1) PC's are more ubiquitous than consoles. A family with no older children is likely to not have a console for themselves, but will have a PC (note that this likely won't be a proper "gaming" PC, but edutainment games generally don't take much to run).
2) PC's are still easier to develop for. Every programmer has experience on them, the SDK's are generally free or at least relatively cheap, and your test hardware can be anything from your own dev machine to the old dell your girlfriend used to use. Edutainment games are a relatively low budget business - the cost for the console SDK's is designed largely around keeping low-budget and hobbyist programmers away from them.
Combine those two, and you've got a PC-based gaming market for small children.
I said AND at a increased priority. If you are running in full screen, developers often assume you care more about game performance than you do about the performance of your system in general. So they will SEPARATELY set the process at a higher priority. This is obviously a per-game setting that the developer can choose to do or not. It has nothing to do with "full screen mode" specifically, but is often toggled along with fullscreen.
And yes, it can run faster when you go to full screen depending on what the current bottleneck is, as the system is no longer compositing the game into a window or redrawing the whole rest of your desktop. Moreover, when running in fullscreen "game mode" the game can change the resolution of the full screen to something that will run faster. If it has to switch resolution when you alt tab out, that will slow donw the switch as well.
So no, I'm not talking out of my ass - I actually AM a game developer, and our program does precisely these things.
Problem is that the game itself takes a performance hit when you do that.
A lot of games are running in a special full screen mode and at an increased process priority - this gives the game a larger than normal portion of your CPU time, increasing your frame rate. Running it in windowed mode makes it behave a little more like a normal app, making your web browsing and switching faster but slowing your frame rate.
Terrorism is a minor danger to individual Americans, but it isn't an invasion, they aren't going to take over NYC, or anything like that. They've managed one successful strike that did about as much damage as a single bomber run using conventional weapons from a real country would have done.
That's an act of war that demands retribution, but it isn't a legitimate *threat* to our way of life except for how its political impact on our country.
I saw that air demonstration. Really a beautiful day, and watching the F-22 fly... thing accelerates straight up in the air, then just starts turning completely around in place:) Truly an amazing aircraft.
But the thing is we aren't *really* threatened by Afghanistan. Putting more tech into saving soldiers lives there is a good thing, but it isn't really going to effect the overall safety of America the country. The only countries big and powerful enough to really do that are the ones we'll need an F-22 to be able to compete with.
Wow, I hadn't realized that Jones had left. I knew that Seropian took off after the release of Halo 2, but I thought that Jones was still there.
Makes me sad - he's always been one to stay out of the spotlight, but personally I'd put him up there with Carmack in terms of better minds in the industry, if not necessarily as influential.
They no longer own the IP. Although there's always a chance of them buying it back from Take Two (since it doesn't seem as though they're really caring that much about it).
I'm curious what size of leak they're targetting here.
I've heard an interesting suggestion for an automatic leak plugging system - floating, easily popped bags of quick drying sealent. Any leak will create air currents that will suck the bags into the holes, where they pop and seal the whole.
This of course ignores all sorts of potential problems (holes in areas obscured by cables/ductwork, for one thing) but I thought it was neat anyway:)
I would, however, classify them as "comparable behavior" - ie., violence against those practicing beliefs that break with their belief system. Try to yell less, heart attacks from stress kill people all the time.
And if you're going to toss around accusations of burning for teaching evolution, you might want to actually cite a few references instead of just flying off the handle at anyone who argues with you. Not saying you aren't right, just that you're an asshole.
Science is fundamentally an idea-system that has grown around a sort of skeleton wire frame--the scientific method. The deliberately cultivated scientific habit of mind is mandatory for successful work in all science and related fields where critical judgment is essential. Scientific progress constantly demands that facts and hypotheses be checked and rechecked, and is unmindful of authority. But there lies the problem: The scientific method is alien to traditional, unreformed religious thought. Only the exceptional individual is able to exercise such a mindset in a society in which absolute authority comes from above, questions are asked only with difficulty, the penalties for disbelief are severe, the intellect is denigrated, and a certainty exists that all answers are already known and must only be discovered.
That describes the fundamentalist Christian-dominated home town so well I want to hug this guy.
The problem with fundamentalists is that they value the knowledge and beliefs of people from thousands of years ago over any progress we have made since.
I've heard plenty of people say they hate working in DirectX as well. Looking at source code examples in both, my impression has been:
1) DirectX does a bit more for you (built in vector and matrix classes, for example) 2) It looks butt fugly - but maybe that's just me, I hate hungarian and microsoft's naming conventions in general:)
Really, so little of a game is the graphics code, though, and any decent game dev is going to be using their own wrapper classes anyway.
