### Perhaps we won't need "pre-rendered" graphics for truly immersive film sequences any more.
From a graphics standpoint alone we didn't need them basically ever. Just watch the intro of Out of this World (1991), while the character itself is rather blocky and nowhere as detailed as todays characters, the movement is fantastic, much better then what the blended-bone animations of todays engine will give you. Motion-caputured sequenzen today can look equally good like the rotoscoped stuff from back then, but computer generated/blended animation (like you see in-game most of the time) still looks pretty damn awefull when compared to a real human, which is IMHO the main problem of why some games look so awefully fake.
While there has been lots of progress with lighting and shading, the human motion itself still hasn't really made any progress since the 2d days.
For somebody who has done this alone in his garage it might be a good achivment, but beside from that its not impressive at all. The movement is still as robotic as ever in video games, the lipsync and mimic might be a better then average, but overall it still looks like your regular CG puppet. Especially when the characters move a bit around or when they get angry at each other it just doesn't look very real. Especially for character movement motion-caputure still gives a lot better results then what we have seen in this video.
### I hate the idea of 1 person owning these communities and getting rich off the free work and contributations of the members.
Yep, thats the problem, you however can't blame google for that, since 1-person-owned forums where there even before google. I think the problems which we see are for most part the result of the fall of the usenet. Today most people no longer use the usenet, heck, most people doesn't even no it ever existed, so its a lot harder to form any kind of community there when the web is a much more attractive place. The point at which people started using web forums instead of usenet was where the throuble begin and I can't blame google for that, most of the throuble was with the usenet itself, hard to use software, lack of features in usenet software, creating a new group is pretty hard, lack of free servers, it doesn't integrate well with the web at all and such, so it was only natural that people moved on to things that suited their need better, we it webforums or mailing list, usenet itself is pretty much dying.
I doubt it, that would be a ergonomic nightmare. Why clutter a controller with a screen when you look all the time at the TV anyway? Why wreak the ergonomics by designing a flat portable thing, when you could also design one with good grip? Beside from that Nintendo already said that the DS will have Revolution connectivity features, so if there is a game that would make use of a screen at the controller, it could use the DS, no need for GBA2.
Re:Still Logging In? The System Isn't Finished.
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Weighing the Internet
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· Score: 1
### Please explain to me how you speed up the boot process by parallelizing something on a one cpu - one system disk machine.
### I once thought VGA graphics and 386 speeds rocked too. But if I ever go back there, it sucks.
A few month ago I played XCom:UFO for the first time ever, so no nostalgica involved and suprise, suprise it didn't suck, it was simple one of the best games I have played in the last few years, even by todays standards. An interesting side node it that XCom has completly destroyable terrain, sure its all just 2d tile graphics, but destroyable terrain is something that almost no 3d game these days has gotten right.
I don't mind if graphics are good, but quite often the better graphics actually limit the gameplay in harmfull ways (no destroyable terrain, no huge outdoor szenarios, etc.).
Rockstar has claimed that the minigames were *not* in the game at all, but that the modification added them, given that the modification is rather large that might be true, ie. its not just a 'enable_porn_minigame = 1' thing. Not sure if that claim is actually true, but if it is that surly blasts the whole thing away. I mean should we outlaw the internet explorer and google just because I can 'unlock' porn with it by entering that word into the search-inputbox?
I am all for regulating video games and making age ratings mandatory, but this whole issue is really rather pointless. Even if Rockstar left the minigames in, people with access to the internet have far easier ways to get far worse porn with a few clicks.
The problem with lack of stackability isn't that I can't stack a VHS Recorder on top of it or a TV, I don't expect from a console, most are simply to small to handle that. The problem is more that I can't stack simple stuff on it, like games, memory cards, the controller or simply another gaming console.
Lack of stackability won't stop me from buying a console, but its certainly a thing that tends to get quite annoying in daily use and especially in times when you do not use the console for a while and just want to move it out of the way, being able to stack them, makes life quite a bit easier.
### Do you actually know anything about the Doom3 engine?
Only what I have seen in the game and that really wasn't much impressive at all, ie. complete lack of any larger rooms or outdoor stuff.
The actually game content is a whole different matter of course, but thats not what I am arguing about.
