### It takes about 10-15 hours and when you're finished - you're finished.
In the PAL version you are not, in the second play through all 'alien' dialog language is translated to english. You however don't really need that to understand the story.
### So why use this system on a digital camera? You don't need it.
SLR gives you *much* better picture preview, getting a picture sharp by looking at a 160x100 (or whatever) LCD screen is basically impossible. There are also issues with the CCD getting hot and causing noise in the picture when exposed to light, thats why its keept in the dark on SLR cameras unless you actually take a picture. Those few SLR cameras that come with a LCD screen view use a second CCD chip to accomplish that, not the main one.
Where else would you point some 1920 person that wants to see what his stereoscopy photographs became? 3D hasn't really made much of an impact so far in the mainstream.
Telephones got smaller and wireless, the gramaphon turned into an iPod, instead of static stereoscopy images we now have the VirtualBoy, instead of a block of paper we have PDAs, instead of outlawing alchohol we are outlawing cigaretts, all pretty much the same if you ask me, just a bit smaller and wireless. The Internet is probally the most significant change, but even that isn't much more then a telegraph connection to your library. Dropping a person from the USA today into a different country on the other side of the globe would probally result in a larger shock then putting a 1920 USA citizen into 2006 USA.
Yes, its bad. Just compare it to the price of a full game, a full game gives you 10-20h of gameplay for $40. So the price of this episode is already equivalent to that of a short game in terms of gameplay hours per dollar. However with a full game you get a new engine and such, while with episodic content the engine is just recycled and some artwork probally as well, so you end up paying quite a bit more then you would have for a full game, $5-15 would be a better price, since it would put the retail price closer to the actual development costs.
Do you know what my first thoughts were when I saw Monkey Island for the first time ever back then in 1990? Can't remember my exact thoughts, but it was something along the line of "This are the best damn graphics I have ever seen in a game", "Maniac Mansion" earlier on the C64 triggered similar feelings. Adventure games simply were one of the best looking games around that time, all those Jump'n Runs and other tile based games just looked flat in comparism to the '3d' scenary you got in an adventure game. Now I am not saying that the technical aspects of graphics are overly important, but graphics itself, ie. the art behind them certainly is. MonkeyIsland1 vs MonkeyIsland4 kind of demonstrates that in a drastic way:
MonkeyIsland1 might suffer a bit from limited resolution and color palette, but boy, the art in there is just lightyears ahead of that shit that they put into MonkeyIsland4. So what does that mean? Not much probally, but it shows that advances in rendering don't necessarily lead to a better looking a game.
Now that brings us back to the Wii, on one side I don't see its limited abilities as much of a problem, especially since we don't know how limited it really will be (will there be HDR and Shaders support?). However its limits won't be a problem only as long as the developers make good use of what they have at hand. If they just try to develop the same style as they do for PS3 the Wii will probally end up with a bunch of ugly and jerky games, just look at 'Burnout' or 'NfS:Most Wanted' for the NintendoDS to see how wrong games can get if they are rushed and don't make proper use of the hardware.
In the end I think you are right, even with shiny high-end graphics, most of the 'world' in a game exists still mainly in our head and not just on the screen. What is shown on the screen however can and has to support the imagination and not work against it to make the game as a whole work. 'Photorealistic graphics' when done wrong can easily fall into the uncanny valley and spoil all imagination, while cartony graphics on the other side are reasonably save for most part. Now I don't want all games to look chartony, but developers have certainly to be carefull to create an overall pleasant looking game and pure CPU/GPU power alone won't help to compansate lack in arstitic skill. And as such lack of CPU/GPU power won't stop people from creating great looking games either, the days of 4 color CGA where lack of graphic ability might have hindered good looking games are long gone and no matter how much power the Wii has, it will certainly be more then enough to bringt some good graphics onto a TV screen.
### How exactly does this new email system stop phishing? Oh, right, it can't.
Properly sign mails and throw everything away that claims to be something, but doesn't come with proper signature. Today almost no mail is signed, so its impossible to figure out if its legit or not.
### How exactly does this new email system stop users from clicking executables thinking that they are going to see nudie pictures of Katie Holmes?
Thats the fault of the underlying OS or mail client, not the fault of email. Making executing.exe that came from email hard or impossible and the problem will disappear.
