The character pictured in the article looks vaguely like Link if you've had a couple drinks. It might be important to note Nintendo's specificity to Wind Waker and not the Zelda series in general.
Character branding is simply a marketing manuvuer that is now becoming obsolete because with graphical community online games such as MMORPGs, people don't have to depend on the releases of a particular image of an alter-ego to live out their imagination. Say you see yourself as Wolverine or Link or Mario. The copyright holder of those characters has you as a loyal customer. If you're able to fashion your own image of an alter-ego, you break free of that grip and they lose their traditional business.
If Webzen is going to use the Linkish-looking character (who is wearing a blue Revolutionary War-style coat and NO HAT for those who haven't RTFA) as the primary advertisement for the game, then *maybe* Nintendo has some kind of point here. Otherwise, this is simply about owning the meta-image of a cartoonish character with spiky blond hair.
This would be like Disney suing Warner Brothers because Bugs Bunny kind of looks like Thumper.
The fact is, however, that the language spec is down, it has already undergone revision, and the compiler is open source. Support for the language will undoubtably grow with time. OpenGL's core strength is its stability.
One of the main reasons, so I understand, for the language's longish delay is the somewhat more democratic process of the ARB as compared to the way MS internally decides the path of DirectX, which has often led to more than a few arguments between the different members.
It will grow strong and, with a bit of luck, could serve as the basis doing some really experimental stuff.
It takes a lot of money to make a commercially successful game, and most investors don't want to invest in "starving artists" with just and idea and no real solid plan for financial return.
[witty quip] If a game designer did attract a wealthy investor, they wouldn't be much of a starving artist, now, would they? [/witty quip]
Funny you bring up starving artists...Most artists, up until around the impressionist period (1860s-ish) were generally either well-to-do folks with nothing better to do or well-funded by very very rich people/organizations (i.e. catholic church, bankers, royalty). This is why most western art before the mid 1800s is fairly narrow in subject range - family paintings, depictions of biblical figures, tubby naked chicks dancing around the forest, etc. Of course, you had some really interesting and poignant things every now and then like Francisco de Goya's black paintings (one of the more famous of these is Cronos Devouring His Young, which depicts a gigantic old fart biting the head off a little dude, with the idea being that those in power will do everything, including sacrificing their own children, to hang on to power. Goya, having amassed a small fortune by the time he painted this from doing other more traditional works, did not sell it, but hung this fairly large painting in his dining room).
This general tradition of doing it for the money took a 180 degree turn with the impressionists, who mostly didn't give much of a flying monkey's ass if they made any money off of their work. This is where the term "starving artist" started to take hold. Instead of going through the usual process of getting a big commission from some rich folk to spend years working on a massive, monumental painting or sculpture, the impressionists would take a relatively small easel out somewhere, paint whatever they saw in a very short period, then go to a cafe in the city that night and show it to all the other impressionists. The idea was to capture the exact effects of light on objects, which made for some very interesting paintings.
Impressionism was more or less just a visual exercise for the artists, but it marks a turning point in art - when artists began doing art for art's sake. Most of the impressionists' works didn't sell very well until well after they were able to enjoy the wealth (a couple, like Monet and Pissarro, did become fairly wealthy in their lifetimes; however, by the time they did, Monet was blind and Pissarro was wheelchair-bound), but their work still stands out today as being important. And many of the art movements that came after impressionism, what we refer to as modern art, were done in this spirit of art for art's sake.
This paradigm used to be a very doable thing in commercial game development back in the day when it only took one person to write the code, draw the blocks..er..graphics, etc, all in what would today be considered an insanely short time period to develop a game, all the while being relatively free to push the envelope however they could. And it's difficult for anyone (somebody jump in and correct me if I'm wrong) to think of some way where somebody with at least reasonable skill could make games this way and still have something worthy of critical acclaim.
And that's probably exactly the problem, too - we expect too much of games these days. We're all like the art critics back in the late 1800's who would walk into an impressionist exhibition and start calling everything garbage because there weren't even any chubby naked chicks in the paintings. Paintings which now you might be able to find a bargain in the six figure range at Christie's.
If game designers want to be recognized for their creativity, they would do well to follow the example of the modern artist and not worry so much about whether the game's going to put bread on the table or not. We have things like the Independent Games Festival already, but from the look of it lately, it seems more like a place for people to get noticed by bi
The company, based in Lindon, Utah, has claimed that parts of the Linux operating system, which is open-source software and requires no licence fee, has been copied from the Unix operating system. It started demanding licence fees from users of some versions of Linux, payments that potentially total-billions of dollars.
SCO has admitted that its action is designed to shore up sagging sales by wringing revenue out of its rights to Unix, an older operating system from which Linux was derived. SCO said it is able to pursue copyright-infringement charges after receiving registrations for its copyrights from the U.S. Copyright Office.
SCO Group is headed by CEO Darl McBride. David Boies and his fellow Boies, Schiller & Flexner LLP lawyer Mark Heise are SCO's attorneys in this case, but the software company was represented in a court skirmish last week in Utah between SCO and IBM Corp. byDarl McBride's brother Kevin. Kevin McBride, according to West Legal Directory, has a private practice in nearby Park City, Utah, where he specializes in litigation and appeals, not corporate-contract or intellectual-property law.
Nice to see he's getting family involved. That reminds me...
I just saw the South Park episode about the mormon kid that moves into town (a couple weeks late, I know). Listening to the story about how the mormon church came about, I could not help but think about SCO's lawsuit.
One bit in particular that reminds me of this is when Mr. Harris's wife takes the translated "testament", locks it away, and asks for another translation that should be identical if it's real - so Joseph Smith gets all pissed off ("God" gets angry) and gives him another translation, but it's "not identical but on the same basic line." More info about the origins of mormonism
Reading the above page only solidifed my view that mormon belief has at least something to do with the workings of SCO as of late.
In short, if and when the SCO code is revealed, check those modification dates! I'm damn sure they'll try to pull something like copying entire files out of the linux kernel, putting them into their code and then saying "See? They copied entire files from our UNIX code!"
