>>>>>>>>>
His physics are independent of the frame rate. The physics are done right. I was actually confused when I read the/. article, then I read the real article on what the problem was, and it made more sense. For simplicity's sake, lets say that we have a ball travelling on a simple arc, with just gravity affecting it. What you normally do is calculate the ball's position on the curve, look and see what the last frame on the curve was, and create a pill shaped collision from the last point on the curve to the current point on the curve, then do collision detection on that. In this example, my physics are correct, as the arc is calculated using calculus, so I can figure out at what point the ball is at given any particlar time, and is independent of the frame rate. But lets say that the arc spans from 1-10 frames, with 5 being the peak of the arc. If I do my collision detection on frames 4 and 6, then when I generate the collision pill, it will cut out the peak of the curve. At that point, my collisions have become dependent on the frame rate, even though my physics are not. Calculating the collision volume for a sphere, moving along a simple arc, is trivial, so in this case, I could solve my problem rather easily. However, creating a collision volume for a 1000+ polygon character, using true polygonal collision, along a curve, is MUCH more difficult, and beyond the scope of a real time game.
Ironically enough, I have a couple friends in television advertising, and all of them own Tivo's, as do most everyone else at their respective places of work.
From what I understand, tricking the brain into thinking you are moving is something that can be done with current resolutions, you just need a large screen and a much higher frame rate. I don't have any links, but I distinctly remember reading something about once you get to about 120 fps, its quite easy to fool the brain.
"Their advantage is that they are a small developer with a producer (Microsoft) who keeps its dirty little hands off."
Not necessarily true. This was true in the past, sure, when they were located in Chicago, but after being purchased by Microsoft, they moved the entire company onto the Microsoft campus in Seattle. Not only that, but I believe both the original principals of Bungie have left the company, so as far as I understand it, this will be the first title done completely by the Microsoft owned Bungie. Remember, Halo was almost complete as a PC/Mac game when Microsoft bought them and it was moved to the XBox, so the design was long done when the XBox version we all know and love was completed. I don't doubt it will be good, but just food for thought.
And no car thief would think to do something like, ummm, pull the fuse dedicated to powering the OnStar system, like is described in this link?
http://www.hypertech-inc.com/pp4pg2.html
Part of the reason for this is what I believe is the size of the disk, which results in both faster spin up/spin down times, faster seeks, and faster reads. I worked on a game that was both PS2 and GameCube, and although the data that was loaded was the same size on both discs, the GameCube loaded in about 1/10th the time of the PS2.
The PS1 consisted of more than just an R3000. It also had a math/transform chip, a GPU, and a sound chip. All though the PS2 does not need to emulate the R3000, it does emulate the rest of the PS1's chips, as well as things like memory layout, CPU speed, etc.
"Our forces were ordered to commit atrocities and did so. While there are debatable justifications for the war itself, there is little justification for some of the tactics we used..."
Atrocities like locking up all the Japanese-Americans who lived on the West Coast and putting them into camps? Atrocities like fire-bombing the largely civilian city of Dresden? I think the only big difference between WWII and Vietnam is that history is written by the winner, and in Vietnam, we didn't win. From what I understand, there were many protests against our involvement in WWII here in the US, even after Pearl Harbor. The difference was we won, and they were conveniently left out. Notice the big differences between other war games and Vietnam. We won all our other wars. And who was it that said "History is written by the winner"? Makes you think, doesn't it?
Something you seem to be missing with your example of "giving them the proper amounts of gratification at proper times" is that if you don't do it this way, the game just isn't fun. The game is supposed to be a challenge without being frustrating. If you let the user win all the time, then there is no challenge, and the game is no fun. If you make it too difficult, then the user never wins, and there is no challenge. So the challenge is to make a game that is just easy enough that you can beat whatever puzzle right at the point where the user is about to give up. But making a parallel between drugs/gambling and video games is flawed in that, I as a video game developer, make no additional income if the user becomes "addicted" to my game. A drug dealer/casino makes additional money the more you play. Each game costs something. As a video game developer, I make money only once, when the user buys the game. After that, I no longer make any money from the user, so to be honest, from a business perspective, I don't really care if the user continues to play, or becomes "hooked" on the title I am working on. And sure, if I get the "hooked" they may buy my next game, but that is 2 years down the line, so its easy enough using marketing to get them to buy the game regardless. Consumer memories are short. Anyway, that's just my view on it, but then again, being in the video game development industry myself, my view may be distorted.