### You've gotta be kidding me... bad engine?
Well, maybe not bad, but not that great either. Havn't yet seen many games that use the Doom3 engine, actually none at all beside Quake4. UT engine on the other side gets used quite a lot.
I doubt it, the processing power eating stuff in Doom is mostly just shaders, shadows and the like, each of which can simply be switched of when porting to XBox (flashlight doesn't create shadows in the XBox version as far as I know). Outdoor wouldn't be much different, the XBox is well capable of handling huge outdoor scenarios, just not with all the bells and whistles like a PC with a good graphics card. So it would be again just a matter of switching some stuff off when porting Doom.
In the end the length of a game doesn't really matter much to me. What matters is that I don't get bored half the way through and that I am not left with an finished story in the end calling for a sequel. If both of those are set, all that matters is that the game is engaging and fun. Quality is important, not quantity.
Beside from that time is also pretty relative, 2 hours in FF:Tactics can feel short, while 10min in Ikaruga can feel quite lengthy, simply because a heck of a lot more is happening in Ikaruga then in FF:Tactis per minute. Not saying that either of those it bad, but five minutes packed action seem to be more valuable then five minutes spend sorting through the item menu, so I don't mind that the price tag for both is the same, even so the time spend in the game might be quite different.
In the end I have to say that my favorite game is still Another World and that is one that can be easily be beaten in 30mins if you know what you are doing, yet, every second of it is engaging and stuff is never repeating, in other games I wouldn't even have found the entrance to a dungeon in that time.
### I wonder if this is such a big deal over in Europe where the attitudes towards sexual content are much more relaxed.
Lula 3D has a '16' rating in germany and similar or worse content then that GTA minigame.
### I do recall hearing that when GTA 3 was released, the German version had certain "violent" features removed
Yep, that is still the case with GTA4, even so nobody really seems to know why they removed it, it doesn't really make the game any more brutal then it already is. The old doing of removing violent content from games is no longer needed these days in germany since the law got changed a while back, so that age ratings are mandatory for all games. Before that games were either 'free for all' or 'indiziert' which meant that a game was only free for age 18 and it was forbidden to perform any form of advertisment for the game, thus making it basically unsellable. So the publishers played save to not get any close to the 'indiziert' barrier and removed anything offensive. Today however games are no longer 'indiziert' they simply get a 'age 18' rating, without the limit on advertisment.
IMHO the problem with Doom3 is the engine. The graphics where ok, but if all it can render are five foot long corridors its just isn't much impressive in the long run. In UT, Farcry, Battlefield and a bunch of other games you have huge outdoor scenarios, in Doom3 you don't have any of that, even so it would have fit the scenario quite well. Beside from that the graphics also where not that impressive, they were good, but not really much better then other games that released around the same time. Doom3 ended up being one of many games out there, neither the graphics nor the gameplay set it much apart from the rest.
The problem is simply that basically all games today look great, full 3d, shaders, bloom and stuff, so it gets a lot harder then in the old days to look special.
Since when attack anti-globalist zivilians? They do a little fight with the police every once in a while, but thats a completly different thing then blowing up a bus.
Ever heard of the Linux Filesystem Hierachie Standard? Users should not mess around in/usr, thats job of the distribution, user can toy around in/usr/local thats how it intended. That said, messing around in/usr can sometimes be quite helpfull and distributions not setting up paths to search in/usr/local make the users live far more difficult then necessary, so that a quick change with --prefix can actually be the by far easiest solution.
### "Installing Applications is complicated" No, it isn't. It's different than what people are accustomed to, but it sure isn't complicated.
Yeah, sure 'different', different across all distros, even different versions of a distros, different across releases of a software packages, hack even within a single releases of a piece of software finding half a dozens different packages and ways to install something is pretty normal. In the end you have like a hundred different ways to install software, sure, its 'different'.
Installing software is one of the hardest part of daily Linux usage and it hasn't really gotten any easier in the last five years. Sure, apt-get is all nifty and fine, it however only workes for stuff that is packaged for your specific version of a distro (if you have the luck of an apt-get based distro in the first place...) and rather unusable for anything else (no, editing sources.list to install a single piece of software is *not* userfriendly).