And at the end of October, Ballmer gave the audience at Gartner's autumn symposium a taster of what was to come when he attacked Linux's assumed security superiority. "In the first 150 days after the release of Windows 2000," he said, "there were 17 critical vulnerabilities. For Windows Server 2003, there were four. For Red Hat Linux 6, they were five to ten times higher."
aside from comparing an old version of a single distribution of linux to the brand new version of windows, leaving out the mass-market windows XP, of course, the statement is failing to take into account the actual likelihood of exploitation, which is dependent on a few other variables besides the mere presence of said security vulnerabilities.
Just because a security vulnerability exists does not mean that it is so easy to exploit that every 13-year-old with a pirated copy of VB is going to be able to format your hard drive. Every OS has security holes, but whether or not they have 1023 or two does not matter if the two in the supposedly "more secure" OS are so easily exploited and so horribly intertwined with the OS that fixing them would mean breaking everything else in the system.
I played Wolfenstein when I was 9 or so, then moved up to Doom and Doom 2 when I was 13ish, Duke Nukem at 14, Quake at 15, I was in tournaments at 16 in Sin (won some nice money too..). At 21 now I still play FPS, although they're somewhat dull these days.
The fact is that games alone don't make kids want to pick up a gun and kill people. Kids at 14 and 16 KNOW the difference between fantasy and reality. It's preposterous to suggest that they do not. I knew the difference between a game and RL at 7 when I played DukeNukem (the 2D version). And yeah sure I thought it would be cool to be a super tough guy and go and save the world. But I certainly did not think that I "was" the super tough guy. But then again I thought it was kind of cool to be Superman also but I never made any attempts to fly.
but here's the thing: it was easier to tell the difference between reality and fantasy back when you and I (I'm 22 myself) were 12 or 14 because back then, pretty much every game in existence had at least some non-suspension of some disbelief, mainly because of technical restrictions. You may have been able to get sucked into Mario or Tetris or Duke Nukem because they were (and still are) very engaging games. The thing that's changed since then is that games are much more realistic looking and feeling, and will continue to become more realistic looking and feeling because that's what gamers have wanted for a very long time - even before Doom or Wolfenstein.
Flying around and frying shit with your eyes is pretty easy to not believe once you think about it. A 12-year old can handle that. Things like running around a New-Yorkish city with a few guns, stealing cars, picking up hookers, and just generally blowing the f$#@ out of everything you see is a tad more believable than that because it is actually physically possible to do those sorts of things. It's just that almost everybody knows that'll either land you in jail for life, the lethal injection table, or six feet under and full of lead pretty much instantly because in real life, if the american government has a strong enough desire to stop you, there is about a 1 in a gajillion chance you're not going to be stopped. Most people familiar with the workings of the government are able to pick up on that fact pretty quickly. Most 12-year-olds in America have not even had a basic civics class yet.
The trend that we're witnessing now in gaming is a shift towards creating virtual reality as opposed to games. Just look at the MMORPG craze. People pay $10/month and upwards for a subscription after forking over $50 for the client so they can project themselves into an alternate reality. The fact that the game industry in general is looking at these things now as major cash cows (hence the slew of me-too blah ripoffs in recent times) overwhelmingly suggests the consumer demand for such realistic experiences.
And games can be realistic in many different ways. They could have eye-popping photorealistic 3D rendered goodness, speaker-rattling environmental audio pumping through a surround sound setup, AI that makes you wonder if there's actually just a secret server where they have a bunch of little elves playing against everybody, or just really fluid input. And GTA is a wonderful, awesome game that is, to a degree, realistic in more than one of these ways.
The problem, and this is why even adolescents should be kept away from the game, is that most people tend to think in a sort of dualist mode of thought until usually the first or second year of college. If something seems kind of realistic enough, then it is realistic, and they get drawn into that. Pretty soon the game becomes reality to them, and reality in turn becomes the game to them. And that's where the shit hits the fan and people actually get hurt, depending on the game.
I totally agree that things like this are more the parents' fault than anybody else because, here
I'm bored, so I'll pick apart your somewhat inaccurate, if not trollish, translation:
Due to a mixture of preconcieved notions and biases, I have decided not to care about the game. Hmm..well, yeah. That and I don't feel like coughing up $180 for an X-Box to find out. That's money better spent on beer.:)
Futhermore, I don't even feel like making up reasons not to play it. No. I just don't care. It's pretty simple, actually.
Thus I'll post up some bullshit about 'sense of greatness' or whatever, and leave it at that. Sense of greatness bullshit? You mean that when Doom came out, nothing seemed really special about it? Did the Sims seem like just another stupid Sim-something-or-other game? And I suppose the fact that we got entire boatloads worth of gaming goodness when Half-Life came out, it meant nothing to you?
Don't get me wrong, Halo looks very nice. It's an excellent demo of the X-Box's graphical capabilities, and seems to have some good physics, too. But from my distant view of it, it doesn't seem terribly special apart from all the movies being made from it (See original post). And something whose primary purpose or special feature is in the field of filmmaking, it's really more of a tool than a game, no?
Plus, rejecting things that are popular makes me feel cool. Mmmm..no. First off, relatively speaking, Halo is not popular, as nobody I know owns or has even played a copy (See original post). Usually, that's a sign of unpopularity. And if I feel any cooler for not really worrying about whether or not I should like some video game that nobody whose opinion I care about cares about, well...hmm..let me think about that one...actually yeah, I think that would make me cooler than if I were to be standing there thinking "should..should I like Halo? b..becuase somebody on the internet said it was popular. and if I don't like it, I won't be cool!"
Why not just capture the video signal as it is going to the monitor, the way a VCR is able to intercept a video signal going to the TV. And from there have the recording device record the video.
That's not impossible, but it would be much simpler if one could could send stuff straight back into memory. It opens up the possibility of doing rendering and post-production on the same workstation in one easy session. Remember, we're talking indie filmmakers here. Think Kevin Smith types. The less technically involved the process, the better.
Before 1994, the idea of walking into a bookstore and seeing entire shelves of books on real-time graphics and game programming was almost unheard of. The very techniques and sciences driving the games that were already making billions of dollars for the Ataris and Nintendos of the world were still well-guarded secrets. That all changed, however, with the release of Tricks of the Game Programming Gurus by computer scientist Andre' LaMothe, and within only a few years, an entirely new genre of technical books had seemingly taken over the world.