The problems are more that you can get access to new features earlier in DirectX. It has been moving faster in general - you can get the same features in OpenGL as quickly, but you have to use an extension.
That said - since 2.0 opengl actually has a pretty complete set of functions. Render to texture, a nicer shading language - all pretty nicely supported, you just have to toss a quick C++ wrapper around their api if you want it to be pretty and you're good to go.
The real problem with Apple is driver support.
Get this straight everyone - Microsoft only ships OpenGL 1.0 with their systems, they have for a long time. ATI and NVIDIA write their own versions of the openGL spec for their drivers, which all have fun little issues. But on windows they release those at their own pace. On mac OS it all gets rolled into a big driver update once in a blue moon. And neither of those companies puts as much time into those drivers as they do for their windows side.
The thing that Valve is probably complaining about are probably some bugs in the Opengl or audio drivers (btw, while Core Audio seems nice, OpenAl is a buggy piece, and that's more what you'd be likely using for 3d audio support, if there are even any mac cards that support 3d audio right now, I know there weren't back when I was gaming on it) that apple has taken a really long time fixing and were core to some feature they wanted.
Or maybe apple just wanted them to buy their dev systems instead of handing them out as encouragement... who knows... or, I know it was only recently that apple introduced an OpenGL debugger. The good ones on windows are all third party, but apparently Gremedy didn't wnat to bring theirs over to mac or something.
Basically, there are a lot of things that a developer does depend on to make the games run. Just OpenGL versus DirectX is a small part of it, and working with docs and drivers that haven't been updated in a long time can get really frustrating.
I think the general geek perception is that the hardware reliability is shit, but it completely owns the other consoles when it comes to current game selection.
Whether you like Halo or not, the list of 90% and higher games for 360 is 10x the length of equivalent games on PS3 or Gamecube. Whatever the reasons for that, it is still truth currently.
Of course, I've never seen a college class that could turn an asshole into someone you would want to work with. The only thing that can even mitigate that is good leadership at the current position to keep the asshole in line.
Not that practicing teamwork skill isn't important - but aside from practice in general social manners, the only useful things I can see actually teaching someone are less teamwork and more leadership.
In my experience, the best teams of anything aren't a group of equals - they're a group of people who bought into their leader's ideas and worked to make it better. The old rule about "Design by Committee" exists for a reason.
Good products come from someone with a vision who put together a good team to go make it for him. They get better if the leader guy listens to new ideas occasionally, but he has to be leading or it just becomes disjointed.
Yes, it was a little dumb for her to leave this shirt on when she went to the airport. Just like it's dumb when someone forgets they have a large lock-blade in their back pocket (that they always carry) and get to airport security.
She should have responded to the person asking her about the shirt. But maybe she didn't hear them. Maybe she didn't think she needed to respond?
The item on her shirt does look suspicious if you don't know anything about electronics. It's a reasonable thing to suspect.
A security person who questioned her about it and did not get a response should have called the police. The police should have had their guns ready in case it was a threat. HOWEVER, the moment they actually interviewed the girl and examined her jacket and realized it was NOT a threat, this is where all the problems should have ended.
They should have told her it was stupid to wear this at an airport, apologized for pointing guns at her, and either let her go on her way or at worst question her a bit while they got someone who knew more about electronics to check out her shirt.
No bullshit charges should have been brought. She should not have been held overnight. She should NOT have had her jacket confiscated.
You know, last time I went to the county courthouse I accidentally brought a fairly large pocket knife. What did they do? They put it in a locker for me, had me sign a slip of paper, and gave it back to me when I left.
I don't know why airlines are so fricking special that they get to ignore all human decency and logic in the treatment of these sorts of things.
A city should not get to work itself into a panic by overreacting and then start sending people to jail because they (the city) were idiots.
There were a million programs at my school to attract women to CS - They have their own special program as part of the college, study groups, sorority, scholarships, special counselors, whatever. There were still only ever one or two in a given class.
I don't think any women applied for my current job when it opened.
At my last job, I worked with two women programmers - one was competent and taken completely seriously by the team. The other my supervisor (also a woman) admitted to me was a worse programmer after years of experience than I was after a semester of interning. But even she was taken as seriously as she presented herself.
I'm sure the bias exists in some people.. but for the most part I don't this massive group of women wanting to go into IT and being pushed out of it by chauvinist guys. The schools are practically begging women to sign up.