Linux still has basically exactly nothing to offer when it comes to a standard way to install third party binaries, autopackage or lsb-rpm are there, but actually seeing software package with them in the wild doesn't happen to often. And the number of not-yet-packaged with your distro will surly grow a lot once Linux gains a little bit more of the mainstream.
Windows way to install stuff might be flawed, but from a user point of view basically everything can be done with a double click and a reboot, Linux is far far away from.
### The biggest stumbling block to Linux on the desktop is that it is not pre-loaded by computer manufacturers such as Dell.
I doubt it, installing Linux never was a problem, you could even install a Debian for *years* by simply holding the Return-key pressed, its actually quite a lot easier then installing a Windows system from scratch. Partitioning is the only thing that might be hard, but even that is only hard when you want to let the Windows partition survive.
The hard part is maintaining, using and configuring a running Linux and finding applications that actually do the job.
The 'hard install' problem of Linux is long solved, the 'make Linux easy to use' problem however is still far far away from being solved. Beside from that you basically install Linux only exactly once, it might take you a day or two, but its something you won't have to do again for a long long time, using Linux on the other side is something that you might be doing for the decades to come. Focusing so much on the install is only ignoring the real problems.
The Metroid Prime Hunters demo is hardly worth to talk about, its something you can finish in 20min and which has basically zero replay value in singleplayer. While its better then nothing I would have much prefered something that is actually fully playable and keeps you busy for a while.
### I've always thought that if a kid can't tell the difference between a video game and the real world
Absolutly nobody doubts that. Of course basically everybody can differ between a video game and reality, after all video game are still projected on a 2D TV, have shit graphics compared to reality, no smell and whatever, so its trival. That however absolutly does *NOT* mean that video games don't influence you, they influence you quite a lot, not in the "I want gun and shoot everyone" way, but in far more subtle ways. The problem is that its not black&white, they are neither evil or not, it depends on the contex you play them in, how you where raised and a shitload of other details that differ from person to person.
This doesn't mean that instantly all violent stuff should be banned, but neither should it be handed out and produced completly careless.
### I don't understand the "short a button" argument. Games that actually use 8 buttons are poorly designed.
Not every game can be SuperMario with only one Jump and one Run button. Back when there still were flightsimulators it wasn't uncommon to have a whole PC keyboard full of functions, many keys even mapped two or three times. And beside other things this ability to have full controll over a whole lot of stuff made, camera modes, engines and such made those games fun, a hell lot of fun. Sure, we don't see those games much often these days, and even much more seldomly on consoles, but the point is that not every game tries to be so simple as SuperMario and that is actually a good thing, not because Mario is bad, but because more choice is always good.
### I don't understand the "short a button" argument. Games that actually use 8 buttons are poorly designed. Plain and simple.
The problem is that a lot of games simply are poorly designed or better not designed with the GC controller in mind, its a fact of live and it won't change anytime soon. Providing a gamepad with not enough buttons simply makes it a pain for the player to play these games and it makes the console as a whole a lot less attractive for third party games, since those are basically never properly adapted.
### That's why the GC's controller is nice, because it encourages developers to simplify gameplay and to reduce the button usage.
Games that are developed for all three consoles for most part simply completly ignore that and this leads to completly horrible button mappings (MGS: Start+A[1], games that use Z-trigger for important actions, etc.). The GC controller doesn't really encourage anybody beside first party developers, the rest simply works around the limitations in most often horrbile ways.
The Gamecube controller is my favorite of the three, however the lack of buttons really is a problem and I really would like if Nintendo would stop trying to be simple as the rest and provide a consoler that actually works properly with ALL the games and not just that handfull that is released by Nintendo.
Slashdot Mirror
### Perhaps we won't need "pre-rendered" graphics for truly immersive film sequences any more.
From a graphics standpoint alone we didn't need them basically ever. Just watch the intro of Out of this World (1991), while the character itself is rather blocky and nowhere as detailed as todays characters, the movement is fantastic, much better then what the blended-bone animations of todays engine will give you. Motion-caputured sequenzen today can look equally good like the rotoscoped stuff from back then, but computer generated/blended animation (like you see in-game most of the time) still looks pretty damn awefull when compared to a real human, which is IMHO the main problem of why some games look so awefully fake.
