Just for the record, some Sony engineer had a techdemo of head tracking up and running a year or so ago. So it seems easy enough to add to Sonys solution. And with that out of the way I don't see much of Natal being left that is useful for hardcore gaming. When both your hands grab the 360 controller, you can't do all that much gesturing. So unless Microsoft comes up with an additional split controller, Natal seems rather limited.
whilst it can have similar applications
The crux is that Natal can't do a lot of what Nintendo and Sonys solutions can do, lack of buttons/axis and lack of wrist detection will make the use of virtual tools rather troublesome. Simply pointing at the screen lightgun-style won't work either, unless you use your whole arm.
I think the biggest issue with Natal will be detection accuracy and lack of buttons/joysticks. So far everything we have seen of Natal shows that it can only detect arms and legs, but not feet, hand or wrist movement. This means that the control will be really limited in what it can do, i.e. everything that requires the use of a "tool" (tenis, golf, FPS, etc.) won't work properly, as there is no way for Natal to figure out how exactly you are holding the tool. Same goes for lack of buttons and joysticks, being able to move your virtual arms around 1:1 is all nice and cool, but you also have to walk around, grab things, shoot things and so on and that won't work without finger detection or even if it would work it would be rather awkward to shoot something via gestures.
Now these problems aren't unfixable, an additional controller with a gyro build in could give you easily all the wrist data and buttons you need. And for golf or tennis a simple plastic toy without any electronics build in could likely be enough. The finger problem on the other side only seems solvable by moving your hands much closer to the camera, so you get the fingers proper, but lose detection of much of the rest of the body.
My biggest worry so far is simply that Microsoft's marketing seems to be focused completly on controller-less gameplay, while they haven't really shown any interesting gameplay that would work properly without a controller.
It blows my mind how many people don't realize their computer is almost always doing more than one thing at a time.
My computer is doing many things at the same time, however almost none of them ever get close to even maxing out a single core and those that do don't happen in parallel. For example I don't apply Gimp filters and browse webpages at the same time, I do either one or the other, while the other application is happily idling along. And of course while doing that I curse that Firefox is to stupid to split plugins and tabs across multiple threads and that Gimp isn't great at using multiple cores for its filters either.
Having multiple cores execute different application might somewhat work with two cores, but with anything larger then that you are basically left with one core maxed out while the other ones idle along. Multicore doesn't bring much benefit unless the applications themselves are clever enough to handel it, the OS doesn't really help there.
using threads, or even multiple processes, and nobody has found a good model that actually makes it easy to do parallel programming.
The reason is that threads and processes are the wrong tool for the task, they introduce a lot of additional complexity while still failing at giving you fine grained parallelization. They are patchworks that try to add the ability to do parallelization to languages that where build for sequential evaluation, instead of solving the problem from the ground up.
Functional languages look like a much better solution for parallel programming. Without side effects, a very large part of parallel programming problems disappears instantly. There will be a need for some relearning as functional languages require a different approach to tackle a programming problem, but in the end that is what it needs. Look at GPU programming, the reason why it is trivial to apply parallelization to it, is because the infrastructure forces you to write your program in a way that can be parallelized. You can't make your fragment shader go crazy and draw over other pixels and stuff, you have one pixel that you have to fill and no side-effects outside of that and as a result you can throw as much parallel processing power at it as you like.
Web-browsing for instance, is not inherently paralizable.
Of course it is. Each Tab can be rendered in parallel, each JPEG can be decoded in parallel, each character can be antialiased in parallel, each download can happen in parallel, all the pixel that make up the final image can be alpha blended in parallel.
Yes, at some point you hit a wall where you will be left with a piece of code that you have to evaluate sequentially, you can't alpha blend half a pixel and your layouting engine might also require some sequential evalution. My point however is that none of those are CPU intensive enough to be a problem for normal use.
These days I don't have to wait for my computer because it has to solve some tiny non-parallelizable task, but because my computer is doing some heavy data crunching that could be done in parallel without much of a problem.
Or to put it another way: Half the for-loops out there just process each element in a list, the major reason why the don't do it in parallel is because the programming language makes it extremely hard to do so, not because there is some fundamental reason why it can't be done.
Implementing threading in a new app written from scratch isn't that hard (even so it has quite a bit problems on its own), the real troublesome part is rewriting legacy code that wasn't build for threading, as that often makes a lot of assumptions that simply break in threading.
