The changes in Vista completely bypass any sound card's hardware acceleration. The only way to use it is to use the OpenAL API instead of Direct Sound or other default Windows APIs. Since many games already use OpenAL, I don't see this as a big issue. Most people who buy just because the box says "great sound" won't hear the difference (although they might think they do) and those who actually care about this will make sure they play OpenAL enabled titles.
Indeed, the only meaninful use for an archive of losslessly compressed (or uncompressed) music is for reselling it. Otherwise it's a waste of disk space, waste of time converting them AGAIN if you want to give someone with an iPod a copy and a waste of time even thinking about it. If you want this archive for your listening pleasure only, go with VBR MP3s. They will usually have an average bitrate of around 200kbps so you can fit many times more on a single harddrive.
While it's true that most businesses should have upgraded to 1.5 a long time ago, that's just the server side. Most Mac computers still run Java 1.4; I develop Java games for PC and Mac and I need them to run on 1.4.
Retroweaver is a great tool that allows me to use the language features of Java 1.5. I miss the improved 1.5 standard classes, ie. the improved string manipulation (String.format() with printf formatting for instance). At least I get a warning from Retroweaver..
In every game there should be a five second goal, a 30 second goal, a 10 minute goal and a 5 hour goal (actual times may vary of course):
5 seconds - see what's behind next corner, shoot an enemy. 30 seconds - get to next floor/building, find key, make something explode, see nice scenery. 10 minutes - get new weapon, encounter new enemy, finish a level. 5 hours - finish the game.
As long as the goals and rewards are enticing enough, it's all fine.
Many studios still develop their engines and tools themselves, they even start from scratch with each game. Artists don't have experience with the tools, there's no proper documentation, everything is unstable, things often have to be redone to work with new technology. It's ridiculous if you look at it from a distance.
Using licensed technology is a way out, but it forces you to do things in a certain way that may influence the game in many ways you don't expect.
Solid reusable tools are going to be more and more important. Scripting language support is also good but often a bit overrated; proprietary languages often suck. Using a single language such as Java or C# for everything is better. The performance hit is negligible and all the trouble with constantly keeping the interfaces up to date is gone.
Development practices in the gaming industry are still very primitive compared to, say, web development. It is only a matter of time and some more failed megalomanic projects before this improves.
> Oh you magnificent god of a man, us mere
> mortals tremble at the awesome power of you
> auditory range
Actually I'm quite glad I don't hear the difference. Sometimes I don't even get to hear the original CD.
I think most of the quality issues is just crap.
Unless you are in the studio while the music is being recorded (of course it would also depend on your position in the studio) or unless you _ARE_ the instruments themselves, you never get to hear the original music anyway, so why try?
> The reference encoder, while not perfect, is
> certainly not bad.
LAME is much closer to perfectness in MP3 encoding than this encoder is in Ogg encoding.
> More importantly, Ogg Vorbis is free of any
> patents or any other restrictions.
This doesn't matter to me at all. I don't really feel restricted to copy CD's, which is the one thing that should stop me doing anything with digital music, as I don't make my own music. I know I have the right (blah blah) to make backups (blah blah..)
> better than MP3's of the same bitrate
You are using low bitrate. Use 256kbps and you get perfect CD-quality audio from both codecs.
Unless, of course, you want to save space. Disk space is the only valid reason I see for using anything else than MP3.
I don't need to..
I can't !
20GiB is not enough - maybe 200GiB would do NOW,
but what about next month? I don't even have time to listen all new music - this thing would not solve that problem, because the new stuff wouldn't fit on it.
Still waiting for the killer 1TiB player that is as small as a MD player, is unbreakable and has batteries that last at least 48 hours...
How much effort is needed to get music from Napster? I think it's still somewhere between turning a radio on and buying a CD. That's not going to change.
All music videos should be available for download for free in as many formats as possible. They are meant to promote the albums, right?
I have Koss R35/S headphones and I'm happy with them. Sound good, even when the volume is [very] high. Haven't heard the famous Porta Pro headphones, but I'm satisfied with what I have now. Good headphones can make even a poor stereo/desktop speaker sound VERY good - for those who haven't tried it: go and try it now.
It's much better to spend $80-100 for kick-ass
headphones than for anything else between the source [be it mp3, ogg or audio CD or whatever]and your ears.