The main purpose of a rewrite should be to allow to properly track down from where a mail came, if you have that build into the system most problem will disappear sooner or later, especially when combined with proper legislation. With todays system on the other side its quite hard to properly track down the source of a mail, so all the legislation has little effect.
### Backward Compatibility, which the Wii and PS3 have and the XBox 360 doesn't
Wii is a very similar architecture to Gamecube, so backward compability is trivial, XBox360 is a completly different beast then XBox, so backward compability for old games is hard. Doesn't mean that Microsoft shouldn't spend some more time to improve compability, but its a harder task then Nintendo has. Can't say anything about the PS3, not sure if they go emulation or just stick a PS2 into the PS3 box.
### A tilt sensing controller, which the Wii and PS3 have and the XBox 360 doesn't: Not important, gamers didn't really want it anyway.
Sony cloned Nintendo and didn't even tell the developers of their new features till a few weeks before E3, so there exist nothing that shows if the controller is actually usefull in most games, let alone the removal of rumble. Microsoft released their console long before that and Microsoft actually was the first to release a tilting controller back in 1999 for the PC, didn't work for them, so they didn't try it again, instead they simply improved their current controller, nothing wrong with that.
### Free online, which the Wii and PS3 have and the XBox 360 doesn't
PS3s press conference didn't make it look exactly 'free', half the talk was about buying stuff via PS3 online, the basic access might be free, but they seem to intend to make money whereever they can. Beside from that we havn't seen either PS3 or Nintendo Online in action, if they get close to what Microsoft has developed has to be seen. XBox Live is out now, Sony and Nintendos stuff isn't.
### 1020p, which the PS3 has and the XBox 360 doesn't
Its 1080p, anyway, hardly any HDTV supports, so its really no big deal to leave it out if it keeps costs down (hint: ~$200 price difference have a reason...).
Better backward compability and free online would of course be nice for the XBox360, but I find little to complain about Microsoft, they might not be the most innovative in town, but they deliver a good product for a fair price. Nintendos 'we don't do graphics' approach might be more innovative, but there are certainly enough games around we don't mind a bit more graphical bang for the buck.
### The trouble is that games do have low level optimisations that aren't trivial to port. And then there's the shader programs that would have to be rewritten for the different GPU.
Microsoft has a emulator for running XBox games on XBox360, so whatever technique they used in that thing should be moveabel down into API space so that developers can make use of it. Or if all fails they could simply let the devolpers tweak the emulotar so that it will run their game *before* shipping it. However as it is now XBox games have zero gurantee that they ever will run on XBox360, not even if the developers would want it. Which really makes the XBox360 transition a lot harder then it needs to be.
### It's far from trivial. Different CPU and different GPU.
Both architectures however are programable with DirectX, so unless you have something highly optimized for one architecture, it should be trivial to port via a simple recompile, especially when the porting is already taken into account right in the beginning. And even if there are differences in the API, it should be trivial for Microsoft to fix those. That 'porting' wouldn't be meant to create a full XBox360 version, but just a XBox version running on a XBox360, so I really don't see where there would be much difficulty involved.
### It's like porting a Windows game to run on a Power Mac.
PowerMac doesn't have DirectX, but OpenGL, thats a whole different beast. Porting apps from PowerPC to IntelMac for example is simple, different arch, but same API, porting apps from IntelMac to Windows PC on the other side is extremly hard, same arch but very different API.
### Clearly, they haven't gone back and tried playing those games now that their standards are higher.
I have gone back to many games and even visited plenty of new games of the old times which I have missed back then and most of them are still extremly amazing, sure, graphics might no longer be top notch, but gameplay is still pretty much wonderfull. The only real issue I have with games of the past is that their interface can suffer from some larger usability issues, this are mostly no big deal when you get used to them, but they can hinder getting into a game (having to press 'Select' instead of up/down to move between savegames in Zelda, having to do a lot of more clicking to get something done in Warcraft or Dune then in todays RTS, etc).
### Hit things and die, jump around, solve a puzzle, hit things and die.
That sounds just like todays games, only that todays games often interrupt the action with more or less useless cutscenes and other annoyancies, while old games focus on the important part. And speaking about story, most old adventure games still beat the shit out of todays games in terms of story.
