This is the first graphics programming article I've seen in a long time with no visual aids. I think the writer simply wanted to write a huge "smart" article so that he'd seem impressive. Missed some good algorithms for terrain rendering (tilemap, octrees, frustrum culling). If you want a really good site about graphics algorithms, check out Paul Debevec's homepage (famous for his contributions to The Matrix)
Keep in mind that those screens are only 3 inches diagonally, so the entire system is about the size of 2 GBA SP's side by side (a little smaller than the original "brick" gameboy).
AdAware is a great program, I swear by it. Also, working at a help desk, I often tell people to go into IE advanced settings and disable 3rd party browser extensions. They seem to think that if it's a toolbar for IE, it's automatically a great idea to download it.
Well, the graph didn't help explain much.:P But your explanation did. I was most definitly thinking of the wrong economic priniciple, and I was also forgetting about the large upfront cost of development.
I was mostly referring to used games, though, where the development cost was already paid by the first user and the prices are set by the reseller. I personally hold the belief that resellers are artificially inflating the prices of used games to (A) increase profit margins and (B) encourage people to buy new games (since they're usually only like $5 more).
Given the ammount of times QA are forced to play the game, and the fact that they can just ask the developers for solutions to puzzles, it's not surprising they can beat them. Given time, I'm sure I can beat any game. I'm too casual of a gamer, though. I'll never be able to put in as much time as QA testers do.
Now, I'm not an economist or anything, but aren't costs supposed to come down when the demand decreases? Most games I'm looking to buy are fairly old, not noteworthy anymore, and simply take up space on store shelves. Still, the prices stay up where they are and nobody buys them. Even used games rarely go below $20 anymore, and I can remember walking into FuncoLand when I was a kid and seeing that newspaper of game prices with things priced around $5-$10.
I'm reminded of an old saying. "If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys." It used to apply to low paying jobs, but it seems to be spreading to any job where you're treated worse than the equipment (i.e. any non-management job). It's more like "you treat people like monkeys, they act like animals."
I still have a hard time believing that this kind of extreme ad saturation actually boosts sales in any way at all. (Except for maybe the x cam, which was wholly unknown until the popunder scheme) I come to loathe advertisements that are intrusive, and to loathe the products they represent. I also don't understand why 5 ads every 2 minutes on TV is a lot... but 1 ad every page load is considered tiny on the web. I'll make this clear so that everybody understands:
There is no reason to have an ad on a page meant solely for navigation. It's like pasting ads on somebody's remote control as they watch TV.
The better question is how you're gonna get Win 98 to interface with it so you can have a BSOD. Maybe if we get it to work with CyberMaxx drivers...... damn I miss the days of VR. It's funny that everyone lost interest in it once computers actually got powerful enough to draw more than 50 flat-shaded polys in a scene.
Games made for a 486 will always work for them. I don't understand your point.
I've been on a continuous upgrade cycle. Games made for a 486 will always run on one... but I sure don't have one lying around anymore.
As for the PCs, these are not gaming machines, get over it. PCs have a quality display included, they include interfaces with peripherals (printers, scanners, cameras and pretty much anything else), they also have hard disks so that you can store stuff and they have lots of other things as well, because PCs are computers, i.e. multipurpose computing devices as opposed to purely gaming machines.
I wholeheartedly agree, with the exception that PC games are usually the only worthwhile online games. The article was asking if the push for graphics innovations was stifiling the gaming scene on the PC. My opinion was that it is, if only by the highly deterrent prices of R&D.
If it weren't for emulation, I probably wouldn't play games on my PC at all. My machine is also a highly multi-purpose one... I just feel that gaming isn't one of the things it does very well.
Sure... single wavelength doesn't mean you'll go blind. But trying to read red ghost-like text constantly for the rest of your life might help. It's like a virtual boy on stereroids! (Assuming the deep red picture with the article is actually how it would look, not just BBC guessing.)
It is a tiny bit better on consoles. They have a lifecycle of several years, and games made for them will always work for them. I've had lots of problems with that on the PC (Star Control 2, Need for Speed 3). Right now, to have games run correctly on a PC, it seems that I have to update about $700 worth of hardware every 4 years or so. Even if I buy a new console every 5 years, they're only $300 when they come out.
As long as people ask these rhetorical questions without providing any answers then they'll be able to twist your perception however they'd like.
I find it really interesting that this author asks the rhetorical question about how much money the industry looses due to piracy, and then goes on to answer it by saying that they don't know, but "it's probably in the millions."