As for ogg - I'm all for it. As soon as everyone else has software supporting installed it by default in their xmms/winamp/media player.
For now, I stick with 320kbps mp3's. Try beat that in quality in a properly conducted listener test! Even the damn xing will not be distinguishable.
That's exactly what the Skinny Puppy video "Warlock" consists of - censored parts of gory movies.
It's funny to watch.
Re:Not when they are an anti-competitive monopoly.
on
MSN Forces Outlook POP
·
· Score: 1
All this happening is also a big opportunity to start providing the same services without the limitations. Or maybe limited to a different group of users.
I'm not an american, so I don't know how much control over everything the ISPs in USA have, but here in Europe, it's not a big deal for me.
What do I need? Dialup connection, email.
Dialup is for free, I can even avoid spam. Or I can pay for it and get better reliability.
Email? For free everywhere or for little money without most of the spam (so far, knock on wood).
After all, if you don't like it, don't use it. If MS thinks it's better not to let you use it's services until you pay for their OS, it's one less spam target for them.
>> evaluate any results ? What are you talking about? What good experiences? The only thing I want to ever experience with my HDD is not having trouble with it. It's something that I expect to work. All the time. It's not like buying a lottery ticket or is it?
Slashdot Mirror
The changes in Vista completely bypass any sound card's hardware acceleration. The only way to use it is to use the OpenAL API instead of Direct Sound or other default Windows APIs. Since many games already use OpenAL, I don't see this as a big issue.
Most people who buy just because the box says "great sound" won't hear the difference (although they might think they do) and those who actually care about this will make sure they play OpenAL enabled titles.
Indeed, the only meaninful use for an archive of losslessly compressed (or uncompressed) music is for reselling it. Otherwise it's a waste of disk space, waste of time converting them AGAIN if you want to give someone with an iPod a copy and a waste of time even thinking about it.
If you want this archive for your listening pleasure only, go with VBR MP3s. They will usually have an average bitrate of around 200kbps so you can fit many times more on a single harddrive.
I believe pong was included in Doom as an easter egg, so they got that covered.
While it's true that most businesses should have upgraded to 1.5 a long time ago, that's just the server side. Most Mac computers still run Java 1.4; I develop Java games for PC and Mac and I need them to run on 1.4.
Retroweaver is a great tool that allows me to use the language features of Java 1.5. I miss the improved 1.5 standard classes, ie. the improved string manipulation (String.format() with printf formatting for instance). At least I get a warning from Retroweaver..
The article doesn't really say anything interesting. The authors merely express their wishes as players. As an inspiration for game designers, this is more to the point: http://www.theinspiracy.com/Current%20Rules%20Mast er%20List.htm
And here's my favorite game design rule:
In every game there should be a five second goal, a 30 second goal, a 10 minute goal and a 5 hour goal (actual times may vary of course):
5 seconds - see what's behind next corner, shoot an enemy.
30 seconds - get to next floor/building, find key, make something explode, see nice scenery.
10 minutes - get new weapon, encounter new enemy, finish a level.
5 hours - finish the game.
As long as the goals and rewards are enticing enough, it's all fine.
Many studios still develop their engines and tools themselves, they even start from scratch with each game. Artists don't have experience with the tools, there's no proper documentation, everything is unstable, things often have to be redone to work with new technology. It's ridiculous if you look at it from a distance.
Using licensed technology is a way out, but it forces you to do things in a certain way that may influence the game in many ways you don't expect.
Solid reusable tools are going to be more and more important. Scripting language support is also good but often a bit overrated; proprietary languages often suck. Using a single language such as Java or C# for everything is better. The performance hit is negligible and all the trouble with constantly keeping the interfaces up to date is gone.
Development practices in the gaming industry are still very primitive compared to, say, web development. It is only a matter of time and some more failed megalomanic projects before this improves.
Copernic Desktop Search http://www.copernic.com/ is also free and pretty good too.
"By giving your company the tools it needs to manage data effectivly" [Datadino.com front page]
What you think makes a correctly spelled word will in fact be very different from what your spellchecker thinks is a word, provided you use one.
..better than getting paid for playing video games:
Getting laid for playing video games.
From the FAQ:
berlin is not 5 years old. the berlin project formally started around 1997 (making us 3.5 years old)
*ahem* Somebody fix it, it's a wiki web after all. I'm too lazy.
There is at least one more language that I think is 100% secure and it is called Brainfuck.