Most computing intensive problems that a user will encounter at home are easily parallelizable, i.e. video encoding, gaming, photoshop filters, webbrowsing and so on. The amount of times where I maxed out a single CPU and the given problem would not have been to some large degree parallelizable are close to zero.
The trouble is that they are only "easy" parallelizable in concept, implementing parallelization on an exciting serial codebase is where it gets messy.
Maybe it is just me, but cutscenes are the worst part of a game.
Its not a cutscene, its gameplay. Indigo Prophecy/Fahrenheit was the same thing and it had basically zero moments where you could lay your controller down. Everything was interactive. How course it was for a lot of parts a matter of pushing buttons, but it worked extremely well, because it gave you a much more direct connection to your character, i.e. whenever the character was doing heavy work, you where doing heavy work, whenever the character was balancing, you where balancing. Its of course a less direct way to intact then in your random action game, but in the end its a tradeoff. An action game gives you direct control, but only a very limited amount of possible actions, for most part you are limited to shooting people, which just isn't very useful for storytelling. Games like Indigo Prophecy or Heavy Rain on the other side give you basically a limitless amount of actions, as everything is context sensitive, which allows much better ways to tell a story.
(2) These rights shall find their limits in the provisions of general laws, in provisions for the protection of young persons, and in the right to personal honor.
No, owning those games is legal, just selling them is outlawed. There are basically three stages of legislation in germany:
1) USK, a rating organisation like ESRB, but its mandatory. 2) Indexed, meaning games can get banned form being displayed/advertised/sold in public. You can still buy it if you are 18+, its just a little hard to find a shop selling it, so its not that different from a ESRB AO rating. 3) Banned, game is not allowed to be sold at all.
Ok genius, why does the Wii Motion Plus exist then? If it does the exact same thing as before, then it must be an empty piece of plastic, right?
Where have I ever said that? MotionPlus is the closest thing to 1:1 mapping we will have for the next year, but that still doesn't make it into a device that can track accurate 3D position like the Sony's solution.
So the paddle is just hanging there in mid-air and moves left and right? There's no twisting of the paddle, backhanding the paddle, or anything of the sort?
The paddle tracks the rotation, not the position.
Nintendo is claiming 1:1 motion. Are you seriously saying that they are opening themselves up to a lawsuit by making a false claim to the public?
"1:1 mapping" isn't a trademarked or clearly defined term and heck, before I have seen Sonys solution a few days ago, I would have called it 1:1 mapping myself, because its a big leap from Wiimote controls. Look for example at this techdemo, by far the best demonstration of MotionPlus I have seen, but does that show tracking of absolute 3D coordinates? Nope, you can easily see that he never actually moves the Wiimote around completly free, it disappears when ever he is not demonstrating a swing motion, so that all swings can start from a defined position in the virtual world and not drift away due to the lack of absolute position tracking. The video also mentioned that knowledge of human motion is needed to allow the tracking, which simply means that the device can't do full 3d tracking and some guesswork is involved.
I simply don't consider that a minor difference, because it allows very different solutions to gameplay. Sonys solutions allows completly free form interaction with the gaming world (drawing a picture), while Nintendos solution requires that interaction is broken up into distinct parts that allow resetting the position back to neutral (sword swinging).
If so, you're as dumb as you are blind.
Insults don't make a good argument. If you have a good demo that shows 3d position tracking, show me, so far I haven't seen one.
I've spent the last 3 years writing software for these stupid things.
Just because you can build 1:1 tracking in some applications with gyros doesn't mean that Nintendo's hardware can do it too, as mentioned there is an axis missing, the gyros only give rotational rate instead of angle and instead of velocity you only have acceleration. Also the Wiimote follows very different movement patterns then say an aircraft.
Absolutely not. Nintendo just put that ad out of the lady precisely controlling the paddle because they figured users would realize that it would be the exact same game as in Wii Play.
You must be looking at some other video then I am. This video doesn't show any precise paddle control, it doesn't really show any positional peddle control at all, characters are far to large and the table is far to small for that. It looks more like its just all about timing and swinging, very similar to Wii Tennis, just with better detection of the rotation of the Wiimote on the swings.
So is it nowadays called jealousy to give credit where credit is due?