Uh, I hate to mention it Andre, but this simply isn't true.
Just to drive that point home, here's a short list of some excellent pre-1994 books on graphics and game programming:
Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice, 1st edition. Foley, Van Damm et. al. ASIN 0201121107. Addison Wesley. 1990 Zen of Assembly Language. Abrash, Michael. ASIN 0673386023. Scott Foresman Trade. 1990 Power Graphics Programming. Abrash, Michael. ASIN 0880225009. Que. 1989 Flights of Fantasy: Programming 3d Video Games in C++. Lampton, Chris. ASIN 1878739182. Waite Group. 1993 The Magic Machine: A Handbook of Computer Sorcery. Dewdney, A K. ASIN 0716721449. W H Freeman & Co. 1990 Visual Basic: Game Programming for Windows. Young, Michael J. ASIN 1556155034. Micro$#!t Press. 1992 Balance of Power: International Politics as the Ultimate Global Game. Crawford, Chris. ASIN 0914845977. Microscope Publications Ltd. 1986 3D Computer Graphics, 1st Edition. Watt, Alan. ASIN 0201154420. Addison-Wesley. 1993 Mathematical Methods in Games, Programming, and Economics. Karlin, Samuel. ASIN 0486670201. Dover Publications (Reprint Edition). 1992 Creating Arcade Games on the Vic. Camp, Robert. ASIN 0942386256. Compute. 1984 Games Programming. Soloman, Eric. ISBN 052127110X. Cambridge University Press. 1984 The Art of Computer Game Design. Crawford, Chris and Linda. ASIN 0078811171. McGraw-Hill Osbourne Media. 1984 Atari Graphics and Arcade Game Design. Stanton, Jeffrey and Pinal, Dan. ASIN 0912003057. Arrays. 1984
The list goes on.
And don't forget good old Dr. Dobb's Journal. A certain John Carmack would not be where he is today if it weren't for Abrash's articles on tricked-out assembly language in that mag.
Sorry for using ASINs on most of them and not ISBNs, but that's all Amazon would give me.
I'm familiar with LaMothe's previous work in games. He's a career author/editor on game-related topics. One thing I've noticed that is common to everything he does is that he hypes his work up to be like "You'll be able to write games just like the pros!" when they're really more like "You'll be able to write half-assed pieces of garbage that might have been commercially viable 10 years ago!" His style is similar to Chris Crawford's - highly subjective, more designed to appeal to your emotions while occasionally throwing you a bone to keep you interested than actually cramming as much useful info as possible into one easy resource (i.e. Real-Time Rendering). He's just trying to sell you a book, that's all. You're not actually going to make anything that will really make back your "investment". Not with his stuff, anyway.
Oh, and check out some of the games he's published. Never heard of them, you say?
If you want to make a homebrew game system. Pick up a couple books on computer architecture, graphics, etc. Subscribe to Mouser, get your soldering iron nice and hot, and have a blast. You'll probably learn a lot more.
If you want to write games for a system that's 1000x faster than a Super NES, go to this amazing reference site and type "linux game programming" into the magic prompt. You won't be disappointed.
It is just me or did the soundtrack seem, well, japanese? The movie in general is just flat-out weird. Not quite funny. Just weird.
I'm not a big fan of Halo myself. I've never played it. None of my friends have. There's just not that sense of greatness about the game that makes me feel like I really need to give a crap about it. But something is worth noting about the game; and that's the sudden deluge of movies circulating the internet that were recorded using the game. This is probably due in part to the game's amazing graphical capability, of which the X-Box itself is very likely playing a key role in, but perhaps also due in part to something easily facilitating video recording? I read something awhile back (probably one of the OpenGL 2.0 white papers about pixel pack/unpack from 3D Labs, maybe not, my brain's starting to fall asleep right now) that seemed to underline the fact that you can send a lot of data to a video card and have it be all accelerated and fast and all, but it's not quite as easy to send it back into memory for, say, recording high-quality 3D rendered movies in real-time. That all we'd need is some kind of bus or compression scheme to get the stuff back into main memory from the video card and all of a sudden you'd have this massive flood of 3D-rendered indie movies.
That said - it is quite likely that this, and the others like it (if you haven't already, check out Red vs. Blue and see what I'm talking about here), is the tip of a very big iceberg.
So to recap, I tried the PS version and liked it...then I tried the PC version and liked it the same...then I decided to stop playing the PC version and went back to the PS version. Why?
Furniture.
I have a very warm and cozy living room, and I sit in a nice comfy lazy-boy adjustable chair while I play on the Playstation. After a long work/school day of sitting in a straight-back chair...you most likely just want to lay back and relax. Playing 4 hours on the lazy-boy is much more appealing than 4 more hours of sitting in front of a PC.
Obviously you're not figuring in some of the cooler things PC like gaming laptops, scalable architectures, a wider range of backward compatibility that PS2 and X-Box can only dream of (could still play X-Com, Master of Orion, and Ultima 4 on my P3-500, not to mention practically every NES and Atari game I ever bought now that the little boxes no longer work), flat screen monitors, 1280x1024 resolution in real-time apps from practically every graphics setup on the market today - not that cheesy, blocky 640x480 crap. You want good resolution in the living room, you have to buy an HDTV which'll run you at least $1000 for the P.O.S "Jed's Hardware Shack" model that breaks after a year.
The rationale behind TV's sucking is that you're generally sitting farther away from a TV than you are from a computer monitor, so they have to be made bigger than a comparable CRT or flatscreen. To make a good digital monitor that is TV sized costs a lot of money. I've also noticed that most HDTVs are bigger than average TVs - you generally don't see the little 13"ers floatin around the discount electronics section of the store. It's always like 40" or 50" or something really big that costs thousands.
And I don't know what kind of chair you have at your desk, but I was able to get a pretty decent, comfortable office chair at Wal-Mart for like $60 (okay, that's like six bargain bin games to you, but still). Using a PC from a couch is not infeasible, but you still don't have the same accessibility that you have with a larger (i.e. 25") TV screen.