### Today, ordinary kids have made superior games using nothing more than Flash.
Please show me a few flash games that come even close to the greatness of a SuperMarioBros or Metroid, sure there are plenty of flash games around, but most of them suck in terms of gameplay quite a lot and aren't really good for anything more then a few minutes of distraction.
Hell, there are still major releases coming out for the X-Box which aren't compatible with the 360.
This is what is puzzling me, wouldn't it be rather trivial to allow developers to compile their newly released games for XBox360 as well and then just ship both binaries on the same DVD, so that the game could run on XBox as well as XBox360 out of the box? This however doesn't seem to be the case, this is a comment from the developer of Dreamfall, a recently released XBox Title:
Will it run on an xbox360 (emulated xbox) ?
Not for the time being, no. Microsoft alone makes the call whether or not to support a game through emulation, and if so, they'll issue a patch for download at a later stage. I hope they do, of course, but we have absolutely no say in that decision. They're good people, and they like the game, so maybe we'll get lucky. Fingers crossed.
This really doesn't look like Microsoft has much of a plan on how to handle their backward compatibility properly when not even the developers themself have any say in XBox360 compatibilty.
Backward compability only goes till the GameboySP, both the NintendoDS and Micro no longer offer full backward compability, which is quite a shame, since even without extra hardware it would have been trivial to do it in software.
Creating tools is half the work that goes into creating a game. You can't expect people to create levels, if there isn't a level editor available and neither can you expect good 3d models, if the most common modelers aren't supported due to the lack of export/converter scripts. Last not least many things simply are done better in code then in content, a physics engine will make realistic behaviour of the environment much easier then trying to fake it via hand animated stuff, caustics or water in general are easy to generate by algorithm, but hard if you try to hand draw them, etc.
Just because one is able to slam together a bit of content to test an engine, doesn't mean that the engine is good enough to produce a full game if there aren't any good tools around to work with.
ACK, or even if people do work on engines, don't just concentrate on the engine itself, but also on the tools surrounding the engine, nothing sucks more to have a shiny open source engine, but then no exporter available to export some Blender model into the engine.
You look at them and if they both are good enough, you use them both in the game, more varity is a good thing after all. There are of course issues when an animation/model/texture doesn't fit the style of the game, but for such one simply needs a style-guide and or a lead artists doing most of the art for a project. This is really not so much different then with coding, especially with game coding, since there isn't any easy way to tell which thing is better either, especially when it comes to stuff that is gameplay relevant and not just polygon plotting. I might be able to messure the performance of a piece of code, but for most code speed is not really an issue, API elegance, easy to maintain it and such are often far more important and not really easy to messure either. Last not least most artwork and code will be something new, not an improvment to existing code, so you don't have anything to compare with to begin with.
### "ok, here's what I did, tell me what's wrong but DON'T fix it, I'll fix it myself".
This has not only something todo with artwork itself, but also with the fileformats in use, with code I can diff/patch, see the differences, compare and merge them. With an image/model I get two chunks of raw data, I can view them, but I can't merge them without lots of additional work, which makes collaboration a lot more difficult, since conflicts are much harder to resolve then with code.
### What I have found, and it is really a strange thing to me, but many projects simply do not want to accept contributions from artists.
I think the biggest problem isn't that they don't accept contributions from artists, but much more basic, most projects simply lack almost any kind of organisations. So nobody knows what needs to be done or when it should be done or even how. With engine coding that isn't to much of a problem, since everybody can just code a bit here and there and have his fun, maybe even producing something half usable in the end. But with games its pretty much catastrophic when nobody knows, not even the maintainer, what should be finished next and often not even what should be produced in the end, let alone things like style guides, specs about intended triangle count for and object, etc. So the thing isn't so much that they don't want to accept contributions, but simply that they can't, because they have no idea what to do with the contributions or which contributions are needed.
At least thats experince with doing graphics for OpenSource games.
### What would be nice is some sort of site like sourceforge but for creative commons licensed artwork that open source games could make use of.
Yes, such a thing could definitvly be usefull, while not necessary for direct in-game use, it can be quite helpfull to have some 3d models or drawings for inspiration or reference. I once started such a thing, but it never went very far:
### By having a law stating that a child cannot buy a game, the Government is the one saying what's okay and what's not. Not you. The government.