While there has been lots of progress with lighting and shading, the human motion itself still hasn't really made any progress since the 2d days.
For somebody who has done this alone in his garage it might be a good achivment, but beside from that its not impressive at all. The movement is still as robotic as ever in video games, the lipsync and mimic might be a better then average, but overall it still looks like your regular CG puppet. Especially when the characters move a bit around or when they get angry at each other it just doesn't look very real. Especially for character movement motion-caputure still gives a lot better results then what we have seen in this video.
### I hate the idea of 1 person owning these communities and getting rich off the free work and contributations of the members.
Yep, thats the problem, you however can't blame google for that, since 1-person-owned forums where there even before google. I think the problems which we see are for most part the result of the fall of the usenet. Today most people no longer use the usenet, heck, most people doesn't even no it ever existed, so its a lot harder to form any kind of community there when the web is a much more attractive place. The point at which people started using web forums instead of usenet was where the throuble begin and I can't blame google for that, most of the throuble was with the usenet itself, hard to use software, lack of features in usenet software, creating a new group is pretty hard, lack of free servers, it doesn't integrate well with the web at all and such, so it was only natural that people moved on to things that suited their need better, we it webforums or mailing list, usenet itself is pretty much dying.
I doubt it, that would be a ergonomic nightmare. Why clutter a controller with a screen when you look all the time at the TV anyway? Why wreak the ergonomics by designing a flat portable thing, when you could also design one with good grip? Beside from that Nintendo already said that the DS will have Revolution connectivity features, so if there is a game that would make use of a screen at the controller, it could use the DS, no need for GBA2.
### Please explain to me how you speed up the boot process by parallelizing something on a one cpu - one system disk machine.
/etc/init.d/
$ cd
$ grep sleep * |wc -l
49
Do I need to say more?
### I once thought VGA graphics and 386 speeds rocked too. But if I ever go back there, it sucks.
A few month ago I played XCom:UFO for the first time ever, so no nostalgica involved and suprise, suprise it didn't suck, it was simple one of the best games I have played in the last few years, even by todays standards. An interesting side node it that XCom has completly destroyable terrain, sure its all just 2d tile graphics, but destroyable terrain is something that almost no 3d game these days has gotten right.
I don't mind if graphics are good, but quite often the better graphics actually limit the gameplay in harmfull ways (no destroyable terrain, no huge outdoor szenarios, etc.).
Rockstar has claimed that the minigames were *not* in the game at all, but that the modification added them, given that the modification is rather large that might be true, ie. its not just a 'enable_porn_minigame = 1' thing. Not sure if that claim is actually true, but if it is that surly blasts the whole thing away. I mean should we outlaw the internet explorer and google just because I can 'unlock' porn with it by entering that word into the search-inputbox?
I am all for regulating video games and making age ratings mandatory, but this whole issue is really rather pointless. Even if Rockstar left the minigames in, people with access to the internet have far easier ways to get far worse porn with a few clicks.
The problem with lack of stackability isn't that I can't stack a VHS Recorder on top of it or a TV, I don't expect from a console, most are simply to small to handle that. The problem is more that I can't stack simple stuff on it, like games, memory cards, the controller or simply another gaming console.
Lack of stackability won't stop me from buying a console, but its certainly a thing that tends to get quite annoying in daily use and especially in times when you do not use the console for a while and just want to move it out of the way, being able to stack them, makes life quite a bit easier.
### Do you actually know anything about the Doom3 engine?
Only what I have seen in the game and that really wasn't much impressive at all, ie. complete lack of any larger rooms or outdoor stuff.
The actually game content is a whole different matter of course, but thats not what I am arguing about.
### You've gotta be kidding me... bad engine?
Well, maybe not bad, but not that great either. Havn't yet seen many games that use the Doom3 engine, actually none at all beside Quake4. UT engine on the other side gets used quite a lot.
I doubt it, the processing power eating stuff in Doom is mostly just shaders, shadows and the like, each of which can simply be switched of when porting to XBox (flashlight doesn't create shadows in the XBox version as far as I know). Outdoor wouldn't be much different, the XBox is well capable of handling huge outdoor scenarios, just not with all the bells and whistles like a PC with a good graphics card. So it would be again just a matter of switching some stuff off when porting Doom.