PC games in general are a bit more geeky than console games because of the whole couch factor. It's mainly in the multiplayer IMHO:
With a PS2 and the latest football game, any time of year you can invite your buddies over with some nachos, beer, pretzels, or whatever to "play" football. It doesn't have to be football season. It doesn't even have to be warm outside, hell it could be 3 o'clock in the f*$%ing morning on a wednesday and you could still do it like it was sunday afternoon. Except there's little physical activity involved - you're sitting on the couch with your buddies drinking beer and eating nachos.
With PC games, if you want live multiplayer with everyone in the same room, you need to organize a LAN party. There's all these computers that need to be hooked up to each other - the whole place is a mess of wires - you have to watch where you walk so you don't trip over the power cord to the server, etc. True, you can have many more players at a LAN party and some might argue that each player's individual experience is better because of this setup, but in the end there's less people into these things because of the hassle required to get the game up and running and that it's harder for non-players to spectate because of the larger number of seperate screens.
With consoles, everything is simpler for the player. No OSes need to be installed, no drivers have to be downloaded. You just put the friggen game in and you play it. And get plenty drunk with your non-geek friends. End of Story.
PC games aren't dying, they're in need of a renaissance.
Client/server is good. Client/server is great. For some things. Like games with thousands of players at a time who absolutely *require* a thin client doing all the up-front display. The truth is, the major thing holding P2P back from the gates of the internet is the gates of the internet themselves. Back when we all dialed into each other's computers manually, most of the time we were using some form of P2P.
And don't think for a second that Carmack doesn't have something up his sleeve to make P2P a reality on the internet. I've actually had quite a few decent ideas on P2P network optimization and I'm sure he's probably at least as far as I am.
Very few people use their typical desktop video cards for actual video production or anything related to it because the hardware up until now was simply unable to handle that sort of load. Now we have these cards that are the beginning of a new era of computer-generated visuals. The article is saying that they can do quite a bit more than they can do now if someone would just write some better drivers for them.
Now, streaming real-time rendering images over the internet? Maybe not fullscreen stuff right now because of a multitude of hampering factors on affordable internet bandwidth which I won't name for clarity's sake, but for the limiting factor to be the internet itself and not the graphics card is still a significant step.
This would definately be very beneficial to low-budget game developers and movie directors. We could very well see the return of the shareware boom (remember the early-mid 90's?) because of this.
sure, only a small portion of the people who'd buy the cards would use these features that the article talks about, but they'd be people that didn't have that capability before. Whenever this happens in any medium/artform/what-have-you, there is the tendency for a lot of experimental stuff to appear. I think we have some very interesting times ahead of us if someone gets these drivers written.
Game design seems to be like a disease in that you can't seem to stop making games even if you want to.
Surgeon General's Warning: Developing games has been found to be more addictive than playing Tetris, Grand Theft Auto, and Civilization combined. May cause insomnia, unstoppable craving for junk food, and irritability towards marketing people. Pregnant women who develop games may cause birth defects in their child including, but not limited to: indecipherable "Mario" voice, polygonal physique, pixelated skin tones, and an uncontrollable terror at the mere thought of the existance of marketing people.
I've been reading through some of the news and related sites on this topic and it seems the possibility exists that one or more of these gnutella clients that send massive numbers of request in such short periods could actually be a maliciously intended program. Some of the developers who make these have yet to respond to any of these problems even though there have been repeated attempts to contact them about the situation. The way some (I'm looking at QTRAXMAX right now) word their sales pitch, it sounds eerily similar to some e-mails I've gotten with links to these sites or those mysterious 53k-attachments-to-emails-that-just-say-hi-from-so me-guy-named-boris-in-siberia that are so obviously worms or viruses. The way they currently work looks eerily similar to a DoS attack. Use people's own greed to flood a network with requests. It would actually be a pretty clever strategy - millions of users instantly flock to the program to maximize their gain out of gnutella, only to block each other out when they send 83 gazillion file requests a second. Classic Nash.
Who would be behind such an attack? There are many possibilities. The recording industry is definately one of them. There could be others. Who knows.
The point is you should all be careful what you install on your computer or even download. Millions of people around the world know how to program at varying levels of control over many different kinds of computers with different purposes. It's like the Force - some use it for good, some don't. There's bound to be at least a couple who are going to write a full-fledged application that is really just one big worm.
heh - Take a number. Interesting. Sounds pretty in line with traditional CS concepts - so it shouldn't be too difficult to implement, and might actually solve the problem.
That is exactly the reason why I voted Green in the last election and not for Gore (Bush is even worse in this respect), who had some significant financial backing from several Microsoft executives.
Matter of fact, that's the sort of thing that Ralph Nader wants to put an end to.
The article mentions an organization in austrailia known as ARIA, the Austrailian Recording Industry Association, that "may seek discussions with the federal government if Berman's bill is adopted in the U.S."
From the look of things, it looks like the recording industry is waiting to see how the bill goes through legislation in the U.S. before persuing it elsewhere. They might be stupid enough to pick cyber-fights with thousands of hackers using DOS-attacks, but they're probably not that stupid as to alienate themselves from a country like Austrailia. So in the worst-case scenario where ARIA tells the RIAA to jam their thumbs up their bum holes, we would have a situation where the individual industries would have to make a choice - cut themselves off from Austrailia, never ever traveling there or having any sort of business dealings there, or find a better solution to their problem.
At least the movie execs might think twice before DOSing anything with a.au on the end of its address. There's been more than a few good things to come from down under into Hollywood. Not sure about the music guys tho - the only notable austrailian bands I can think of offhand that have had any kind of success in the US are Chumbawumba and Men At Work. Doesn't seem like much of a loss to them if you ask me - though some of those bands that do "world tours" might have to divert themselves to New Zealand or Antarctica (wouldn't that be fun?).
I think the USA can learn a lot from Italy's way of life;).
Kinda like how they take those naughty, evil, blaspheming web sites (who cares where they're hosted) and plaster the special police's logo over the welcome page?
Slashdot Mirror
The character pictured in the article looks vaguely like Link if you've had a couple drinks. It might be important to note Nintendo's specificity to Wind Waker and not the Zelda series in general.