Wrong, the government, or whoever would rate the games in the end, isn't saying what is ok and what is not, it would only be a recommendation, nothing more. If a parent thinks his son/daughter is mature enough for some more gory content there is nothing stoping that parent from buying the game for his/her child. The point is that the parent should be the one buying the game, not the child.
Are there any gameplay videos available for Bioshock and Assassin's Creed? For Assassin's Creed there only seems to be a (realtime?) render movie and in one of the interview videos one can see like 5sec of what might be real gameplay, but nothing more. For Bioshock I couldn't find anything at all beside some screenshots.
Even Nintendo themself don't seem to consider that connection feature important at all, else they might have taken the time to add a link port to the NintendoDS, which they didn't, so no NDSGCN link.
The only game where that linking was used in a good way was Zelda Four Swords, but even that game would have been possible without it if they simply added some splitscreen. Beside from that I have yet to see a game where the linking was used for more then locking up some features of the game to force users to get a GBA and a specific GBA game (MetroidPrime->MetroidFusion) to unlock the whole GCN game or to simply force having GBAs to have the game playable at all (Crystal Chronicals) in multiplayer.
In the end the linking feature simply was and is very gymmicy in every way, not because Sony-fanboys said so, but because it simply had little to no use in the whole lifecycle of the GCN. And Sonys PSPPS3 link features seems to be no different, given that all they could come up with was a rear-mirror for a racing game for the press conference.
Prices in the US are given without taxes, prices in the EU with taxes. Also the EU laws force two year warranty on all kinds of electronic products, which US law does not, which also increases the price a bit. There are also other laws that require manufactors to take their electronic products back to recycle them and such. Not sure how each of them exactly affects the price, but they certainly do to some degree leading to the $ == EUR price tags in the end.
Nice math there, however I thing your conclusion is fundamentally wrong. People don't by a console in the hope that it cost will have amortized in a few years, they buy them to have fun right now and here. So to turn things around, say one spends $1500 in the 5 years of the lifetime a console might have, that means aproximatly $300 per year. For the Wii that means the console itself and two games in the first year and then every two month a new game in the coming years, for the PS3 on the other side that means two years without any games at all, since the whole gaming budget for those years is already spend for the console itself. Not exactly an attractive buy.
Since people don't always exactly time their budget on a yearly basis the reality might look a bit different, but no matter how you turn it, the $600 PS3 will punch a large hole into peoples pockets and it will take quite a bit of time to recover from there (or get there in the first place).
If Sony wants the PS3 to be a success they have to get the price down a lot and that really really fast, else I can't imagine that all the developers and users will stay with them much longer.
### There's no possible way that you can know that. You just think it's unlikely that there will ever be animators skilled enough to be a real actor's equal.
Have you ever seen anything hand animated that came even close to real motion or well, any kind of computer animation of a human where you couldn't tell if its real? I havn't, there is after all a reason why we use motion capture these days. Hand animation never did produce realistic results, it can produce good and usefull results (cartoon), but there is no way you will ever get very realistic results out of it, let alone in reasonable time. The human motion is quite a bit to complex to be replicated manually by hand.
That however doesn't mean that a CGI actor will never replace a real one. However to produce a realistic CGI actor we would first need a way to generate the proper motion, even motion capture is quite limited, since it leaves out far to many details. Beside from that it would be cheating, what got is it to replace a real actor, when all you do is moving him into the motion capture studio to do his moves there, instead of infront of a camera? You still would have to pay him, and you also in addition now need to pay the anmiators and other personal that will transfer him into CGI. So instead of motion capture we would need a way to generate motion automatically, basically creating something like a virtual human that we can give direction and some attributes and then will perform something to our liking, when we have that, we might get closer to replacing a real actor, but we are nowhere near that. There is some progress in that area, but its still pretty much in its very early days, since it doesn't go bejoint some half realistic reaction to collisions and a bit of walking. Something that looks realistic enough to replace a real actor is still far far away, 20 years at least I would say. But if that, even when it looks realistic, is good enough to replace a good real actor is still quite doubtfull.
For the next years computer animation will still be either cartoony or all backed up by motion capture, meaning you will 'replace' a "real actor" with a "real actor + animator + motion capture crew +...", not exactly a way to make things cheaper, but a way to give some more flexibility in what a actor can do.