- simple language
- easy to implement VM for portability
- small VM footprint allowing use on portable devices
http://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/bf/
> Oh you magnificent god of a man, us mere
> mortals tremble at the awesome power of you
> auditory range
Actually I'm quite glad I don't hear the difference. Sometimes I don't even get to hear the original CD.
I think most of the quality issues is just crap.
Unless you are in the studio while the music is being recorded (of course it would also depend on your position in the studio) or unless you _ARE_ the instruments themselves, you never get to hear the original music anyway, so why try?
> The reference encoder, while not perfect, is
> certainly not bad.
LAME is much closer to perfectness in MP3 encoding than this encoder is in Ogg encoding.
> More importantly, Ogg Vorbis is free of any
> patents or any other restrictions.
This doesn't matter to me at all. I don't really feel restricted to copy CD's, which is the one thing that should stop me doing anything with digital music, as I don't make my own music. I know I have the right (blah blah) to make backups (blah blah..)
> better than MP3's of the same bitrate
You are using low bitrate. Use 256kbps and you get perfect CD-quality audio from both codecs.
Unless, of course, you want to save space. Disk space is the only valid reason I see for using anything else than MP3.
Does it run doom in 200 instances simultaneously?
Maybe somebody could connect terminals to it and
have a LAN party without the LAN.
> I don't need to put ALL of my MP3s on it...
I don't need to..
I can't !
20GiB is not enough - maybe 200GiB would do NOW,
but what about next month? I don't even have time to listen all new music - this thing would not solve that problem, because the new stuff wouldn't fit on it.
Still waiting for the killer 1TiB player that is as small as a MD player, is unbreakable and has batteries that last at least 48 hours...
..and costs $50, of course
How much effort is needed to get music from Napster? I think it's still somewhere between turning a radio on and buying a CD. That's not going to change.
All music videos should be available for download for free in as many formats as possible. They are meant to promote the albums, right?
I have Koss R35/S headphones and I'm happy with them. Sound good, even when the volume is [very] high. Haven't heard the famous Porta Pro headphones, but I'm satisfied with what I have now. Good headphones can make even a poor stereo/desktop speaker sound VERY good - for those who haven't tried it: go and try it now.
It's much better to spend $80-100 for kick-ass
headphones than for anything else between the source [be it mp3, ogg or audio CD or whatever]and your ears.
As for ogg - I'm all for it. As soon as everyone else has software supporting installed it by default in their xmms/winamp/media player.
For now, I stick with 320kbps mp3's. Try beat that in quality in a properly conducted listener test! Even the damn xing will not be distinguishable.
in Czech, the word "lotr" means "rogue" and "fotr" means "dad".
so the first movie should be called "bad dad"
Digital audio streaming is good, but why not record the analog broadcast and digitize it later?
Anyway, I have this in MP3 already - it's over 400 megs - I'm not sure what bitrate it is, but the quality is pretty good.
VBR would have been a better choice for speech though (this is fixed bitrate). So if BBC is testing OGG/Vorbis, it is a good thing.
How much? As much as my music collection requires. And /home, of course, so that would be 200GB for the music and, say, 10GB for other data.
That's exactly what the Skinny Puppy video "Warlock" consists of - censored parts of gory movies.
It's funny to watch.
All this happening is also a big opportunity to start providing the same services without the limitations. Or maybe limited to a different group of users.
I'm not an american, so I don't know how much control over everything the ISPs in USA have, but here in Europe, it's not a big deal for me.
What do I need? Dialup connection, email.
Dialup is for free, I can even avoid spam. Or I can pay for it and get better reliability.
Email? For free everywhere or for little money without most of the spam (so far, knock on wood).
After all, if you don't like it, don't use it. If MS thinks it's better not to let you use it's services until you pay for their OS, it's one less spam target for them.
The only way to _seriously_ trade music is: MAIL.
Arrange the trade online and then send CD-R's.
Using online mp3 archives is like reading books from the eye-level bookshelves.
http://www.mp3th.net
http://www.sweb.cz/yerbouti
>> evaluate any results ? What are you talking about? What good experiences? The only thing I want to ever experience with my HDD is not having trouble with it. It's something that I expect to work. All the time. It's not like buying a lottery ticket or is it?
But once you get a free program, nobody can come and say "give it back" (delete it now I command you) - you can keep using it as long as you want to.