Character branding is simply a marketing manuvuer that is now becoming obsolete because with graphical community online games such as MMORPGs, people don't have to depend on the releases of a particular image of an alter-ego to live out their imagination. Say you see yourself as Wolverine or Link or Mario. The copyright holder of those characters has you as a loyal customer. If you're able to fashion your own image of an alter-ego, you break free of that grip and they lose their traditional business.
If Webzen is going to use the Linkish-looking character (who is wearing a blue Revolutionary War-style coat and NO HAT for those who haven't RTFA) as the primary advertisement for the game, then *maybe* Nintendo has some kind of point here. Otherwise, this is simply about owning the meta-image of a cartoonish character with spiky blond hair.
This would be like Disney suing Warner Brothers because Bugs Bunny kind of looks like Thumper.
There is the current and likely very temporary issue of nvidia's drivers only partially supporting GLSL (and only through a registry hack with very up-to-date drivers at that), not to mention a few limitations of the language itself.
The fact is, however, that the language spec is down, it has already undergone revision, and the compiler is open source. Support for the language will undoubtably grow with time. OpenGL's core strength is its stability.
One of the main reasons, so I understand, for the language's longish delay is the somewhat more democratic process of the ARB as compared to the way MS internally decides the path of DirectX, which has often led to more than a few arguments between the different members.
It will grow strong and, with a bit of luck, could serve as the basis doing some really experimental stuff.
It takes a lot of money to make a commercially successful game, and most investors don't want to invest in "starving artists" with just and idea and no real solid plan for financial return.
[witty quip]
If a game designer did attract a wealthy investor, they wouldn't be much of a starving artist, now, would they?
[/witty quip]
Funny you bring up starving artists...Most artists, up until around the impressionist period (1860s-ish) were generally either well-to-do folks with nothing better to do or well-funded by very very rich people/organizations (i.e. catholic church, bankers, royalty). This is why most western art before the mid 1800s is fairly narrow in subject range - family paintings, depictions of biblical figures, tubby naked chicks dancing around the forest, etc. Of course, you had some really interesting and poignant things every now and then like Francisco de Goya's black paintings (one of the more famous of these is Cronos Devouring His Young, which depicts a gigantic old fart biting the head off a little dude, with the idea being that those in power will do everything, including sacrificing their own children, to hang on to power. Goya, having amassed a small fortune by the time he painted this from doing other more traditional works, did not sell it, but hung this fairly large painting in his dining room).
This general tradition of doing it for the money took a 180 degree turn with the impressionists, who mostly didn't give much of a flying monkey's ass if they made any money off of their work. This is where the term "starving artist" started to take hold. Instead of going through the usual process of getting a big commission from some rich folk to spend years working on a massive, monumental painting or sculpture, the impressionists would take a relatively small easel out somewhere, paint whatever they saw in a very short period, then go to a cafe in the city that night and show it to all the other impressionists. The idea was to capture the exact effects of light on objects, which made for some very interesting paintings.
Impressionism was more or less just a visual exercise for the artists, but it marks a turning point in art - when artists began doing art for art's sake. Most of the impressionists' works didn't sell very well until well after they were able to enjoy the wealth (a couple, like Monet and Pissarro, did become fairly wealthy in their lifetimes; however, by the time they did, Monet was blind and Pissarro was wheelchair-bound), but their work still stands out today as being important. And many of the art movements that came after impressionism, what we refer to as modern art, were done in this spirit of art for art's sake.
This paradigm used to be a very doable thing in commercial game development back in the day when it only took one person to write the code, draw the blocks..er..graphics, etc, all in what would today be considered an insanely short time period to develop a game, all the while being relatively free to push the envelope however they could. And it's difficult for anyone (somebody jump in and correct me if I'm wrong) to think of some way where somebody with at least reasonable skill could make games this way and still have something worthy of critical acclaim.
And that's probably exactly the problem, too - we expect too much of games these days. We're all like the art critics back in the late 1800's who would walk into an impressionist exhibition and start calling everything garbage because there weren't even any chubby naked chicks in the paintings. Paintings which now you might be able to find a bargain in the six figure range at Christie's.
If game designers want to be recognized for their creativity, they would do well to follow the example of the modern artist and not worry so much about whether the game's going to put bread on the table or not. We have things like the Independent Games Festival already, but from the look of it lately, it seems more like a place for people to get noticed by bi
Very simple recipe:
1 shot kahlua
1 shot vodka
club soda
The company, based in Lindon, Utah, has claimed that parts of the Linux operating system, which is open-source software and requires no licence fee, has been copied from the Unix operating system. It started demanding licence fees from users of some versions of Linux, payments that potentially total-billions of dollars.
SCO has admitted that its action is designed to shore up sagging sales by wringing revenue out of its rights to Unix, an older operating system from which Linux was derived. SCO said it is able to pursue copyright-infringement charges after receiving registrations for its copyrights from the U.S. Copyright Office.
SCO Group is headed by CEO Darl McBride. David Boies and his fellow Boies, Schiller & Flexner LLP lawyer Mark Heise are SCO's attorneys in this case, but the software company was represented in a court skirmish last week in Utah between SCO and IBM Corp. byDarl McBride's brother Kevin. Kevin McBride, according to West Legal Directory, has a private practice in nearby Park City, Utah, where he specializes in litigation and appeals, not corporate-contract or intellectual-property law.
Nice to see he's getting family involved. That reminds me...
I just saw the South Park episode about the mormon kid that moves into town (a couple weeks late, I know). Listening to the story about how the mormon church came about, I could not help but think about SCO's lawsuit.
One bit in particular that reminds me of this is when Mr. Harris's wife takes the translated "testament", locks it away, and asks for another translation that should be identical if it's real - so Joseph Smith gets all pissed off ("God" gets angry) and gives him another translation, but it's "not identical but on the same basic line."
More info about the origins of mormonism
Reading the above page only solidifed my view that mormon belief has at least something to do with the workings of SCO as of late.
In short, if and when the SCO code is revealed, check those modification dates! I'm damn sure they'll try to pull something like copying entire files out of the linux kernel, putting them into their code and then saying "See? They copied entire files from our UNIX code!"