Slashdot Mirror
### It takes about 10-15 hours and when you're finished - you're finished.
In the PAL version you are not, in the second play through all 'alien' dialog language is translated to english. You however don't really need that to understand the story.
### So why use this system on a digital camera? You don't need it.
SLR gives you *much* better picture preview, getting a picture sharp by looking at a 160x100 (or whatever) LCD screen is basically impossible. There are also issues with the CCD getting hot and causing noise in the picture when exposed to light, thats why its keept in the dark on SLR cameras unless you actually take a picture. Those few SLR cameras that come with a LCD screen view use a second CCD chip to accomplish that, not the main one.
Where else would you point some 1920 person that wants to see what his stereoscopy photographs became? 3D hasn't really made much of an impact so far in the mainstream.
Telephones got smaller and wireless, the gramaphon turned into an iPod, instead of static stereoscopy images we now have the VirtualBoy, instead of a block of paper we have PDAs, instead of outlawing alchohol we are outlawing cigaretts, all pretty much the same if you ask me, just a bit smaller and wireless. The Internet is probally the most significant change, but even that isn't much more then a telegraph connection to your library. Dropping a person from the USA today into a different country on the other side of the globe would probally result in a larger shock then putting a 1920 USA citizen into 2006 USA.
### Is $20 for 5 hours really that bad?
Yes, its bad. Just compare it to the price of a full game, a full game gives you 10-20h of gameplay for $40. So the price of this episode is already equivalent to that of a short game in terms of gameplay hours per dollar. However with a full game you get a new engine and such, while with episodic content the engine is just recycled and some artwork probally as well, so you end up paying quite a bit more then you would have for a full game, $5-15 would be a better price, since it would put the retail price closer to the actual development costs.
Do you know what my first thoughts were when I saw Monkey Island for the first time ever back then in 1990? Can't remember my exact thoughts, but it was something along the line of "This are the best damn graphics I have ever seen in a game", "Maniac Mansion" earlier on the C64 triggered similar feelings. Adventure games simply were one of the best looking games around that time, all those Jump'n Runs and other tile based games just looked flat in comparism to the '3d' scenary you got in an adventure game. Now I am not saying that the technical aspects of graphics are overly important, but graphics itself, ie. the art behind them certainly is. MonkeyIsland1 vs MonkeyIsland4 kind of demonstrates that in a drastic way:
/ images/mi4_019.jpg
http://www.vgmuseum.com/end/scd/a/monkey-25.gif
http://bonusweb.idnes.cz/obrazek/na_mi05.jpg
vs
http://www.activewin.com/reviews/software/games/m
MonkeyIsland1 might suffer a bit from limited resolution and color palette, but boy, the art in there is just lightyears ahead of that shit that they put into MonkeyIsland4. So what does that mean? Not much probally, but it shows that advances in rendering don't necessarily lead to a better looking a game.
Now that brings us back to the Wii, on one side I don't see its limited abilities as much of a problem, especially since we don't know how limited it really will be (will there be HDR and Shaders support?). However its limits won't be a problem only as long as the developers make good use of what they have at hand. If they just try to develop the same style as they do for PS3 the Wii will probally end up with a bunch of ugly and jerky games, just look at 'Burnout' or 'NfS:Most Wanted' for the NintendoDS to see how wrong games can get if they are rushed and don't make proper use of the hardware.
In the end I think you are right, even with shiny high-end graphics, most of the 'world' in a game exists still mainly in our head and not just on the screen. What is shown on the screen however can and has to support the imagination and not work against it to make the game as a whole work. 'Photorealistic graphics' when done wrong can easily fall into the uncanny valley and spoil all imagination, while cartony graphics on the other side are reasonably save for most part. Now I don't want all games to look chartony, but developers have certainly to be carefull to create an overall pleasant looking game and pure CPU/GPU power alone won't help to compansate lack in arstitic skill. And as such lack of CPU/GPU power won't stop people from creating great looking games either, the days of 4 color CGA where lack of graphic ability might have hindered good looking games are long gone and no matter how much power the Wii has, it will certainly be more then enough to bringt some good graphics onto a TV screen.
### How exactly does this new email system stop phishing? Oh, right, it can't.
.exe that came from email hard or impossible and the problem will disappear.
Properly sign mails and throw everything away that claims to be something, but doesn't come with proper signature. Today almost no mail is signed, so its impossible to figure out if its legit or not.