That whole issue is just historic and has really little to do with credit. If you want to give credit you have to call it GNU/Linux/Xorg/KDE/Gnome/Ubuntu/Firefox/OpenOffice/..., but that of course is a little impractical. The issue popped up in the first place because GNU was building bits and pieces of an operation system and so did Linus, both gave their creation a name and the Linux name got popular, even so its technically wrong, as its just the kernel, not the complete OS, so the GNU peolpe wanted their slice and came up with GNU/Linux. The joke of cause is that the OS is not GNU either, as GNU never delivered an OS itself, that's what the distris did by putting the pieces together and they didn't just pick GNU and Linux, they picked a ton of other stuff to.
So in the end the solution is very simple: I just call it Ubuntu.
Watch the frisbee and sword mechanics. The character on screen is following the motions 1:1 with the player.
I don't think so. It looks basically the same as the baseball game in Wii Sports, just with some better detection. As Wii Sports is being based on single actions, with known body positions, its easy enough to fake things to make them look somewhat 1:1, but that is a different thing then having exact position and rotation in 3d space. As far as I know the sensor in MotionPlus can't even detect all three axis, just two and also only reports relative rotations, not absolute ones. On top of that the accelerometer gives you acceleration, not velocity. So you have quite a lot of missing information that you have to fill in with guess work.
It's effectively the same demo Sony gave this year, but with a bit less pizazz.
Mapping 3D objects directly onto the controller is what I call a convincing demonstration of 1:1, nothing I have seen of MotionPlus so far comes close to that. Would be interesting to know if the ping pong in Wii Sports Resort allows you to control the actual paddle, instead of just the swing on auto-moving paddle like in Wii Sports Tennis.
The Wii Remote has a camera in the controller itself.
That won't help much, as the sensorbar has only two points for reference, not enough to calculate a proper position in 3d space. And in games where you are not pointing at the screen it wouldn't work either way.
This was demonstrated at last year's E3.
Links are welcome. I havn't seen anything that gets near what Sony demostrated. Thats not to say that the MotionPlus isn't a big improvement, it allows to properly detected swinging motion and such, which would likely be good enough for some decent sword fighting or grenade throwing, but that is still relative motion, not an exact position in 3d space.
MotionPlus doesn't give you 1:1 mapping. The controller has still no idea where it is in 3D space. The controller now has sensors to measure rotation independent from acceleration, which will allow to make the mapping of action a good bit better then before, as it will get much harder to cheat the thing, but it will still be a lot of guessing of what the player did, instead of just taking the coordinates and bringing them into them game. So MotionPlus is more an intermediate step, then the solution to the 1:1 problem.
MotionPlus however has the advantage of actually being a mostly finished product, while all the other stuff is just techdemo stage and it could easily take a year or two till some actual games surface.
That claim comes up every now and then, but at this point in time its really kind of baseless. The major failure of the Wiimote is simply that it just doesn't work the people expected it. It doesn't give you 1:1 mapping and thus your movement on the screen ends up having little or even nothing to do with your actual motion. Its not even a matter of precision, its simply not enough sensory data to do any kind of real 3d tracking. That's the sole reason why the experience ends up a little flat, as you end up performing the same game moves as always in games, just triggered by a different mechanism.
The PS3 and Xbox360 solutions are very different in that they give you real 1:1 mapping. There is no longer a need for waggle-replacing-a-button style gameplay. Those things can give you completly new gameplay possibilities, as they allow you to directly manipulate the gaming world and get rid of a lot of limitions current games have. Weird example: Try to shoot yourself in the head in any shooter, doesn't work, because you can't target that spot with current day game controllers. Its one of the many blind spots todays games have where you simply can't do things that your character should be able to do with ease. With 1:1 on the other side those things become trivial.
Now of course having haptic in addition would be great, but it really isn't needed for a lot of things. You don't need haptic to aim a gun or shoot a crossbow. You don't need it to throw a grenade either. And even for things like sword fighting being able to precisely decide how a sword stab would work would be big.
I think the hardest part of motion sensing is really the game design at this point. Games will need to change a lot if motion sensing gets a central part of gaming and a lot of todays mechanics will need to be replaced with other different ones. Gaming pretty much needs to be reinvented the way it did from 2D to 3D.
An as a side note: Microsofts solution, as cool as it looks, seems a little useless without an addition controller, you can do casual stuff with it, but pulling a trigger on a gun kind of needs a button and I don't think it can track hand movement either, so being limited to your arms and legs is kind of a big issue. Sonys solution on the other side looks spot on, it looks basically like a Wiimote done right and I can see huge potential for that in normal non-casual games.
Am I the only one who was glad that "waggle" games were segmented to the Wii?