Namco was also the original developer of games like PacMan, even though Midway distributed it in the US. As for acquiring Atari's arcade division in the 90's, I do believe that is wrong. WMS Industries (Williams/Midway) acquired it, hence games like San Francisco Rush being released under the Atari name when in the arcades. Someone else owned the Atari name for home releases (not Namco), and everything that was Atari in the arcades was rebranded as a Midway game when released for the home. The Atari that was owned by Midway was all headquartered in Atari's original location in the San Francisco Bay Area, and had many of the original employees, including Ed Logg of Asteroids fame.
They cheat on the FSAA. What they do is they don't actually sample the entire screen, they basically just run AA on the textures when they are rendered, then anti-alias the edges as they are rendered. Although technically what you said is true, if you think about it, its fairly unfeasable to say, render it at double resolution (say 3200x2400), then render that down into 1 1600x1200 screen. The memory requirements alone are massive. 1 24 bit 1600x1200 screen is 5.76 megs of video memory as it is, so one at 3200x2400x24 bits is roughly 24 megs. That is a lot of video memory to be using just for anti-aliasing, not to mention, can you imagine what kind of memory bandwidth you'd need to move that much data around every frame?
I am in the video game industry, and I have to say that the development teams themselves are not the ones at fault. If I am working on a title, its not left up to me when something is considered done and when its not. I keep submitting it to a test department, and I keep getting a list of bugs that I fix in the next release that then goes back to test. This cycle continues until some producer says "Ship it".
In the highly competitive video game industry, where development teams are the critical path to completion and there are too few developers and too many games, salaries for developers have been going up not down, so lack of motiviation by the teams has not been an issue.
My guess as to what causes these problems is some guy somewhere decides that he wants a game with X and Y features. He then decides it needs to be done by Z date, after which he hires a development team who has never been asked whether the specified dates and/or feature lists are reasonable.
Being a part of the video game industry, being part of the IDSA or ESA is highly encouraged, but I happened to get my membership renewal form on the same day I saw an article about them sending cease and desist orders to people who have websites related to old arcade game ROMs. Thats when I decided that they get no more of my money.
I mean this in all seriousness, Doom3 has been announced as an XBox title. We'll see if it comes out first on XBox, then on PC, but as far as consoles go, I do believe it is exclusively XBox.
Although I understand where you're coming from, there is the issue that these people are paying a monthly fee to play a game thats supposed to be enjoyable. When the experience is ruined because some moron has found a way to harrass other users, it can be quite infuriating.
Ummm, and how exactly are they going to fix bugs in SOCOM? Since you don't have a HD to save changes to. They could send out CDs I suppose, but that seems prohibitively expensive.
I was using them in Chicago 2 or 3 years ago, and they were great then. I had to pay 90 bux a month because I had to get SDSL and wanted 768k both ways, but with that they gave 10 static IPs, which was awesome. I always had a great experience with them.
I spent a good year of my life with just cash. Didn't even own a bank account, would just go cash my paychecks. No credit cards, no checks, etc. It was a strangely exhilirating feeling, but it was also surprising how many times I got into arguments with different utilities about whether they had to accept cash as payment. Ameritech was especially bad about it, they never made it easy for me to pay my phone bill.
I thought part of the reason they tend to enforce their copyrights, even when they have no financial gain in doing so, is to maintain the copyright. From my understanding, if you openly let people copy your copyrighted material, it in essence sets a precedent, and it becomes much more difficult to enforce your copyright later on. You have to make an effort to stop people from violating your copyright, even it is just a cease-and-desist. This is to prevent something me from creating a piece of software that is incredibly useful and has no copy protection, and not enforcing the copyright on it, so that it becomes a de-facto standard, and then suing everyone later on for violating my copyright.
Not necessarily because your SS is private, and you want to keep it that way, but to keep marketing companies from being able to cross-reference records from a multitude of different places. That is why I refuse to give out my SS #, or I just make one up. It does add the additional hassle of having to remember several different SS #s, write them down somewhere, or coming up a system for them, but it does limit the marketing information that is available on you. To me, that is worth something, and I can do it at minimal cost to myself.
It worked simply by detecting the volume increase. Commercials *tend* to be at higher volume than the shows, so by searching for an increase in volume that continues for some amount of time, you can detect the commercials. It works most of the time, but I always thought the 30 second skip was better, because if it decided to not record something in my show because the volume detect did not work, then I would just get pissed off. The 30 second skip is easy enough to use.
