learns-computer" thing quite funny; I mean, we have to learn how to write, don't we?
Everything (ok, not everything) a human does is taught...so wtf is this debate about? Just learn a differnt way to adapt to computers...or just learn how to write graffitti style (or whatever) from the start! Who cares, as long as everyone learns that way and it is an accepted standard of doing things.
Do you happen to use a palmpilot?
You, dear sir, are bloody mad. I expect an ATC to direct the air-traffic in his sector, be damn good at that, and not a single thing else.
And seeing as ATC is pretty fault in-tolerant, whilst in hardware/software design making a mistake just means you're not finished with your task yet, I damn well hope the ATC knows absolute bupkiss about software, excepting the UI.
RE: your sig; I think Syd would be pleased...or at least put a smile on his face :)
Just to clear things up: the BBC had a source that said the UK government was lying about the evidence in the Iraq affair. The government denied it and tried to discredit the source, trying to get the bbc to give their source up. The bbc refused to give up their source, upon which /the government allowed other news people to guess the identity of the source, and they (gov.) would only respond if the news people guesses right!/
Aftyer a bit, of course, the news media guessed right, and it turned out not only was the BBC's source quite highly placed, but he was also right. Then, apparently, due to all the media attention and public shit going on, the BBC's source commited suicide.
The BBC handled this utterly correctly, and remembered one of the most important things in reporting; always protect your source; never give him up...and they didn't; the government let him out to dry.
Infinity is not a number; it's not a value...it's a concept. Go look on kuroshin and do a search for infinity...they had a article which explained it pretty decently.
Disc's of tron...man, I loved that. I think the quality you ascribe to it also applies to street fighter 2, windjammers (neogeo game), speedball 2 and many others.
It's a question of a few simple rules whose interaction leads up to a system with more complexity than the sum of it's parts, yet small enough to be encompassed and mastered from basic principles.
nihilistic critisism is a form of subjective reasoning (albeit somewhat fatalistic). Not only that, after that statement you make an assertion...an assertion utterly devoid of reasoning (subjective or objective), but just a statement out of the blue.
You didn't learn how to translate the genetic code in highschool; all you learnt was about adenine, guanine, cytocyne and tauine...you might even know the difference between RNA and DNA and the barest of what happens when the latter gets transcibed. But I think the only sequence you might have learnt is the stop codon, and you'll have forgotten that one by now too.
Trust me, you know as little about genetics as you know how engines work when you just see a diagram...the real work is taught at universities.
Anyway, how's your geographical knowledge? What about your algebra and calculus? Hell, seeing how many people can't read or write after they went to school (in the US) shows me that the US school system is being dumbed down...as is the proliferation of A's (just because a B would be too low for colleges etc). The american school system lets two A grade students differ way too much in their levels of education...which is a sign of a broken system.
Cute, but a gauss-curve (or a bell curve for those of the dumbed down genereation ;) ) of intelligence (NOT IQ!) over population will show you that more than two thirds to three quarters of the population is just not smart...no matter the distribution.
I take it the whole setup was these 8 servers with the gamers connecting to them through ethernet? Or did they remotely connect?
Also, how are the bots handles? If they move to another sector, is the AI handed off to that server too? Or is that what's being re-written in the bot code?
You can't be happy with yourself when you're dead.
Anyway, I'd say someone who wears one of these is more happy with themselves then you are: they accept their condition and strive to overcome it. It is one thing to be at peace with the concept of death and another thing entirely to be able to live longer and better (ie get around, in this case) and then say 'fuck it, I wanna be dead' (which is what you're advertising).
RTFA: the system has all that you're describing.
What, you don't think the military has it's eyes on this? Bet you the americans are going nuts now, seeing this; their exoskeleton research is only in the think-tank stages (go google) fudging about over possible power sources etc...the japanese now have a fully functional prototype (albeit with a weak power source).
Just imagine this thing over dimensioned 50x with kevlar plating and a howitzer...mobile personal infantary, here we are.
Yup...using what's called a messe-sensor (in german, at least, if I remember correctly). They use 'em now in factories on lifting equipment; you push/pull on the armgrip sensor, and the lifting machinery allows you to lift as many tons as it's certified for with you handling it as if it where light as a feather.
:)
I saw this tech demonstrated to me in the factory which developed the fitting machinery for the doors to the Audi TT...which was cool, because at that time, no-one knew the Audi TT existed
Anyway, this tech is real responsive...but that's not so strange considering it takes measurements a hundred times a second, at least. The time delay for swithcing directions is effectively zero.
I'd say David Kronenberg would also have a good chance of making good effort.
Usually I'm not at all a stickler for semantics, but in this case I definitely think the story submitter should have used 'based on a story by', instead of 'written by'.
Not only is it the first correct and the second just plain wrong, but it also confeys much more info to someone reading it who is out of the loop. The difference between something based on a book and 'worked over' by a dozen screenwriters and an author (competently) writing the screenplay makes a huge difference.
Well, in a company you'd just have a central server...just like IM is done if implemented properly (you don't want your internal comms to travel around for the whole net to see). But for non-conference calls, you just set up an IP to IP connection. No NAT problems.
For gaming conference calls, everyone would have to run both a client and server...but with modern gsm compression (which works well over even a 56k6 modem! You wouldn't want to play a game at the same time with such a connection though) and the low footprint (and the huge amounts of ram found in pc's nowadays) of that client and server (just look at what can be used right now...tiny!), the only remaining problem is latency...which people can live with very well (just ask people in developing countries...voice over pc is big there as it costs less than telephone). As for NAT issues when gaming...wouldn't you have those anyway?
Anyway, the point is that thanks to the power of modern pc's and broadband, I don't think the hardware is the limitation; the voice software can run without making the rest of the system significantly slower or breaking the bandwidth barrier. It'll have to be budgetted in during game development, but it'll run fine alongside office programs.
Not only that, but right now it's perfectly feasable to use something like Roger Wilco to do this (not optimal, not always usefull...but then again, IM and e-mail are only suitable for certain situations too).
Yeah but, judging by some of the comments in response to the article, social interaction can be kicked aswell :)
Good point...in which case you can join me in the wait for e-ink to be incorporated (not oled, e-ink; much less power consuming) :)