The whole reason why those games were waggle was because the Wiimote could only detect that, it was a technical limitation. The Sony device gives you true 1:1 mapping, allowing all the things that people expected the Wii to handle, but that it couldn't. And if developers actually pick up on that you might end up with quite a revolution in the hardcore gaming world, as it will, literally speaking, allow a ton of new ways to hack your opponent into pieces. However considering that Sony's solution is at the tech-demo stage that could take a while till games that fully utilize the controller pop up, especially considering that it already takes like multiple years these days to create a brand new game from scratch and those are with already well established gameplay, not completly new ones.
With the Microsoft solution, as impressive as it is (add a VR helmet and you have the fake NintendoOn for real), I see the problem that it is just not very useful for hardcore gaming, as it only tracks your arms and legs, not your hands, thus all the subtle movements are impossible, you don't even have a way to press a button and you are left with a bunch of casual sport game stuff. That would however be easy to fix by adding a Wiimote-like controller with Gyros, but that will probably have to wait till the Xbox720, since they didn't seem to have that planed for now.
Mouse and keyboard will STILL be better and more accurate for FPS games,
And an aim-bot is even better, but we don't play with those because accuracy neither guarantees you fun or immersion.
Motion control is all about simulating and capturing human motion. Your FPS style trick jumping and 180 degree turns don't fall into that category, so I have some serious doubt that it will ever happen with motion controls. Or to say it another way: Quake-style FPS gameplay is in large part an artifact of the mouse controls, so its natural that the mouse works best with it.
The first FPS that used the Wiimote (Red Steel) only sorta worked, but with the Metroid game, the experience was much better.
The Metroid game workaround the problem by using lock-on, it didn't fix the core problem. Trying to rotate your view and aim with the same control is still as awkward as ever on the Wii.
But anyways, the ratio of really good games to crap games has always been in the neighborhood of 50:1,
The problem aren't the crap games, but the lack of really good ones. At this point I consider the Wiimote as a complete failure for hardcore gaming, it works well enough for Wiisports, but hardly for anything else. Even Nintendo admits that, thus MotionPlus.
Well, go ahead and do that if you think it will give you some good pictures of those UFOs that all the radar stations, mobile phones and astronomers in the world somehow manage to miss.
SETI happens to be privately funded these days. There should be enough UFO quacks around to pay for a few cameras pointing at the sky.
Well, that depends, OOP alone is certainly not the guilty one for causing all the slowdown, but abstraction in general is guilty for a lot of things. Todays software is just way to removed from the actual hardware to allow certain kinds of optimizations. Random example: When you have a 2D game on older hardware (say GBA or similar) you could scroll by manipulating two bytes that represent the scroll offset, everything else was done in hardware. How do you scroll in a 2D game today? Fullscreen refreshes, as you don't have any access to the hardware to allow faster ways to scroll. So in the worst case you have to manipulate not 2 bytes, but around six million of them. Thats quite a few orders of magnitude difference there, that you can't really optimize away today.
Now for real games of course you might have a GPU that can handle that amount of speed and since modern games are 3D you don't really have a choice of not doing fullscreen refreshes to begin with, but as soon as you look into web games you can see all the problems, games in Flash or Javascript most of the time run completly terrible, worse then games you might have played a decade or two ago, because those games don't even have GPU access but instead pump their data through layers upon layers of abstraction before they finally hit the graphics card.
In the end I think the core problem is simply that todays software is written far to often for an abstract black box, instead of for a actual hardware. Especially web development is just way to removed from the actual machine to even have a chance of running quickly. To make things really fast you would have to optimize all layers of abstractions that the code has to run through, but most often you just don't have the control over it, as development is far more spread out these days. Its no longer your code and the hardware, its your code, dozens or even hundreds of libraries and then maybe far far away some piece of hardware again.
No, you're the one who's missing the point, it's not about proving alien life, it's about getting ANYONE to get off their ass and investigate that whole shit, because it's obviously worth investigating,
What do you want to investigate? We don't have a crashes spacecraft to poke around in and neither do we have any idea when or why an UFO might pop up. So you literally have to sit around and wait for something to happen, as people are watching the sky already anyway, be it birdwatchers, astronomers, air traffic controllers, military or just random guy with mobile phone. If you want to investigate something you need something to investigate, random events at random times that happen only every few years in the world and don't leave any trace evidence are just a little troublesome to investigate properly.