### How exactly does this new email system stop users from clicking executables thinking that they are going to see nudie pictures of Katie Holmes?
Thats the fault of the underlying OS or mail client, not the fault of email. Making executing
The main purpose of a rewrite should be to allow to properly track down from where a mail came, if you have that build into the system most problem will disappear sooner or later, especially when combined with proper legislation. With todays system on the other side its quite hard to properly track down the source of a mail, so all the legislation has little effect.
### Backward Compatibility, which the Wii and PS3 have and the XBox 360 doesn't
Wii is a very similar architecture to Gamecube, so backward compability is trivial, XBox360 is a completly different beast then XBox, so backward compability for old games is hard. Doesn't mean that Microsoft shouldn't spend some more time to improve compability, but its a harder task then Nintendo has. Can't say anything about the PS3, not sure if they go emulation or just stick a PS2 into the PS3 box.
### A tilt sensing controller, which the Wii and PS3 have and the XBox 360 doesn't: Not important, gamers didn't really want it anyway.
Sony cloned Nintendo and didn't even tell the developers of their new features till a few weeks before E3, so there exist nothing that shows if the controller is actually usefull in most games, let alone the removal of rumble. Microsoft released their console long before that and Microsoft actually was the first to release a tilting controller back in 1999 for the PC, didn't work for them, so they didn't try it again, instead they simply improved their current controller, nothing wrong with that.
### Free online, which the Wii and PS3 have and the XBox 360 doesn't
PS3s press conference didn't make it look exactly 'free', half the talk was about buying stuff via PS3 online, the basic access might be free, but they seem to intend to make money whereever they can. Beside from that we havn't seen either PS3 or Nintendo Online in action, if they get close to what Microsoft has developed has to be seen. XBox Live is out now, Sony and Nintendos stuff isn't.
### 1020p, which the PS3 has and the XBox 360 doesn't
Its 1080p, anyway, hardly any HDTV supports, so its really no big deal to leave it out if it keeps costs down (hint: ~$200 price difference have a reason...).
Better backward compability and free online would of course be nice for the XBox360, but I find little to complain about Microsoft, they might not be the most innovative in town, but they deliver a good product for a fair price. Nintendos 'we don't do graphics' approach might be more innovative, but there are certainly enough games around we don't mind a bit more graphical bang for the buck.
### The trouble is that games do have low level optimisations that aren't trivial to port. And then there's the shader programs that would have to be rewritten for the different GPU.
Microsoft has a emulator for running XBox games on XBox360, so whatever technique they used in that thing should be moveabel down into API space so that developers can make use of it. Or if all fails they could simply let the devolpers tweak the emulotar so that it will run their game *before* shipping it. However as it is now XBox games have zero gurantee that they ever will run on XBox360, not even if the developers would want it. Which really makes the XBox360 transition a lot harder then it needs to be.
### It's far from trivial. Different CPU and different GPU.
Both architectures however are programable with DirectX, so unless you have something highly optimized for one architecture, it should be trivial to port via a simple recompile, especially when the porting is already taken into account right in the beginning. And even if there are differences in the API, it should be trivial for Microsoft to fix those. That 'porting' wouldn't be meant to create a full XBox360 version, but just a XBox version running on a XBox360, so I really don't see where there would be much difficulty involved.
### It's like porting a Windows game to run on a Power Mac.
PowerMac doesn't have DirectX, but OpenGL, thats a whole different beast. Porting apps from PowerPC to IntelMac for example is simple, different arch, but same API, porting apps from IntelMac to Windows PC on the other side is extremly hard, same arch but very different API.
### Clearly, they haven't gone back and tried playing those games now that their standards are higher.
I have gone back to many games and even visited plenty of new games of the old times which I have missed back then and most of them are still extremly amazing, sure, graphics might no longer be top notch, but gameplay is still pretty much wonderfull. The only real issue I have with games of the past is that their interface can suffer from some larger usability issues, this are mostly no big deal when you get used to them, but they can hinder getting into a game (having to press 'Select' instead of up/down to move between savegames in Zelda, having to do a lot of more clicking to get something done in Warcraft or Dune then in todays RTS, etc).
### Hit things and die, jump around, solve a puzzle, hit things and die.
That sounds just like todays games, only that todays games often interrupt the action with more or less useless cutscenes and other annoyancies, while old games focus on the important part. And speaking about story, most old adventure games still beat the shit out of todays games in terms of story.