If you don't know, don't pretend that it's a lot. Just say something like "The exact figure is unknown, but the issue is being taken seriously by the video game industry." Or something like that (factual, conveys the gravity, but also draws the caveat that there's no definite answer). Also, mentioning imports once would have been nice.
Sony doesn't NEED the PS3 out... they want it out. They've noticed certian inadeqacies in the PS2 hardware when compared to the Gamecube and X-Box and they don't like being in last place (in technology, definitely not sales).
An example of one such inadeqacy is that the PS2 only has 2 texture combiners, and certain effects (like Normal Mapping) take 3 or more. That means that certain effects can't be done on the PS2 properly and must be faked... which kills development time. There are other problems as well, but that's the most specific one I can think of now.
Sony? Delay? I'm... uh... surprised? Almost everything they've made so far has been hopelessly delayed and then stripped of features at the last minute (but always managing to steal their competition's thunder). It's not like it's a mistake or anything. With a pattern like that, it's a marketing strategy.
I then thought of the word "and". What I ended up doing, is making a contract...
Of course, the more practical thing to do is to realize that you're too small to be on the radar, so even if you break the laws, the copyright holders would never notice/give a damn.
Also, they tend to encourage this sort of LAN party atmosphere. The way they see it, if you play the game at a party and have a lot of fun, you'll probably want to buy a copy for yourself.
Is it odd that the same people who move to Linux because Microsoft wants to track their online activity are simultaneously tracking every movement of Linus Torvaldis?
And why report a "sighting" anyway? He's not Elvis. Even if he is that popular, being alive and all, it's not so odd that someone might see him around every once in a while.
And don't flame me, it's just sarcasm.
Re:For their own sake, I do hope that...
on
Xandros version 2
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· Score: 1
One day at your local LUG:
"We have this new version of Linux. It's based on Debian with KDE..... and it works just like Windows! Now you can have Windows without Microsoft!"
"Why would we want Windows?"
Most avid Linux users don't want a Linux that's just like windows, they want Linux. The point of this distro is to pull in people who like windows, but wanna try linux.
Unfortunately, DRM is not always advertised. Thankfully all the DRM on CD bull was deemed "defective" and now consumers have to be warned, but that's the only example I know.
And it's exactly why I will never ever buy an iPod. Even if it's cool and I can get around the DRM without much effort, I'd rather vote with my wallet and tell apple to shove their DRM and get something that reads like a USB mass storage device.
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This is the first graphics programming article I've seen in a long time with no visual aids. I think the writer simply wanted to write a huge "smart" article so that he'd seem impressive. Missed some good algorithms for terrain rendering (tilemap, octrees, frustrum culling). If you want a really good site about graphics algorithms, check out Paul Debevec's homepage (famous for his contributions to The Matrix)
Keep in mind that those screens are only 3 inches diagonally, so the entire system is about the size of 2 GBA SP's side by side (a little smaller than the original "brick" gameboy).
AdAware is a great program, I swear by it. Also, working at a help desk, I often tell people to go into IE advanced settings and disable 3rd party browser extensions. They seem to think that if it's a toolbar for IE, it's automatically a great idea to download it.
Well, the graph didn't help explain much. :P But your explanation did. I was most definitly thinking of the wrong economic priniciple, and I was also forgetting about the large upfront cost of development.
I was mostly referring to used games, though, where the development cost was already paid by the first user and the prices are set by the reseller. I personally hold the belief that resellers are artificially inflating the prices of used games to (A) increase profit margins and (B) encourage people to buy new games (since they're usually only like $5 more).
I used to pump quarters into that sucker at the local pizzaria. It kicked my ass every time, but man was it fun.
Given the ammount of times QA are forced to play the game, and the fact that they can just ask the developers for solutions to puzzles, it's not surprising they can beat them. Given time, I'm sure I can beat any game. I'm too casual of a gamer, though. I'll never be able to put in as much time as QA testers do.
Now, I'm not an economist or anything, but aren't costs supposed to come down when the demand decreases? Most games I'm looking to buy are fairly old, not noteworthy anymore, and simply take up space on store shelves. Still, the prices stay up where they are and nobody buys them. Even used games rarely go below $20 anymore, and I can remember walking into FuncoLand when I was a kid and seeing that newspaper of game prices with things priced around $5-$10.
I'm reminded of an old saying. "If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys." It used to apply to low paying jobs, but it seems to be spreading to any job where you're treated worse than the equipment (i.e. any non-management job). It's more like "you treat people like monkeys, they act like animals."