I see a lot more women who just plain aren't interested in computers and never were. I know one who started in CS but was't really into it, and wanted to hang out with more girls and less nerdy guys (although the same girl married a CS grad - go figure).
And this at a school where the engineering department in general at least has a decent-sized minority of women in it.
I think CS still has a very large "hacker" or "hobbyist" culture associated with it - my wife admits to being intimidated by how much the other freshman knew when she first started - she wasn't sure she belonged not because anyone treated her poorly, but just because they knew so much more than she did at first. Most guys going into CS started building systems when they were in high school. Most girls... never did that.
Actually, "out of the box" codec support is one of my biggest complaints with desktop manufacturers. If they are going to load the thing up with crap, it would be nice if they at least included major common formats:
Quicktime (Including modern codecs like h.264, not just the original sorenson) Windows Media Flash Shockwave DivX/Xvid DVD (MPEG-2 video) MP3 MP4 Realplayer
I want to be able to go to any random video site and watch the fricking movie, not get an error that it couldn't find the proper codec. *I* can find the correct one, but my grandma can't. They're the first things I put on a new system after I've locked down the main security holes.
The reason web video in its current craze looks like crap is because the only player that they can reasonably assume people can figure out how to configure is flash, and flash video current looks like crap at low bitrates. If developers could count on people being able to watch H.264 on youtube things would be so much nicer.
Everywhere I go I have met people that I like in real life and who also play.
Are any of them ever on the same server? No, of course not:(
Of course, supporting the density of 9 million people on a single wow server would both require and allow massive shifts in gameplay. No more grinding thirty mobs at once - you've have to zerg rush a single murloc to get him down, or the world would be completely overrun in murlocs.
Every press release the Russians have ever sent out about these things paints them as the "good guys." We in the western media sphere just haven't been willing to believe them since the end of WW2:)
So do European roaming plans work in the US, or just in the nicely contiguous countries next door? I don't (on most plans) get roaming charges if I go from Ohio to Indiana, which is basically the same distance - cell phones in Europe would be completely impractical if you couldn't roam to other European countries with them.
American phone companies suck, but chalking this up to isolationism is just flamebaiting.
Slashdot Mirror
1) PC's are more ubiquitous than consoles. A family with no older children is likely to not have a console for themselves, but will have a PC (note that this likely won't be a proper "gaming" PC, but edutainment games generally don't take much to run).
2) PC's are still easier to develop for. Every programmer has experience on them, the SDK's are generally free or at least relatively cheap, and your test hardware can be anything from your own dev machine to the old dell your girlfriend used to use. Edutainment games are a relatively low budget business - the cost for the console SDK's is designed largely around keeping low-budget and hobbyist programmers away from them.
Combine those two, and you've got a PC-based gaming market for small children.
I said AND at a increased priority. If you are running in full screen, developers often assume you care more about game performance than you do about the performance of your system in general. So they will SEPARATELY set the process at a higher priority. This is obviously a per-game setting that the developer can choose to do or not. It has nothing to do with "full screen mode" specifically, but is often toggled along with fullscreen.
And yes, it can run faster when you go to full screen depending on what the current bottleneck is, as the system is no longer compositing the game into a window or redrawing the whole rest of your desktop. Moreover, when running in fullscreen "game mode" the game can change the resolution of the full screen to something that will run faster. If it has to switch resolution when you alt tab out, that will slow donw the switch as well.
So no, I'm not talking out of my ass - I actually AM a game developer, and our program does precisely these things.
Problem is that the game itself takes a performance hit when you do that.
A lot of games are running in a special full screen mode and at an increased process priority - this gives the game a larger than normal portion of your CPU time, increasing your frame rate. Running it in windowed mode makes it behave a little more like a normal app, making your web browsing and switching faster but slowing your frame rate.
Terrorism is a minor danger to individual Americans, but it isn't an invasion, they aren't going to take over NYC, or anything like that. They've managed one successful strike that did about as much damage as a single bomber run using conventional weapons from a real country would have done.
That's an act of war that demands retribution, but it isn't a legitimate *threat* to our way of life except for how its political impact on our country.
I saw that air demonstration. Really a beautiful day, and watching the F-22 fly... thing accelerates straight up in the air, then just starts turning completely around in place :) Truly an amazing aircraft.
But the thing is we aren't *really* threatened by Afghanistan. Putting more tech into saving soldiers lives there is a good thing, but it isn't really going to effect the overall safety of America the country. The only countries big and powerful enough to really do that are the ones we'll need an F-22 to be able to compete with.