### Today, ordinary kids have made superior games using nothing more than Flash.
Please show me a few flash games that come even close to the greatness of a SuperMarioBros or Metroid, sure there are plenty of flash games around, but most of them suck in terms of gameplay quite a lot and aren't really good for anything more then a few minutes of distraction.
This is what is puzzling me, wouldn't it be rather trivial to allow developers to compile their newly released games for XBox360 as well and then just ship both binaries on the same DVD, so that the game could run on XBox as well as XBox360 out of the box? This however doesn't seem to be the case, this is a comment from the developer of Dreamfall, a recently released XBox Title:
This really doesn't look like Microsoft has much of a plan on how to handle their backward compatibility properly when not even the developers themself have any say in XBox360 compatibilty.Backward compability only goes till the GameboySP, both the NintendoDS and Micro no longer offer full backward compability, which is quite a shame, since even without extra hardware it would have been trivial to do it in software.
Creating tools is half the work that goes into creating a game. You can't expect people to create levels, if there isn't a level editor available and neither can you expect good 3d models, if the most common modelers aren't supported due to the lack of export/converter scripts. Last not least many things simply are done better in code then in content, a physics engine will make realistic behaviour of the environment much easier then trying to fake it via hand animated stuff, caustics or water in general are easy to generate by algorithm, but hard if you try to hand draw them, etc.
Just because one is able to slam together a bit of content to test an engine, doesn't mean that the engine is good enough to produce a full game if there aren't any good tools around to work with.
ACK, or even if people do work on engines, don't just concentrate on the engine itself, but also on the tools surrounding the engine, nothing sucks more to have a shiny open source engine, but then no exporter available to export some Blender model into the engine.
### how do you define which is better?
You look at them and if they both are good enough, you use them both in the game, more varity is a good thing after all. There are of course issues when an animation/model/texture doesn't fit the style of the game, but for such one simply needs a style-guide and or a lead artists doing most of the art for a project. This is really not so much different then with coding, especially with game coding, since there isn't any easy way to tell which thing is better either, especially when it comes to stuff that is gameplay relevant and not just polygon plotting. I might be able to messure the performance of a piece of code, but for most code speed is not really an issue, API elegance, easy to maintain it and such are often far more important and not really easy to messure either. Last not least most artwork and code will be something new, not an improvment to existing code, so you don't have anything to compare with to begin with.
### "ok, here's what I did, tell me what's wrong but DON'T fix it, I'll fix it myself".
This has not only something todo with artwork itself, but also with the fileformats in use, with code I can diff/patch, see the differences, compare and merge them. With an image/model I get two chunks of raw data, I can view them, but I can't merge them without lots of additional work, which makes collaboration a lot more difficult, since conflicts are much harder to resolve then with code.
### What I have found, and it is really a strange thing to me, but many projects simply do not want to accept contributions from artists.
w s
I think the biggest problem isn't that they don't accept contributions from artists, but much more basic, most projects simply lack almost any kind of organisations. So nobody knows what needs to be done or when it should be done or even how. With engine coding that isn't to much of a problem, since everybody can just code a bit here and there and have his fun, maybe even producing something half usable in the end. But with games its pretty much catastrophic when nobody knows, not even the maintainer, what should be finished next and often not even what should be produced in the end, let alone things like style guides, specs about intended triangle count for and object, etc. So the thing isn't so much that they don't want to accept contributions, but simply that they can't, because they have no idea what to do with the contributions or which contributions are needed.
At least thats experince with doing graphics for OpenSource games.
### What would be nice is some sort of site like sourceforge but for creative commons licensed artwork that open source games could make use of.
Yes, such a thing could definitvly be usefull, while not necessary for direct in-game use, it can be quite helpfull to have some 3d models or drawings for inspiration or reference. I once started such a thing, but it never went very far:
http://clanlib.org/~grumbel/mediarepo/show.cgi?ne
### By having a law stating that a child cannot buy a game, the Government is the one saying what's okay and what's not. Not you. The government.
Wrong, the government, or whoever would rate the games in the end, isn't saying what is ok and what is not, it would only be a recommendation, nothing more. If a parent thinks his son/daughter is mature enough for some more gory content there is nothing stoping that parent from buying the game for his/her child. The point is that the parent should be the one buying the game, not the child.