I still have a hard time believing that this kind of extreme ad saturation actually boosts sales in any way at all. (Except for maybe the x cam, which was wholly unknown until the popunder scheme) I come to loathe advertisements that are intrusive, and to loathe the products they represent. I also don't understand why 5 ads every 2 minutes on TV is a lot... but 1 ad every page load is considered tiny on the web. I'll make this clear so that everybody understands:
There is no reason to have an ad on a page meant solely for navigation. It's like pasting ads on somebody's remote control as they watch TV.
The better question is how you're gonna get Win 98 to interface with it so you can have a BSOD. Maybe if we get it to work with CyberMaxx drivers ...... damn I miss the days of VR. It's funny that everyone lost interest in it once computers actually got powerful enough to draw more than 50 flat-shaded polys in a scene.
If it weren't for emulation, I probably wouldn't play games on my PC at all. My machine is also a highly multi-purpose one... I just feel that gaming isn't one of the things it does very well.
Sure... single wavelength doesn't mean you'll go blind. But trying to read red ghost-like text constantly for the rest of your life might help. It's like a virtual boy on stereroids! (Assuming the deep red picture with the article is actually how it would look, not just BBC guessing.)
You wish! By the time this gets relased, advertising and AOL in general will be much much more annoying than that!
It is a tiny bit better on consoles. They have a lifecycle of several years, and games made for them will always work for them. I've had lots of problems with that on the PC (Star Control 2, Need for Speed 3). Right now, to have games run correctly on a PC, it seems that I have to update about $700 worth of hardware every 4 years or so. Even if I buy a new console every 5 years, they're only $300 when they come out.
I find it really interesting that this author asks the rhetorical question about how much money the industry looses due to piracy, and then goes on to answer it by saying that they don't know, but "it's probably in the millions."
If you don't know, don't pretend that it's a lot. Just say something like "The exact figure is unknown, but the issue is being taken seriously by the video game industry." Or something like that (factual, conveys the gravity, but also draws the caveat that there's no definite answer). Also, mentioning imports once would have been nice.
Sony doesn't NEED the PS3 out... they want it out. They've noticed certian inadeqacies in the PS2 hardware when compared to the Gamecube and X-Box and they don't like being in last place (in technology, definitely not sales).
An example of one such inadeqacy is that the PS2 only has 2 texture combiners, and certain effects (like Normal Mapping) take 3 or more. That means that certain effects can't be done on the PS2 properly and must be faked... which kills development time. There are other problems as well, but that's the most specific one I can think of now.
'cause it's still cheaper than buying a video card every year. :P
Sony? Delay? I'm... uh... surprised? Almost everything they've made so far has been hopelessly delayed and then stripped of features at the last minute (but always managing to steal their competition's thunder). It's not like it's a mistake or anything. With a pattern like that, it's a marketing strategy.
Of course, the more practical thing to do is to realize that you're too small to be on the radar, so even if you break the laws, the copyright holders would never notice/give a damn.
Also, they tend to encourage this sort of LAN party atmosphere. The way they see it, if you play the game at a party and have a lot of fun, you'll probably want to buy a copy for yourself.
The only problem is that Nintendo has too much Japanese pride and identity to allow itself to be bought by an American competitor.
Yeah, like all other Nintendo consoles it "sucks" so hard that people buy it, play it, and ask for more.
If it's not your cup of tea, just say that... obviously it doesn't suck if a lot of other people enjoy it.
Is it odd that the same people who move to Linux because Microsoft wants to track their online activity are simultaneously tracking every movement of Linus Torvaldis?
And why report a "sighting" anyway? He's not Elvis. Even if he is that popular, being alive and all, it's not so odd that someone might see him around every once in a while.
And don't flame me, it's just sarcasm.
One day at your local LUG:
"We have this new version of Linux. It's based on Debian with KDE..... and it works just like Windows! Now you can have Windows without Microsoft!"
"Why would we want Windows?"
Most avid Linux users don't want a Linux that's just like windows, they want Linux. The point of this distro is to pull in people who like windows, but wanna try linux.
Unfortunately, DRM is not always advertised. Thankfully all the DRM on CD bull was deemed "defective" and now consumers have to be warned, but that's the only example I know.
And it's exactly why I will never ever buy an iPod. Even if it's cool and I can get around the DRM without much effort, I'd rather vote with my wallet and tell apple to shove their DRM and get something that reads like a USB mass storage device.