And at the end of October, Ballmer gave the audience at Gartner's autumn symposium a taster of what was to come when he attacked Linux's assumed security superiority. "In the first 150 days after the release of Windows 2000," he said, "there were 17 critical vulnerabilities. For Windows Server 2003, there were four. For Red Hat Linux 6, they were five to ten times higher."
aside from comparing an old version of a single distribution of linux to the brand new version of windows, leaving out the mass-market windows XP, of course, the statement is failing to take into account the actual likelihood of exploitation, which is dependent on a few other variables besides the mere presence of said security vulnerabilities.
Just because a security vulnerability exists does not mean that it is so easy to exploit that every 13-year-old with a pirated copy of VB is going to be able to format your hard drive. Every OS has security holes, but whether or not they have 1023 or two does not matter if the two in the supposedly "more secure" OS are so easily exploited and so horribly intertwined with the OS that fixing them would mean breaking everything else in the system.
Quality, not quantity, Ballmer.
>early 2004-due title.
read: actual release date - summer 2005
but here's the thing: it was easier to tell the difference between reality and fantasy back when you and I (I'm 22 myself) were 12 or 14 because back then, pretty much every game in existence had at least some non-suspension of some disbelief, mainly because of technical restrictions. You may have been able to get sucked into Mario or Tetris or Duke Nukem because they were (and still are) very engaging games. The thing that's changed since then is that games are much more realistic looking and feeling, and will continue to become more realistic looking and feeling because that's what gamers have wanted for a very long time - even before Doom or Wolfenstein.
Flying around and frying shit with your eyes is pretty easy to not believe once you think about it. A 12-year old can handle that. Things like running around a New-Yorkish city with a few guns, stealing cars, picking up hookers, and just generally blowing the f$#@ out of everything you see is a tad more believable than that because it is actually physically possible to do those sorts of things. It's just that almost everybody knows that'll either land you in jail for life, the lethal injection table, or six feet under and full of lead pretty much instantly because in real life, if the american government has a strong enough desire to stop you, there is about a 1 in a gajillion chance you're not going to be stopped. Most people familiar with the workings of the government are able to pick up on that fact pretty quickly. Most 12-year-olds in America have not even had a basic civics class yet.
The trend that we're witnessing now in gaming is a shift towards creating virtual reality as opposed to games. Just look at the MMORPG craze. People pay $10/month and upwards for a subscription after forking over $50 for the client so they can project themselves into an alternate reality. The fact that the game industry in general is looking at these things now as major cash cows (hence the slew of me-too blah ripoffs in recent times) overwhelmingly suggests the consumer demand for such realistic experiences.
And games can be realistic in many different ways. They could have eye-popping photorealistic 3D rendered goodness, speaker-rattling environmental audio pumping through a surround sound setup, AI that makes you wonder if there's actually just a secret server where they have a bunch of little elves playing against everybody, or just really fluid input. And GTA is a wonderful, awesome game that is, to a degree, realistic in more than one of these ways.
The problem, and this is why even adolescents should be kept away from the game, is that most people tend to think in a sort of dualist mode of thought until usually the first or second year of college. If something seems kind of realistic enough, then it is realistic, and they get drawn into that. Pretty soon the game becomes reality to them, and reality in turn becomes the game to them. And that's where the shit hits the fan and people actually get hurt, depending on the game.
I totally agree that things like this are more the parents' fault than anybody else because, here
of retired U.S. Gen. Tommy Franks and Pres. George Bush, "Bring 'em on."
I ain't afraid'a no SCO.
To any SCO legal reps reading this: please direct all e-mail regarding lawsuits to this address.
Yesterday's Births:
...
Xing Tao Ming - 3.2 kg - M
Deng Fu Ling - 4.2kg - M
Bugs Bun Nee - 10.3kg - M
Jaz Jak Rab Bit - 10.4kg - M
Plae Boi Bun Nee - 8.7kg - F
...
I'm bored, so I'll pick apart your somewhat inaccurate, if not trollish, translation:
:)
Due to a mixture of preconcieved notions and biases, I have decided not to care about the game.
Hmm..well, yeah. That and I don't feel like coughing up $180 for an X-Box to find out. That's money better spent on beer.
Futhermore, I don't even feel like making up reasons not to play it.
No. I just don't care. It's pretty simple, actually.
Thus I'll post up some bullshit about 'sense of greatness' or whatever, and leave it at that.
Sense of greatness bullshit? You mean that when Doom came out, nothing seemed really special about it? Did the Sims seem like just another stupid Sim-something-or-other game? And I suppose the fact that we got entire boatloads worth of gaming goodness when Half-Life came out, it meant nothing to you?
Don't get me wrong, Halo looks very nice. It's an excellent demo of the X-Box's graphical capabilities, and seems to have some good physics, too. But from my distant view of it, it doesn't seem terribly special apart from all the movies being made from it (See original post). And something whose primary purpose or special feature is in the field of filmmaking, it's really more of a tool than a game, no?
Plus, rejecting things that are popular makes me feel cool.
Mmmm..no. First off, relatively speaking, Halo is not popular, as nobody I know owns or has even played a copy (See original post). Usually, that's a sign of unpopularity. And if I feel any cooler for not really worrying about whether or not I should like some video game that nobody whose opinion I care about cares about, well...hmm..let me think about that one...actually yeah, I think that would make me cooler than if I were to be standing there thinking "should..should I like Halo? b..becuase somebody on the internet said it was popular. and if I don't like it, I won't be cool!"
I want the last five minutes of my life back.
Why not just capture the video signal as it is going to the monitor, the way a VCR is able to intercept a video signal going to the TV. And from there have the recording device record the video.
That's not impossible, but it would be much simpler if one could could send stuff straight back into memory. It opens up the possibility of doing rendering and post-production on the same workstation in one easy session. Remember, we're talking indie filmmakers here. Think Kevin Smith types. The less technically involved the process, the better.
Before 1994, the idea of walking into a bookstore and seeing entire shelves of books on real-time graphics and game programming was almost unheard of. The very techniques and sciences driving the games that were already making billions of dollars for the Ataris and Nintendos of the world were still well-guarded secrets. That all changed, however, with the release of Tricks of the Game Programming Gurus by computer scientist Andre' LaMothe, and within only a few years, an entirely new genre of technical books had seemingly taken over the world.
Uh, I hate to mention it Andre, but this simply isn't true.