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>>>>>>>>> His physics are independent of the frame rate. The physics are done right. I was actually confused when I read the /. article, then I read the real article on what the problem was, and it made more sense. For simplicity's sake, lets say that we have a ball travelling on a simple arc, with just gravity affecting it. What you normally do is calculate the ball's position on the curve, look and see what the last frame on the curve was, and create a pill shaped collision from the last point on the curve to the current point on the curve, then do collision detection on that. In this example, my physics are correct, as the arc is calculated using calculus, so I can figure out at what point the ball is at given any particlar time, and is independent of the frame rate. But lets say that the arc spans from 1-10 frames, with 5 being the peak of the arc. If I do my collision detection on frames 4 and 6, then when I generate the collision pill, it will cut out the peak of the curve. At that point, my collisions have become dependent on the frame rate, even though my physics are not. Calculating the collision volume for a sphere, moving along a simple arc, is trivial, so in this case, I could solve my problem rather easily. However, creating a collision volume for a 1000+ polygon character, using true polygonal collision, along a curve, is MUCH more difficult, and beyond the scope of a real time game.
Ironically enough, I have a couple friends in television advertising, and all of them own Tivo's, as do most everyone else at their respective places of work.
Actually, from what I understand, Armadillo != bunch of ex-games developers, but Armadillo == 1 gamedeveloper & at least 1 former rocket scientist.
From what I understand, tricking the brain into thinking you are moving is something that can be done with current resolutions, you just need a large screen and a much higher frame rate. I don't have any links, but I distinctly remember reading something about once you get to about 120 fps, its quite easy to fool the brain.
"Their advantage is that they are a small developer with a producer (Microsoft) who keeps its dirty little hands off." Not necessarily true. This was true in the past, sure, when they were located in Chicago, but after being purchased by Microsoft, they moved the entire company onto the Microsoft campus in Seattle. Not only that, but I believe both the original principals of Bungie have left the company, so as far as I understand it, this will be the first title done completely by the Microsoft owned Bungie. Remember, Halo was almost complete as a PC/Mac game when Microsoft bought them and it was moved to the XBox, so the design was long done when the XBox version we all know and love was completed. I don't doubt it will be good, but just food for thought.
That game was quite fun, and all the rooms where randomly generated each time you played. In addition, it was always possible to beat the game.
And no car thief would think to do something like, ummm, pull the fuse dedicated to powering the OnStar system, like is described in this link? http://www.hypertech-inc.com/pp4pg2.html
Part of the reason for this is what I believe is the size of the disk, which results in both faster spin up/spin down times, faster seeks, and faster reads. I worked on a game that was both PS2 and GameCube, and although the data that was loaded was the same size on both discs, the GameCube loaded in about 1/10th the time of the PS2.
The PS1 consisted of more than just an R3000. It also had a math/transform chip, a GPU, and a sound chip. All though the PS2 does not need to emulate the R3000, it does emulate the rest of the PS1's chips, as well as things like memory layout, CPU speed, etc.
"Our forces were ordered to commit atrocities and did so. While there are debatable justifications for the war itself, there is little justification for some of the tactics we used..." Atrocities like locking up all the Japanese-Americans who lived on the West Coast and putting them into camps? Atrocities like fire-bombing the largely civilian city of Dresden? I think the only big difference between WWII and Vietnam is that history is written by the winner, and in Vietnam, we didn't win. From what I understand, there were many protests against our involvement in WWII here in the US, even after Pearl Harbor. The difference was we won, and they were conveniently left out. Notice the big differences between other war games and Vietnam. We won all our other wars. And who was it that said "History is written by the winner"? Makes you think, doesn't it?
Something you seem to be missing with your example of "giving them the proper amounts of gratification at proper times" is that if you don't do it this way, the game just isn't fun. The game is supposed to be a challenge without being frustrating. If you let the user win all the time, then there is no challenge, and the game is no fun. If you make it too difficult, then the user never wins, and there is no challenge. So the challenge is to make a game that is just easy enough that you can beat whatever puzzle right at the point where the user is about to give up. But making a parallel between drugs/gambling and video games is flawed in that, I as a video game developer, make no additional income if the user becomes "addicted" to my game. A drug dealer/casino makes additional money the more you play. Each game costs something. As a video game developer, I make money only once, when the user buys the game. After that, I no longer make any money from the user, so to be honest, from a business perspective, I don't really care if the user continues to play, or becomes "hooked" on the title I am working on. And sure, if I get the "hooked" they may buy my next game, but that is 2 years down the line, so its easy enough using marketing to get them to buy the game regardless. Consumer memories are short. Anyway, that's just my view on it, but then again, being in the video game development industry myself, my view may be distorted.