JPEG2000 an alternative? Wake me up in 20 years or so when the patent mess around JPEG2000 is solved...
...and pretty much useless for photos, unless one is happy with very large files.
Are there any gameplay videos available for Bioshock and Assassin's Creed? For Assassin's Creed there only seems to be a (realtime?) render movie and in one of the interview videos one can see like 5sec of what might be real gameplay, but nothing more. For Bioshock I couldn't find anything at all beside some screenshots.
Even Nintendo themself don't seem to consider that connection feature important at all, else they might have taken the time to add a link port to the NintendoDS, which they didn't, so no NDSGCN link.
The only game where that linking was used in a good way was Zelda Four Swords, but even that game would have been possible without it if they simply added some splitscreen. Beside from that I have yet to see a game where the linking was used for more then locking up some features of the game to force users to get a GBA and a specific GBA game (MetroidPrime->MetroidFusion) to unlock the whole GCN game or to simply force having GBAs to have the game playable at all (Crystal Chronicals) in multiplayer.
In the end the linking feature simply was and is very gymmicy in every way, not because Sony-fanboys said so, but because it simply had little to no use in the whole lifecycle of the GCN. And Sonys PSPPS3 link features seems to be no different, given that all they could come up with was a rear-mirror for a racing game for the press conference.
Prices in the US are given without taxes, prices in the EU with taxes. Also the EU laws force two year warranty on all kinds of electronic products, which US law does not, which also increases the price a bit. There are also other laws that require manufactors to take their electronic products back to recycle them and such. Not sure how each of them exactly affects the price, but they certainly do to some degree leading to the $ == EUR price tags in the end.
Nice math there, however I thing your conclusion is fundamentally wrong. People don't by a console in the hope that it cost will have amortized in a few years, they buy them to have fun right now and here. So to turn things around, say one spends $1500 in the 5 years of the lifetime a console might have, that means aproximatly $300 per year. For the Wii that means the console itself and two games in the first year and then every two month a new game in the coming years, for the PS3 on the other side that means two years without any games at all, since the whole gaming budget for those years is already spend for the console itself. Not exactly an attractive buy.
Since people don't always exactly time their budget on a yearly basis the reality might look a bit different, but no matter how you turn it, the $600 PS3 will punch a large hole into peoples pockets and it will take quite a bit of time to recover from there (or get there in the first place).
If Sony wants the PS3 to be a success they have to get the price down a lot and that really really fast, else I can't imagine that all the developers and users will stay with them much longer.
### There's no possible way that you can know that. You just think it's unlikely that there will ever be animators skilled enough to be a real actor's equal.
...", not exactly a way to make things cheaper, but a way to give some more flexibility in what a actor can do.
Have you ever seen anything hand animated that came even close to real motion or well, any kind of computer animation of a human where you couldn't tell if its real? I havn't, there is after all a reason why we use motion capture these days. Hand animation never did produce realistic results, it can produce good and usefull results (cartoon), but there is no way you will ever get very realistic results out of it, let alone in reasonable time. The human motion is quite a bit to complex to be replicated manually by hand.
That however doesn't mean that a CGI actor will never replace a real one. However to produce a realistic CGI actor we would first need a way to generate the proper motion, even motion capture is quite limited, since it leaves out far to many details. Beside from that it would be cheating, what got is it to replace a real actor, when all you do is moving him into the motion capture studio to do his moves there, instead of infront of a camera? You still would have to pay him, and you also in addition now need to pay the anmiators and other personal that will transfer him into CGI. So instead of motion capture we would need a way to generate motion automatically, basically creating something like a virtual human that we can give direction and some attributes and then will perform something to our liking, when we have that, we might get closer to replacing a real actor, but we are nowhere near that. There is some progress in that area, but its still pretty much in its very early days, since it doesn't go bejoint some half realistic reaction to collisions and a bit of walking. Something that looks realistic enough to replace a real actor is still far far away, 20 years at least I would say. But if that, even when it looks realistic, is good enough to replace a good real actor is still quite doubtfull.
For the next years computer animation will still be either cartoony or all backed up by motion capture, meaning you will 'replace' a "real actor" with a "real actor + animator + motion capture crew +