Wow, I hadn't realized that Jones had left. I knew that Seropian took off after the release of Halo 2, but I thought that Jones was still there.
Makes me sad - he's always been one to stay out of the spotlight, but personally I'd put him up there with Carmack in terms of better minds in the industry, if not necessarily as influential.
They no longer own the IP. Although there's always a chance of them buying it back from Take Two (since it doesn't seem as though they're really caring that much about it).
You're a white supremacist sitting on an all white southern jury in a hate crimes trial for a KKK member. Do you find him guilty?
I'm curious what size of leak they're targetting here.
:)
I've heard an interesting suggestion for an automatic leak plugging system - floating, easily popped bags of quick drying sealent. Any leak will create air currents that will suck the bags into the holes, where they pop and seal the whole.
This of course ignores all sorts of potential problems (holes in areas obscured by cables/ductwork, for one thing) but I thought it was neat anyway
So how I read this is...
If I am using pirated software and want to stop, I can either
1) Buy a legitimate copy of windows, replace my pirated software, and have no one ever know I was being illegal.
2) Buy a legitimate copy of windows, replace my pirated software, and be forced to submit microsoft audits any time they want.
So how big is the discount to make the second option sound better, ever?
I would, however, classify them as "comparable behavior" - ie., violence against those practicing beliefs that break with their belief system. Try to yell less, heart attacks from stress kill people all the time.
And if you're going to toss around accusations of burning for teaching evolution, you might want to actually cite a few references instead of just flying off the handle at anyone who argues with you. Not saying you aren't right, just that you're an asshole.
Abortion clinic bombings.
99% of religious people aren't nuts, but the last 1% makes for some very good headlines.
That describes the fundamentalist Christian-dominated home town so well I want to hug this guy.
The problem with fundamentalists is that they value the knowledge and beliefs of people from thousands of years ago over any progress we have made since.
I've heard plenty of people say they hate working in DirectX as well. Looking at source code examples in both, my impression has been:
:)
1) DirectX does a bit more for you (built in vector and matrix classes, for example)
2) It looks butt fugly - but maybe that's just me, I hate hungarian and microsoft's naming conventions in general
Really, so little of a game is the graphics code, though, and any decent game dev is going to be using their own wrapper classes anyway.
The problems are more that you can get access to new features earlier in DirectX. It has been moving faster in general - you can get the same features in OpenGL as quickly, but you have to use an extension.
That said - since 2.0 opengl actually has a pretty complete set of functions. Render to texture, a nicer shading language - all pretty nicely supported, you just have to toss a quick C++ wrapper around their api if you want it to be pretty and you're good to go.
The real problem with Apple is driver support.
Get this straight everyone - Microsoft only ships OpenGL 1.0 with their systems, they have for a long time. ATI and NVIDIA write their own versions of the openGL spec for their drivers, which all have fun little issues. But on windows they release those at their own pace. On mac OS it all gets rolled into a big driver update once in a blue moon. And neither of those companies puts as much time into those drivers as they do for their windows side.
The thing that Valve is probably complaining about are probably some bugs in the Opengl or audio drivers (btw, while Core Audio seems nice, OpenAl is a buggy piece, and that's more what you'd be likely using for 3d audio support, if there are even any mac cards that support 3d audio right now, I know there weren't back when I was gaming on it) that apple has taken a really long time fixing and were core to some feature they wanted.
Or maybe apple just wanted them to buy their dev systems instead of handing them out as encouragement... who knows... or, I know it was only recently that apple introduced an OpenGL debugger. The good ones on windows are all third party, but apparently Gremedy didn't wnat to bring theirs over to mac or something.
Basically, there are a lot of things that a developer does depend on to make the games run. Just OpenGL versus DirectX is a small part of it, and working with docs and drivers that haven't been updated in a long time can get really frustrating.
I think the general geek perception is that the hardware reliability is shit, but it completely owns the other consoles when it comes to current game selection.
Whether you like Halo or not, the list of 90% and higher games for 360 is 10x the length of equivalent games on PS3 or Gamecube. Whatever the reasons for that, it is still truth currently.
Of course, I've never seen a college class that could turn an asshole into someone you would want to work with. The only thing that can even mitigate that is good leadership at the current position to keep the asshole in line.
Not that practicing teamwork skill isn't important - but aside from practice in general social manners, the only useful things I can see actually teaching someone are less teamwork and more leadership.
In my experience, the best teams of anything aren't a group of equals - they're a group of people who bought into their leader's ideas and worked to make it better. The old rule about "Design by Committee" exists for a reason.