Just to drive that point home, here's a short list of some excellent pre-1994 books on graphics and game programming:
Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice, 1st edition. Foley, Van Damm et. al. ASIN 0201121107. Addison Wesley. 1990
Zen of Assembly Language. Abrash, Michael. ASIN 0673386023. Scott Foresman Trade. 1990
Power Graphics Programming. Abrash, Michael. ASIN 0880225009. Que. 1989
Flights of Fantasy: Programming 3d Video Games in C++. Lampton, Chris. ASIN 1878739182. Waite Group. 1993
The Magic Machine: A Handbook of Computer Sorcery. Dewdney, A K. ASIN 0716721449. W H Freeman & Co. 1990
Visual Basic: Game Programming for Windows. Young, Michael J. ASIN 1556155034. Micro$#!t Press. 1992
Balance of Power: International Politics as the Ultimate Global Game. Crawford, Chris. ASIN 0914845977. Microscope Publications Ltd. 1986
3D Computer Graphics, 1st Edition. Watt, Alan. ASIN 0201154420. Addison-Wesley. 1993
Mathematical Methods in Games, Programming, and Economics. Karlin, Samuel. ASIN 0486670201. Dover Publications (Reprint Edition). 1992
Creating Arcade Games on the Vic. Camp, Robert. ASIN 0942386256. Compute. 1984
Games Programming. Soloman, Eric. ISBN 052127110X. Cambridge University Press. 1984
The Art of Computer Game Design. Crawford, Chris and Linda. ASIN 0078811171. McGraw-Hill Osbourne Media. 1984
Atari Graphics and Arcade Game Design. Stanton, Jeffrey and Pinal, Dan. ASIN 0912003057. Arrays. 1984
The list goes on.
And don't forget good old Dr. Dobb's Journal. A certain John Carmack would not be where he is today if it weren't for Abrash's articles on tricked-out assembly language in that mag.
Sorry for using ASINs on most of them and not ISBNs, but that's all Amazon would give me.
I'm familiar with LaMothe's previous work in games. He's a career author/editor on game-related topics. One thing I've noticed that is common to everything he does is that he hypes his work up to be like "You'll be able to write games just like the pros!" when they're really more like "You'll be able to write half-assed pieces of garbage that might have been commercially viable 10 years ago!" His style is similar to Chris Crawford's - highly subjective, more designed to appeal to your emotions while occasionally throwing you a bone to keep you interested than actually cramming as much useful info as possible into one easy resource (i.e. Real-Time Rendering). He's just trying to sell you a book, that's all. You're not actually going to make anything that will really make back your "investment". Not with his stuff, anyway.
Oh, and check out some of the games he's published. Never heard of them, you say?
If you want to make a homebrew game system. Pick up a couple books on computer architecture, graphics, etc. Subscribe to Mouser, get your soldering iron nice and hot, and have a blast. You'll probably learn a lot more.
If you want to write games for a system that's 1000x faster than a Super NES, go to this amazing reference site and type "linux game programming" into the magic prompt. You won't be disappointed.
It is just me or did the soundtrack seem, well, japanese? The movie in general is just flat-out weird. Not quite funny. Just weird.
I'm not a big fan of Halo myself. I've never played it. None of my friends have. There's just not that sense of greatness about the game that makes me feel like I really need to give a crap about it. But something is worth noting about the game; and that's the sudden deluge of movies circulating the internet that were recorded using the game. This is probably due in part to the game's amazing graphical capability, of which the X-Box itself is very likely playing a key role in, but perhaps also due in part to something easily facilitating video recording? I read something awhile back (probably one of the OpenGL 2.0 white papers about pixel pack/unpack from 3D Labs, maybe not, my brain's starting to fall asleep right now) that seemed to underline the fact that you can send a lot of data to a video card and have it be all accelerated and fast and all, but it's not quite as easy to send it back into memory for, say, recording high-quality 3D rendered movies in real-time. That all we'd need is some kind of bus or compression scheme to get the stuff back into main memory from the video card and all of a sudden you'd have this massive flood of 3D-rendered indie movies.
That said - it is quite likely that this, and the others like it (if you haven't already, check out Red vs. Blue and see what I'm talking about here), is the tip of a very big iceberg.
So to recap, I tried the PS version and liked it...then I tried the PC version and liked it the same...then I decided to stop playing the PC version and went back to the PS version. Why?
Furniture.
I have a very warm and cozy living room, and I sit in a nice comfy lazy-boy adjustable chair while I play on the Playstation. After a long work/school day of sitting in a straight-back chair...you most likely just want to lay back and relax. Playing 4 hours on the lazy-boy is much more appealing than 4 more hours of sitting in front of a PC.
Obviously you're not figuring in some of the cooler things PC like gaming laptops, scalable architectures, a wider range of backward compatibility that PS2 and X-Box can only dream of (could still play X-Com, Master of Orion, and Ultima 4 on my P3-500, not to mention practically every NES and Atari game I ever bought now that the little boxes no longer work), flat screen monitors, 1280x1024 resolution in real-time apps from practically every graphics setup on the market today - not that cheesy, blocky 640x480 crap. You want good resolution in the living room, you have to buy an HDTV which'll run you at least $1000 for the P.O.S "Jed's Hardware Shack" model that breaks after a year.
The rationale behind TV's sucking is that you're generally sitting farther away from a TV than you are from a computer monitor, so they have to be made bigger than a comparable CRT or flatscreen. To make a good digital monitor that is TV sized costs a lot of money. I've also noticed that most HDTVs are bigger than average TVs - you generally don't see the little 13"ers floatin around the discount electronics section of the store. It's always like 40" or 50" or something really big that costs thousands.
And I don't know what kind of chair you have at your desk, but I was able to get a pretty decent, comfortable office chair at Wal-Mart for like $60 (okay, that's like six bargain bin games to you, but still). Using a PC from a couch is not infeasible, but you still don't have the same accessibility that you have with a larger (i.e. 25") TV screen.