In the end the length of a game doesn't really matter much to me. What matters is that I don't get bored half the way through and that I am not left with an finished story in the end calling for a sequel. If both of those are set, all that matters is that the game is engaging and fun. Quality is important, not quantity.
Beside from that time is also pretty relative, 2 hours in FF:Tactics can feel short, while 10min in Ikaruga can feel quite lengthy, simply because a heck of a lot more is happening in Ikaruga then in FF:Tactis per minute. Not saying that either of those it bad, but five minutes packed action seem to be more valuable then five minutes spend sorting through the item menu, so I don't mind that the price tag for both is the same, even so the time spend in the game might be quite different.
In the end I have to say that my favorite game is still Another World and that is one that can be easily be beaten in 30mins if you know what you are doing, yet, every second of it is engaging and stuff is never repeating, in other games I wouldn't even have found the entrance to a dungeon in that time.
### I wonder if this is such a big deal over in Europe where the attitudes towards sexual content are much more relaxed.
Lula 3D has a '16' rating in germany and similar or worse content then that GTA minigame.
### I do recall hearing that when GTA 3 was released, the German version had certain "violent" features removed
Yep, that is still the case with GTA4, even so nobody really seems to know why they removed it, it doesn't really make the game any more brutal then it already is. The old doing of removing violent content from games is no longer needed these days in germany since the law got changed a while back, so that age ratings are mandatory for all games. Before that games were either 'free for all' or 'indiziert' which meant that a game was only free for age 18 and it was forbidden to perform any form of advertisment for the game, thus making it basically unsellable. So the publishers played save to not get any close to the 'indiziert' barrier and removed anything offensive. Today however games are no longer 'indiziert' they simply get a 'age 18' rating, without the limit on advertisment.
IMHO the problem with Doom3 is the engine. The graphics where ok, but if all it can render are five foot long corridors its just isn't much impressive in the long run. In UT, Farcry, Battlefield and a bunch of other games you have huge outdoor scenarios, in Doom3 you don't have any of that, even so it would have fit the scenario quite well. Beside from that the graphics also where not that impressive, they were good, but not really much better then other games that released around the same time. Doom3 ended up being one of many games out there, neither the graphics nor the gameplay set it much apart from the rest.
The problem is simply that basically all games today look great, full 3d, shaders, bloom and stuff, so it gets a lot harder then in the old days to look special.
### This is why the War on Terror is so important and must be fought now.
The 'War on Terror' and what happened before it, is what has caused this thing in the first place.
Since when attack anti-globalist zivilians? They do a little fight with the police every once in a while, but thats a completly different thing then blowing up a bus.
### RAID1 is pretty cheap when you can get 2 200GB HDs for about 300$ CDN. ...and it won't help you at all if you accidently 'rm -rf /'.
Ever heard of the Linux Filesystem Hierachie Standard? Users should not mess around in /usr, thats job of the distribution, user can toy around in /usr/local thats how it intended. That said, messing around in /usr can sometimes be quite helpfull and distributions not setting up paths to search in /usr/local make the users live far more difficult then necessary, so that a quick change with --prefix can actually be the by far easiest solution.
### "Installing Applications is complicated"
No, it isn't. It's different than what people are accustomed to, but it sure isn't complicated.
Yeah, sure 'different', different across all distros, even different versions of a distros, different across releases of a software packages, hack even within a single releases of a piece of software finding half a dozens different packages and ways to install something is pretty normal. In the end you have like a hundred different ways to install software, sure, its 'different'.
Installing software is one of the hardest part of daily Linux usage and it hasn't really gotten any easier in the last five years. Sure, apt-get is all nifty and fine, it however only workes for stuff that is packaged for your specific version of a distro (if you have the luck of an apt-get based distro in the first place...) and rather unusable for anything else (no, editing sources.list to install a single piece of software is *not* userfriendly).
Linux still has basically exactly nothing to offer when it comes to a standard way to install third party binaries, autopackage or lsb-rpm are there, but actually seeing software package with them in the wild doesn't happen to often. And the number of not-yet-packaged with your distro will surly grow a lot once Linux gains a little bit more of the mainstream.