Good products come from someone with a vision who put together a good team to go make it for him. They get better if the leader guy listens to new ideas occasionally, but he has to be leading or it just becomes disjointed.
Yes. Yes. And Yes. It's right there on their website. Some idiot gamesite started that rumor and for some reason it's stick really hard.
I hate to see how polarized this crap gets.
Yes, it was a little dumb for her to leave this shirt on when she went to the airport. Just like it's dumb when someone forgets they have a large lock-blade in their back pocket (that they always carry) and get to airport security.
She should have responded to the person asking her about the shirt. But maybe she didn't hear them. Maybe she didn't think she needed to respond?
The item on her shirt does look suspicious if you don't know anything about electronics. It's a reasonable thing to suspect.
A security person who questioned her about it and did not get a response should have called the police. The police should have had their guns ready in case it was a threat. HOWEVER, the moment they actually interviewed the girl and examined her jacket and realized it was NOT a threat, this is where all the problems should have ended.
They should have told her it was stupid to wear this at an airport, apologized for pointing guns at her, and either let her go on her way or at worst question her a bit while they got someone who knew more about electronics to check out her shirt.
No bullshit charges should have been brought. She should not have been held overnight. She should NOT have had her jacket confiscated.
You know, last time I went to the county courthouse I accidentally brought a fairly large pocket knife. What did they do? They put it in a locker for me, had me sign a slip of paper, and gave it back to me when I left.
I don't know why airlines are so fricking special that they get to ignore all human decency and logic in the treatment of these sorts of things.
A city should not get to work itself into a panic by overreacting and then start sending people to jail because they (the city) were idiots.
But that's because... I've barely seen any.
There were a million programs at my school to attract women to CS - They have their own special program as part of the college, study groups, sorority, scholarships, special counselors, whatever. There were still only ever one or two in a given class.
I don't think any women applied for my current job when it opened.
At my last job, I worked with two women programmers - one was competent and taken completely seriously by the team. The other my supervisor (also a woman) admitted to me was a worse programmer after years of experience than I was after a semester of interning. But even she was taken as seriously as she presented herself.
I'm sure the bias exists in some people.. but for the most part I don't this massive group of women wanting to go into IT and being pushed out of it by chauvinist guys. The schools are practically begging women to sign up.
I see a lot more women who just plain aren't interested in computers and never were. I know one who started in CS but was't really into it, and wanted to hang out with more girls and less nerdy guys (although the same girl married a CS grad - go figure).
And this at a school where the engineering department in general at least has a decent-sized minority of women in it.
I think CS still has a very large "hacker" or "hobbyist" culture associated with it - my wife admits to being intimidated by how much the other freshman knew when she first started - she wasn't sure she belonged not because anyone treated her poorly, but just because they knew so much more than she did at first. Most guys going into CS started building systems when they were in high school. Most girls... never did that.
Actually, "out of the box" codec support is one of my biggest complaints with desktop manufacturers. If they are going to load the thing up with crap, it would be nice if they at least included major common formats:
Quicktime (Including modern codecs like h.264, not just the original sorenson)
Windows Media
Flash
Shockwave
DivX/Xvid
DVD (MPEG-2 video)
MP3
MP4
Realplayer
I want to be able to go to any random video site and watch the fricking movie, not get an error that it couldn't find the proper codec. *I* can find the correct one, but my grandma can't. They're the first things I put on a new system after I've locked down the main security holes.
The reason web video in its current craze looks like crap is because the only player that they can reasonably assume people can figure out how to configure is flash, and flash video current looks like crap at low bitrates. If developers could count on people being able to watch H.264 on youtube things would be so much nicer.
The Light shine on you and the Creator shelter you. The last embrace of the mother welcome you home.
Everywhere I go I have met people that I like in real life and who also play.
:(
Are any of them ever on the same server? No, of course not
Of course, supporting the density of 9 million people on a single wow server would both require and allow massive shifts in gameplay. No more grinding thirty mobs at once - you've have to zerg rush a single murloc to get him down, or the world would be completely overrun in murlocs.
Every press release the Russians have ever sent out about these things paints them as the "good guys." We in the western media sphere just haven't been willing to believe them since the end of WW2 :)
So do European roaming plans work in the US, or just in the nicely contiguous countries next door? I don't (on most plans) get roaming charges if I go from Ohio to Indiana, which is basically the same distance - cell phones in Europe would be completely impractical if you couldn't roam to other European countries with them.
American phone companies suck, but chalking this up to isolationism is just flamebaiting.