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Just for the record, some Sony engineer had a techdemo of head tracking up and running a year or so ago. So it seems easy enough to add to Sonys solution. And with that out of the way I don't see much of Natal being left that is useful for hardcore gaming. When both your hands grab the 360 controller, you can't do all that much gesturing. So unless Microsoft comes up with an additional split controller, Natal seems rather limited.
whilst it can have similar applications
The crux is that Natal can't do a lot of what Nintendo and Sonys solutions can do, lack of buttons/axis and lack of wrist detection will make the use of virtual tools rather troublesome. Simply pointing at the screen lightgun-style won't work either, unless you use your whole arm.
I think the biggest issue with Natal will be detection accuracy and lack of buttons/joysticks. So far everything we have seen of Natal shows that it can only detect arms and legs, but not feet, hand or wrist movement. This means that the control will be really limited in what it can do, i.e. everything that requires the use of a "tool" (tenis, golf, FPS, etc.) won't work properly, as there is no way for Natal to figure out how exactly you are holding the tool. Same goes for lack of buttons and joysticks, being able to move your virtual arms around 1:1 is all nice and cool, but you also have to walk around, grab things, shoot things and so on and that won't work without finger detection or even if it would work it would be rather awkward to shoot something via gestures.
Now these problems aren't unfixable, an additional controller with a gyro build in could give you easily all the wrist data and buttons you need. And for golf or tennis a simple plastic toy without any electronics build in could likely be enough. The finger problem on the other side only seems solvable by moving your hands much closer to the camera, so you get the fingers proper, but lose detection of much of the rest of the body.
My biggest worry so far is simply that Microsoft's marketing seems to be focused completly on controller-less gameplay, while they haven't really shown any interesting gameplay that would work properly without a controller.
It blows my mind how many people don't realize their computer is almost always doing more than one thing at a time.
My computer is doing many things at the same time, however almost none of them ever get close to even maxing out a single core and those that do don't happen in parallel. For example I don't apply Gimp filters and browse webpages at the same time, I do either one or the other, while the other application is happily idling along. And of course while doing that I curse that Firefox is to stupid to split plugins and tabs across multiple threads and that Gimp isn't great at using multiple cores for its filters either.
Having multiple cores execute different application might somewhat work with two cores, but with anything larger then that you are basically left with one core maxed out while the other ones idle along. Multicore doesn't bring much benefit unless the applications themselves are clever enough to handel it, the OS doesn't really help there.
using threads, or even multiple processes, and nobody has found a good model that actually makes it easy to do parallel programming.
The reason is that threads and processes are the wrong tool for the task, they introduce a lot of additional complexity while still failing at giving you fine grained parallelization. They are patchworks that try to add the ability to do parallelization to languages that where build for sequential evaluation, instead of solving the problem from the ground up.
Functional languages look like a much better solution for parallel programming. Without side effects, a very large part of parallel programming problems disappears instantly. There will be a need for some relearning as functional languages require a different approach to tackle a programming problem, but in the end that is what it needs. Look at GPU programming, the reason why it is trivial to apply parallelization to it, is because the infrastructure forces you to write your program in a way that can be parallelized. You can't make your fragment shader go crazy and draw over other pixels and stuff, you have one pixel that you have to fill and no side-effects outside of that and as a result you can throw as much parallel processing power at it as you like.
Web-browsing for instance, is not inherently paralizable.
Of course it is. Each Tab can be rendered in parallel, each JPEG can be decoded in parallel, each character can be antialiased in parallel, each download can happen in parallel, all the pixel that make up the final image can be alpha blended in parallel.
Yes, at some point you hit a wall where you will be left with a piece of code that you have to evaluate sequentially, you can't alpha blend half a pixel and your layouting engine might also require some sequential evalution. My point however is that none of those are CPU intensive enough to be a problem for normal use.
These days I don't have to wait for my computer because it has to solve some tiny non-parallelizable task, but because my computer is doing some heavy data crunching that could be done in parallel without much of a problem.
Or to put it another way: Half the for-loops out there just process each element in a list, the major reason why the don't do it in parallel is because the programming language makes it extremely hard to do so, not because there is some fundamental reason why it can't be done.
Implementing threading in a new app written from scratch isn't that hard (even so it has quite a bit problems on its own), the real troublesome part is rewriting legacy code that wasn't build for threading, as that often makes a lot of assumptions that simply break in threading.
Most computing intensive problems that a user will encounter at home are easily parallelizable, i.e. video encoding, gaming, photoshop filters, webbrowsing and so on. The amount of times where I maxed out a single CPU and the given problem would not have been to some large degree parallelizable are close to zero.