Namco was also the original developer of games like PacMan, even though Midway distributed it in the US. As for acquiring Atari's arcade division in the 90's, I do believe that is wrong. WMS Industries (Williams/Midway) acquired it, hence games like San Francisco Rush being released under the Atari name when in the arcades. Someone else owned the Atari name for home releases (not Namco), and everything that was Atari in the arcades was rebranded as a Midway game when released for the home. The Atari that was owned by Midway was all headquartered in Atari's original location in the San Francisco Bay Area, and had many of the original employees, including Ed Logg of Asteroids fame.
They cheat on the FSAA. What they do is they don't actually sample the entire screen, they basically just run AA on the textures when they are rendered, then anti-alias the edges as they are rendered. Although technically what you said is true, if you think about it, its fairly unfeasable to say, render it at double resolution (say 3200x2400), then render that down into 1 1600x1200 screen. The memory requirements alone are massive. 1 24 bit 1600x1200 screen is 5.76 megs of video memory as it is, so one at 3200x2400x24 bits is roughly 24 megs. That is a lot of video memory to be using just for anti-aliasing, not to mention, can you imagine what kind of memory bandwidth you'd need to move that much data around every frame?
I am in the video game industry, and I have to say that the development teams themselves are not the ones at fault. If I am working on a title, its not left up to me when something is considered done and when its not. I keep submitting it to a test department, and I keep getting a list of bugs that I fix in the next release that then goes back to test. This cycle continues until some producer says "Ship it". In the highly competitive video game industry, where development teams are the critical path to completion and there are too few developers and too many games, salaries for developers have been going up not down, so lack of motiviation by the teams has not been an issue. My guess as to what causes these problems is some guy somewhere decides that he wants a game with X and Y features. He then decides it needs to be done by Z date, after which he hires a development team who has never been asked whether the specified dates and/or feature lists are reasonable.
Being a part of the video game industry, being part of the IDSA or ESA is highly encouraged, but I happened to get my membership renewal form on the same day I saw an article about them sending cease and desist orders to people who have websites related to old arcade game ROMs. Thats when I decided that they get no more of my money.
I mean this in all seriousness, Doom3 has been announced as an XBox title. We'll see if it comes out first on XBox, then on PC, but as far as consoles go, I do believe it is exclusively XBox.
Although I understand where you're coming from, there is the issue that these people are paying a monthly fee to play a game thats supposed to be enjoyable. When the experience is ruined because some moron has found a way to harrass other users, it can be quite infuriating.
Ummm, and how exactly are they going to fix bugs in SOCOM? Since you don't have a HD to save changes to. They could send out CDs I suppose, but that seems prohibitively expensive.
I was using them in Chicago 2 or 3 years ago, and they were great then. I had to pay 90 bux a month because I had to get SDSL and wanted 768k both ways, but with that they gave 10 static IPs, which was awesome. I always had a great experience with them.
I spent a good year of my life with just cash. Didn't even own a bank account, would just go cash my paychecks. No credit cards, no checks, etc. It was a strangely exhilirating feeling, but it was also surprising how many times I got into arguments with different utilities about whether they had to accept cash as payment. Ameritech was especially bad about it, they never made it easy for me to pay my phone bill.
When it said take a look, I was hoping for cool server room pictures, but no.....
I thought part of the reason they tend to enforce their copyrights, even when they have no financial gain in doing so, is to maintain the copyright. From my understanding, if you openly let people copy your copyrighted material, it in essence sets a precedent, and it becomes much more difficult to enforce your copyright later on. You have to make an effort to stop people from violating your copyright, even it is just a cease-and-desist. This is to prevent something me from creating a piece of software that is incredibly useful and has no copy protection, and not enforcing the copyright on it, so that it becomes a de-facto standard, and then suing everyone later on for violating my copyright.
Why does it need to be in mint condition? Your mame version looks like a computer, a generic cabinet should be fine for you.
Not necessarily because your SS is private, and you want to keep it that way, but to keep marketing companies from being able to cross-reference records from a multitude of different places. That is why I refuse to give out my SS #, or I just make one up. It does add the additional hassle of having to remember several different SS #s, write them down somewhere, or coming up a system for them, but it does limit the marketing information that is available on you. To me, that is worth something, and I can do it at minimal cost to myself.
It worked simply by detecting the volume increase. Commercials *tend* to be at higher volume than the shows, so by searching for an increase in volume that continues for some amount of time, you can detect the commercials. It works most of the time, but I always thought the 30 second skip was better, because if it decided to not record something in my show because the volume detect did not work, then I would just get pissed off. The 30 second skip is easy enough to use.