Windows way to install stuff might be flawed, but from a user point of view basically everything can be done with a double click and a reboot, Linux is far far away from.
### The biggest stumbling block to Linux on the desktop is that it is not pre-loaded by computer manufacturers such as Dell.
I doubt it, installing Linux never was a problem, you could even install a Debian for *years* by simply holding the Return-key pressed, its actually quite a lot easier then installing a Windows system from scratch. Partitioning is the only thing that might be hard, but even that is only hard when you want to let the Windows partition survive.
The hard part is maintaining, using and configuring a running Linux and finding applications that actually do the job.
The 'hard install' problem of Linux is long solved, the 'make Linux easy to use' problem however is still far far away from being solved. Beside from that you basically install Linux only exactly once, it might take you a day or two, but its something you won't have to do again for a long long time, using Linux on the other side is something that you might be doing for the decades to come. Focusing so much on the install is only ignoring the real problems.
### Other than Metroid Prime Hunters First Hunt?
The Metroid Prime Hunters demo is hardly worth to talk about, its something you can finish in 20min and which has basically zero replay value in singleplayer. While its better then nothing I would have much prefered something that is actually fully playable and keeps you busy for a while.
### I've always thought that if a kid can't tell the difference between a video game and the real world
Absolutly nobody doubts that. Of course basically everybody can differ between a video game and reality, after all video game are still projected on a 2D TV, have shit graphics compared to reality, no smell and whatever, so its trival. That however absolutly does *NOT* mean that video games don't influence you, they influence you quite a lot, not in the "I want gun and shoot everyone" way, but in far more subtle ways. The problem is that its not black&white, they are neither evil or not, it depends on the contex you play them in, how you where raised and a shitload of other details that differ from person to person.
This doesn't mean that instantly all violent stuff should be banned, but neither should it be handed out and produced completly careless.
Aehm, the XBox also has 4 more then Gamecube:
XBox: DPad, 2x Analog, Start, Select, A, B, X, Y, L, R and additionally Black, White, left Analogstick button and right Analogstick button.
Only difference between XBox and PS2 is that PS2 has two triggers, while XBox has the Black, White buttons
### I don't understand the "short a button" argument. Games that actually use 8 buttons are poorly designed.
Not every game can be SuperMario with only one Jump and one Run button. Back when there still were flightsimulators it wasn't uncommon to have a whole PC keyboard full of functions, many keys even mapped two or three times. And beside other things this ability to have full controll over a whole lot of stuff made, camera modes, engines and such made those games fun, a hell lot of fun. Sure, we don't see those games much often these days, and even much more seldomly on consoles, but the point is that not every game tries to be so simple as SuperMario and that is actually a good thing, not because Mario is bad, but because more choice is always good.
### It's 1 button!
/\, L1, R1 and in addition L2, R2, L3, R3
Sure about that? I count 4 more on the PS2 Pad.
Gamecube: DPad, 2x Analogstick, Start, Z, A, B, X, Y, L, R
PS2: DPad, 2x Analogstick, Start, Select, X, [], O,
Plus all buttons on the PS2 are analog, while the Gamecube only has two of them.
### I don't understand the "short a button" argument. Games that actually use 8 buttons are poorly designed. Plain and simple.
The problem is that a lot of games simply are poorly designed or better not designed with the GC controller in mind, its a fact of live and it won't change anytime soon. Providing a gamepad with not enough buttons simply makes it a pain for the player to play these games and it makes the console as a whole a lot less attractive for third party games, since those are basically never properly adapted.
### That's why the GC's controller is nice, because it encourages developers to simplify gameplay and to reduce the button usage.
Games that are developed for all three consoles for most part simply completly ignore that and this leads to completly horrible button mappings (MGS: Start+A[1], games that use Z-trigger for important actions, etc.). The GC controller doesn't really encourage anybody beside first party developers, the rest simply works around the limitations in most often horrbile ways.
The Gamecube controller is my favorite of the three, however the lack of buttons really is a problem and I really would like if Nintendo would stop trying to be simple as the rest and provide a consoler that actually works properly with ALL the games and not just that handfull that is released by Nintendo.