The trouble is that they are only "easy" parallelizable in concept, implementing parallelization on an exciting serial codebase is where it gets messy.
Maybe it is just me, but cutscenes are the worst part of a game.
Its not a cutscene, its gameplay. Indigo Prophecy/Fahrenheit was the same thing and it had basically zero moments where you could lay your controller down. Everything was interactive. How course it was for a lot of parts a matter of pushing buttons, but it worked extremely well, because it gave you a much more direct connection to your character, i.e. whenever the character was doing heavy work, you where doing heavy work, whenever the character was balancing, you where balancing. Its of course a less direct way to intact then in your random action game, but in the end its a tradeoff. An action game gives you direct control, but only a very limited amount of possible actions, for most part you are limited to shooting people, which just isn't very useful for storytelling. Games like Indigo Prophecy or Heavy Rain on the other side give you basically a limitless amount of actions, as everything is context sensitive, which allows much better ways to tell a story.
My microwave can do that right now.
The troublesome part is that it continues:
No, owning those games is legal, just selling them is outlawed. There are basically three stages of legislation in germany:
1) USK, a rating organisation like ESRB, but its mandatory.
2) Indexed, meaning games can get banned form being displayed/advertised/sold in public. You can still buy it if you are 18+, its just a little hard to find a shop selling it, so its not that different from a ESRB AO rating.
3) Banned, game is not allowed to be sold at all.
Ok genius, why does the Wii Motion Plus exist then? If it does the exact same thing as before, then it must be an empty piece of plastic, right?
Where have I ever said that? MotionPlus is the closest thing to 1:1 mapping we will have for the next year, but that still doesn't make it into a device that can track accurate 3D position like the Sony's solution.
So the paddle is just hanging there in mid-air and moves left and right? There's no twisting of the paddle, backhanding the paddle, or anything of the sort?
The paddle tracks the rotation, not the position.
Nintendo is claiming 1:1 motion. Are you seriously saying that they are opening themselves up to a lawsuit by making a false claim to the public?
"1:1 mapping" isn't a trademarked or clearly defined term and heck, before I have seen Sonys solution a few days ago, I would have called it 1:1 mapping myself, because its a big leap from Wiimote controls. Look for example at this techdemo, by far the best demonstration of MotionPlus I have seen, but does that show tracking of absolute 3D coordinates? Nope, you can easily see that he never actually moves the Wiimote around completly free, it disappears when ever he is not demonstrating a swing motion, so that all swings can start from a defined position in the virtual world and not drift away due to the lack of absolute position tracking. The video also mentioned that knowledge of human motion is needed to allow the tracking, which simply means that the device can't do full 3d tracking and some guesswork is involved.
I simply don't consider that a minor difference, because it allows very different solutions to gameplay. Sonys solutions allows completly free form interaction with the gaming world (drawing a picture), while Nintendos solution requires that interaction is broken up into distinct parts that allow resetting the position back to neutral (sword swinging).
If so, you're as dumb as you are blind.
Insults don't make a good argument. If you have a good demo that shows 3d position tracking, show me, so far I haven't seen one.
I've spent the last 3 years writing software for these stupid things.
Just because you can build 1:1 tracking in some applications with gyros doesn't mean that Nintendo's hardware can do it too, as mentioned there is an axis missing, the gyros only give rotational rate instead of angle and instead of velocity you only have acceleration. Also the Wiimote follows very different movement patterns then say an aircraft.
Absolutely not. Nintendo just put that ad out of the lady precisely controlling the paddle because they figured users would realize that it would be the exact same game as in Wii Play.
You must be looking at some other video then I am. This video doesn't show any precise paddle control, it doesn't really show any positional peddle control at all, characters are far to large and the table is far to small for that. It looks more like its just all about timing and swinging, very similar to Wii Tennis, just with better detection of the rotation of the Wiimote on the swings.
So is it nowadays called jealousy to give credit where credit is due?
That whole issue is just historic and has really little to do with credit. If you want to give credit you have to call it GNU/Linux/Xorg/KDE/Gnome/Ubuntu/Firefox/OpenOffice/..., but that of course is a little impractical. The issue popped up in the first place because GNU was building bits and pieces of an operation system and so did Linus, both gave their creation a name and the Linux name got popular, even so its technically wrong, as its just the kernel, not the complete OS, so the GNU peolpe wanted their slice and came up with GNU/Linux. The joke of cause is that the OS is not GNU either, as GNU never delivered an OS itself, that's what the distris did by putting the pieces together and they didn't just pick GNU and Linux, they picked a ton of other stuff to.