PC games in general are a bit more geeky than console games because of the whole couch factor. It's mainly in the multiplayer IMHO:
With a PS2 and the latest football game, any time of year you can invite your buddies over with some nachos, beer, pretzels, or whatever to "play" football. It doesn't have to be football season. It doesn't even have to be warm outside, hell it could be 3 o'clock in the f*$%ing morning on a wednesday and you could still do it like it was sunday afternoon. Except there's little physical activity involved - you're sitting on the couch with your buddies drinking beer and eating nachos.
With PC games, if you want live multiplayer with everyone in the same room, you need to organize a LAN party. There's all these computers that need to be hooked up to each other - the whole place is a mess of wires - you have to watch where you walk so you don't trip over the power cord to the server, etc. True, you can have many more players at a LAN party and some might argue that each player's individual experience is better because of this setup, but in the end there's less people into these things because of the hassle required to get the game up and running and that it's harder for non-players to spectate because of the larger number of seperate screens.
With consoles, everything is simpler for the player. No OSes need to be installed, no drivers have to be downloaded. You just put the friggen game in and you play it. And get plenty drunk with your non-geek friends. End of Story.
PC games aren't dying, they're in need of a renaissance.
Client/server is good. Client/server is great. For some things. Like games with thousands of players at a time who absolutely *require* a thin client doing all the up-front display. The truth is, the major thing holding P2P back from the gates of the internet is the gates of the internet themselves. Back when we all dialed into each other's computers manually, most of the time we were using some form of P2P.
And don't think for a second that Carmack doesn't have something up his sleeve to make P2P a reality on the internet. I've actually had quite a few decent ideas on P2P network optimization and I'm sure he's probably at least as far as I am.
hopefully it won't burn into the atmosphere of other planets
Or be gobbled up by a giant intergalactic space dog. arf!
Very few people use their typical desktop video cards for actual video production or anything related to it because the hardware up until now was simply unable to handle that sort of load. Now we have these cards that are the beginning of a new era of computer-generated visuals. The article is saying that they can do quite a bit more than they can do now if someone would just write some better drivers for them.
Now, streaming real-time rendering images over the internet? Maybe not fullscreen stuff right now because of a multitude of hampering factors on affordable internet bandwidth which I won't name for clarity's sake, but for the limiting factor to be the internet itself and not the graphics card is still a significant step.
This would definately be very beneficial to low-budget game developers and movie directors. We could very well see the return of the shareware boom (remember the early-mid 90's?) because of this.
sure, only a small portion of the people who'd buy the cards would use these features that the article talks about, but they'd be people that didn't have that capability before. Whenever this happens in any medium/artform/what-have-you, there is the tendency for a lot of experimental stuff to appear. I think we have some very interesting times ahead of us if someone gets these drivers written.
And, apparently, he's actually got a real game out there based on his recent comic book work, Danger Girl
Ok, so it's not exactly Lockarm.
I wonder whatever became of that game. Does anybody know? I tried doing a search for it and the only relevant links I got were broken.
Game design seems to be like a disease in that you can't seem to stop making games even if you want to.
Surgeon General's Warning: Developing games has been found to be more addictive than playing Tetris, Grand Theft Auto, and Civilization combined. May cause insomnia, unstoppable craving for junk food, and irritability towards marketing people. Pregnant women who develop games may cause birth defects in their child including, but not limited to: indecipherable "Mario" voice, polygonal physique, pixelated skin tones, and an uncontrollable terror at the mere thought of the existance of marketing people.
I've been reading through some of the news and related sites on this topic and it seems the possibility exists that one or more of these gnutella clients that send massive numbers of request in such short periods could actually be a maliciously intended program. Some of the developers who make these have yet to respond to any of these problems even though there have been repeated attempts to contact them about the situation. The way some (I'm looking at QTRAXMAX right now) word their sales pitch, it sounds eerily similar to some e-mails I've gotten with links to these sites or those mysterious 53k-attachments-to-emails-that-just-say-hi-from-so me-guy-named-boris-in-siberia that are so obviously worms or viruses. The way they currently work looks eerily similar to a DoS attack. Use people's own greed to flood a network with requests. It would actually be a pretty clever strategy - millions of users instantly flock to the program to maximize their gain out of gnutella, only to block each other out when they send 83 gazillion file requests a second. Classic Nash.
Who would be behind such an attack? There are many possibilities. The recording industry is definately one of them. There could be others. Who knows.
The point is you should all be careful what you install on your computer or even download. Millions of people around the world know how to program at varying levels of control over many different kinds of computers with different purposes. It's like the Force - some use it for good, some don't. There's bound to be at least a couple who are going to write a full-fledged application that is really just one big worm.
heh - Take a number. Interesting. Sounds pretty in line with traditional CS concepts - so it shouldn't be too difficult to implement, and might actually solve the problem.
That is exactly the reason why I voted Green in the last election and not for Gore (Bush is even worse in this respect), who had some significant financial backing from several Microsoft executives.
Matter of fact, that's the sort of thing that Ralph Nader wants to put an end to.
The article mentions an organization in austrailia known as ARIA, the Austrailian Recording Industry Association, that "may seek discussions with the federal government if Berman's bill is adopted in the U.S."
.au on the end of its address. There's been more than a few good things to come from down under into Hollywood. Not sure about the music guys tho - the only notable austrailian bands I can think of offhand that have had any kind of success in the US are Chumbawumba and Men At Work. Doesn't seem like much of a loss to them if you ask me - though some of those bands that do "world tours" might have to divert themselves to New Zealand or Antarctica (wouldn't that be fun?).
From the look of things, it looks like the recording industry is waiting to see how the bill goes through legislation in the U.S. before persuing it elsewhere. They might be stupid enough to pick cyber-fights with thousands of hackers using DOS-attacks, but they're probably not that stupid as to alienate themselves from a country like Austrailia. So in the worst-case scenario where ARIA tells the RIAA to jam their thumbs up their bum holes, we would have a situation where the individual industries would have to make a choice - cut themselves off from Austrailia, never ever traveling there or having any sort of business dealings there, or find a better solution to their problem.
At least the movie execs might think twice before DOSing anything with a
I think the USA can learn a lot from Italy's way of life ;).
0 3&mode=thread&tid=153
Kinda like how they take those naughty, evil, blaspheming web sites (who cares where they're hosted) and plaster the special police's logo over the welcome page?
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/07/10/04502