So in the end the solution is very simple: I just call it Ubuntu.
Watch the frisbee and sword mechanics. The character on screen is following the motions 1:1 with the player.
I don't think so. It looks basically the same as the baseball game in Wii Sports, just with some better detection. As Wii Sports is being based on single actions, with known body positions, its easy enough to fake things to make them look somewhat 1:1, but that is a different thing then having exact position and rotation in 3d space. As far as I know the sensor in MotionPlus can't even detect all three axis, just two and also only reports relative rotations, not absolute ones. On top of that the accelerometer gives you acceleration, not velocity. So you have quite a lot of missing information that you have to fill in with guess work.
It's effectively the same demo Sony gave this year, but with a bit less pizazz.
Mapping 3D objects directly onto the controller is what I call a convincing demonstration of 1:1, nothing I have seen of MotionPlus so far comes close to that. Would be interesting to know if the ping pong in Wii Sports Resort allows you to control the actual paddle, instead of just the swing on auto-moving paddle like in Wii Sports Tennis.
The Wii Remote has a camera in the controller itself.
That won't help much, as the sensorbar has only two points for reference, not enough to calculate a proper position in 3d space. And in games where you are not pointing at the screen it wouldn't work either way.
This was demonstrated at last year's E3.
Links are welcome. I havn't seen anything that gets near what Sony demostrated. Thats not to say that the MotionPlus isn't a big improvement, it allows to properly detected swinging motion and such, which would likely be good enough for some decent sword fighting or grenade throwing, but that is still relative motion, not an exact position in 3d space.
Fixed that for you.
MotionPlus doesn't give you 1:1 mapping. The controller has still no idea where it is in 3D space. The controller now has sensors to measure rotation independent from acceleration, which will allow to make the mapping of action a good bit better then before, as it will get much harder to cheat the thing, but it will still be a lot of guessing of what the player did, instead of just taking the coordinates and bringing them into them game. So MotionPlus is more an intermediate step, then the solution to the 1:1 problem.
MotionPlus however has the advantage of actually being a mostly finished product, while all the other stuff is just techdemo stage and it could easily take a year or two till some actual games surface.
That claim comes up every now and then, but at this point in time its really kind of baseless. The major failure of the Wiimote is simply that it just doesn't work the people expected it. It doesn't give you 1:1 mapping and thus your movement on the screen ends up having little or even nothing to do with your actual motion. Its not even a matter of precision, its simply not enough sensory data to do any kind of real 3d tracking. That's the sole reason why the experience ends up a little flat, as you end up performing the same game moves as always in games, just triggered by a different mechanism.
The PS3 and Xbox360 solutions are very different in that they give you real 1:1 mapping. There is no longer a need for waggle-replacing-a-button style gameplay. Those things can give you completly new gameplay possibilities, as they allow you to directly manipulate the gaming world and get rid of a lot of limitions current games have. Weird example: Try to shoot yourself in the head in any shooter, doesn't work, because you can't target that spot with current day game controllers. Its one of the many blind spots todays games have where you simply can't do things that your character should be able to do with ease. With 1:1 on the other side those things become trivial.
Now of course having haptic in addition would be great, but it really isn't needed for a lot of things. You don't need haptic to aim a gun or shoot a crossbow. You don't need it to throw a grenade either. And even for things like sword fighting being able to precisely decide how a sword stab would work would be big.
I think the hardest part of motion sensing is really the game design at this point. Games will need to change a lot if motion sensing gets a central part of gaming and a lot of todays mechanics will need to be replaced with other different ones. Gaming pretty much needs to be reinvented the way it did from 2D to 3D.
An as a side note: Microsofts solution, as cool as it looks, seems a little useless without an addition controller, you can do casual stuff with it, but pulling a trigger on a gun kind of needs a button and I don't think it can track hand movement either, so being limited to your arms and legs is kind of a big issue. Sonys solution on the other side looks spot on, it looks basically like a Wiimote done right and I can see huge potential for that in normal non-casual games.
Am I the only one who was glad that "waggle" games were segmented to the Wii?
The whole reason why those games were waggle was because the Wiimote could only detect that, it was a technical limitation. The Sony device gives you true 1:1 mapping, allowing all the things that people expected the Wii to handle, but that it couldn't. And if developers actually pick up on that you might end up with quite a revolution in the hardcore gaming world, as it will, literally speaking, allow a ton of new ways to hack your opponent into pieces. However considering that Sony's solution is at the tech-demo stage that could take a while till games that fully utilize the controller pop up, especially considering that it already takes like multiple years these days to create a brand new game from scratch and those are with already well established gameplay, not completly new ones.
With the Microsoft solution, as impressive as it is (add a VR helmet and you have the fake NintendoOn for real), I see the problem that it is just not very useful for hardcore gaming, as it only tracks your arms and legs, not your hands, thus all the subtle movements are impossible, you don't even have a way to press a button and you are left with a bunch of casual sport game stuff. That would however be easy to fix by adding a Wiimote-like controller with Gyros, but that will probably have to wait till the Xbox720, since they didn't seem to have that planed for now.
Mouse and keyboard will STILL be better and more accurate for FPS games,
And an aim-bot is even better, but we don't play with those because accuracy neither guarantees you fun or immersion.
Motion control is all about simulating and capturing human motion. Your FPS style trick jumping and 180 degree turns don't fall into that category, so I have some serious doubt that it will ever happen with motion controls. Or to say it another way: Quake-style FPS gameplay is in large part an artifact of the mouse controls, so its natural that the mouse works best with it.
The first FPS that used the Wiimote (Red Steel) only sorta worked, but with the Metroid game, the experience was much better.
The Metroid game workaround the problem by using lock-on, it didn't fix the core problem. Trying to rotate your view and aim with the same control is still as awkward as ever on the Wii.
But anyways, the ratio of really good games to crap games has always been in the neighborhood of 50:1,
The problem aren't the crap games, but the lack of really good ones. At this point I consider the Wiimote as a complete failure for hardcore gaming, it works well enough for Wiisports, but hardly for anything else. Even Nintendo admits that, thus MotionPlus.
There are plenty of different telescopes around and capturing airplanes seem to be quite possible.
A quick Googling revealed that such illustrious astronomers as...
You are back at step one: argument from authority. People seeing things != proof of ET flying around in his spacecraft.
Well, go ahead and do that if you think it will give you some good pictures of those UFOs that all the radar stations, mobile phones and astronomers in the world somehow manage to miss.
SETI happens to be privately funded these days. There should be enough UFO quacks around to pay for a few cameras pointing at the sky.
Well, that depends, OOP alone is certainly not the guilty one for causing all the slowdown, but abstraction in general is guilty for a lot of things. Todays software is just way to removed from the actual hardware to allow certain kinds of optimizations. Random example: When you have a 2D game on older hardware (say GBA or similar) you could scroll by manipulating two bytes that represent the scroll offset, everything else was done in hardware. How do you scroll in a 2D game today? Fullscreen refreshes, as you don't have any access to the hardware to allow faster ways to scroll. So in the worst case you have to manipulate not 2 bytes, but around six million of them. Thats quite a few orders of magnitude difference there, that you can't really optimize away today.
Now for real games of course you might have a GPU that can handle that amount of speed and since modern games are 3D you don't really have a choice of not doing fullscreen refreshes to begin with, but as soon as you look into web games you can see all the problems, games in Flash or Javascript most of the time run completly terrible, worse then games you might have played a decade or two ago, because those games don't even have GPU access but instead pump their data through layers upon layers of abstraction before they finally hit the graphics card.
In the end I think the core problem is simply that todays software is written far to often for an abstract black box, instead of for a actual hardware. Especially web development is just way to removed from the actual machine to even have a chance of running quickly. To make things really fast you would have to optimize all layers of abstractions that the code has to run through, but most often you just don't have the control over it, as development is far more spread out these days. Its no longer your code and the hardware, its your code, dozens or even hundreds of libraries and then maybe far far away some piece of hardware again.
No, you're the one who's missing the point, it's not about proving alien life, it's about getting ANYONE to get off their ass and investigate that whole shit, because it's obviously worth investigating,
What do you want to investigate? We don't have a crashes spacecraft to poke around in and neither do we have any idea when or why an UFO might pop up. So you literally have to sit around and wait for something to happen, as people are watching the sky already anyway, be it birdwatchers, astronomers, air traffic controllers, military or just random guy with mobile phone. If you want to investigate something you need something to investigate, random events at random times that happen only every few years in the world and don't leave any trace evidence are just a little troublesome to investigate properly.