As far as black bars and image stretching on emulation... HD support is not necessarily the same as widescreen support. I hope that even without support for 720p and 1080i, developers will see fit to have a widescreen and 4:3 mode on all their games (widescreen support must be handled in the software, there's no automatic way to do it in hardware). Ideally, their emulators should be able to switch back and forth at the user's will.
I also have an HDTV and I wouldn't have minded the support, but I think I'll still be happy at 480p as long as they start using antialiasing and anisotropic filtering.
The best they could do to pull the rug out from under Sony and MS would be to make the hardware support HDR rendering very well, and then make their SDK very HDR friendly. (and I don't mean cheesy glow effects, I mean real honest HDR rendering)
Also a 512 MB onboard flash rom drive. I ask... to the end user, does it make a lick of difference that the onboard storage is a flash rom instead of a spinning disk? I really doubt it. Sure, you can't do game pre-loading like on the X-Box, but GCN load times from the disc were still better than X-Box load times from the hard drive, so I'm not worried.
GameCube was $100 cheaper, and all it really did was convince all of the consumers that it wasn't as technically able or as good an investment as PS2 or Xbox.
The Gamecube was certainly more "technically able" that the PS2.
The question though is whether people believed it. People still have this mentality (even if they don't think it consciously) that something small and lightweight is a "toy" and something large and heavy is a "tool" and that the tool is more powerful than the toy. The X-Box and PS2's heftiness played a part in the misconception that they were both more powerful than the Gamecube.
In reality, the Gamecube is just about as "powerful" as the X-Box, in the sense that if something is possible on the X-Box, it's probably possible on the Gamecube and vice-versa. The X-Box had more texture memory and a higher single-pass fill rate, while the Gamecube had more texture pipelines and a higher multi-texture fill rate, and so on and so on... but they were both beefy machines.
And, true, the PS2 was less powerful than both of them, but it's also well over a year (maybe 2?) older than the GCN and X-Box. The age is the reason it's slower, not any half-assed-ness on Sony's part.
When you look at the specs of the PS3 or Xbox 360, it appears to me that your money is getting you a better system. With the Revolution not supporting high-definition, it should be discounted.
While I'll agree with out that the non-support for HDTV should lead to a lower cost (and almost certainly does), I would like to point out that:
There are no specs release for the Revolution at all (outside of some extremely unsubstantiated rumors), and the PS3 ones are still a little vague (as is its price point)
Outside of Sony and Nintendo, almost nobody has gotten to play a real PS3 or Revolution game yet, so it is a little hasty to make qualitative judgements (i.e. "better system") until you actually have a chance to play with them a little.
It's definitely too early to say which gives you the most bang for your buck, since we don't know what "bang" the Revolution will give you, nor how much "buck" the PS3 will cost.
I don't want anyone to think I'm evangelizing for anyone... but calling systems "better" or "worse" based on rumors are how flame wars get started. Even if you're not saying it in a mean way, there's someone out there who will take it personally.
First of all, it should be clear that the Rev. will support 480p and component cables. It would be stupid to think that they'd go below what the GCN already supports. A lot of aricles get that wrong, though, and someone new to this story following our posts might not understand that.
Second, I'm not following the whole 512 MB USB stick thing... but as for why you'd remove HD support from 3rd party developers is because of the hardware costs. To render a full screen (assuming no overlap of polygons, which is laughable) at 640x480 and 60 fps requires an 18 megapixel fill-rate. To do it at 1280x720 (720p) takes 55 megapixels (about 3x the fill rate), and 1920x1080 (1080p/1080i) takes 124 megapixels (about 6.8x the fill rate). And that's just the bare minimum required just to draw the screen, much less do anything worthwhile with it. This should make it clear that supporting higher resolutions requires more powerful graphics processors, which in turn cost more money. I think it's obvious that the only real reason they have to hold the support back entirely is so that they can keep the console's price point at about $200 (using the MSRP for the N64 and Gamecube as a predictor) because increasing resolution means increasing fill rate, which means higher priced GPUs.
I think that for the majority of people (who don't have or don't have access to HDTV monitors), the lack of HD support will mean nothing whatsoever. They still will support component cables, which means I can wire it up like an HD device (which simplifies my home theater), and that's all I really care about.
Well, at least with a Revolution, you can play some of the SNES and N64 games you missed out on. I personally just hope the download games are cheap (like a buck or two) instead of the ridiculous prices they charge for GBA classic games.
Ther is not... but you could take Physics I and II in college. Then look into ball-and-spring meshes.
It's fairly easy to simulate a large mass of fatty matter using a 3D ball-and-spring mesh and an algorithm like the one used for dynamic cloth, but link the vertices to other vertices based upon distance, not whether they're neighbors on the mesh.
Re:The word for today is 'moralgorithm'...
on
Behind the Moralgorithm
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· Score: 3, Insightful
When I saw this title show up in my RSS reader, I thought it would be an aritlce about morals in AI programming. What it is is something much dumber.
Yeah... I especially liked the part where they pretty much all said unanimously that if you're old enough to walk then you should throw away your gamecube. On their own shelves they can see games for the GCN like THPS4, THUG, Medal of Honor Frontline, NFSU, etc.... and not only are they common on the GCN, they're top sellers.
I also like how the Slashdot posting tries to rag on the store clerk for not knowing when next-gen systems are coming out, but by all accounts this survey was done in either January or February when details were scarse.
People would think that stealing an album in a shop is immoral, but stealing an mp3 isn't.
Yeah... I'm glad someone tried to associate this with a murder case. Sonofa...
Downloading a copyrighted mp3 isn't stealing. Stealing necessitates depriving someone else of property. Downloading a copyrighted mp3 is copyright infringement.
And, no, copyright infringement isn't stealing. Copyright infringement is copyright infringement. That's why there's different laws for it... and why it has its own name and stuff.
Just a tip for making sure the title is clear in the future. In the console world, HD = high definition, HDD = hard disk drive.
Also, I have no doubts the X-Box 360 will sell well, but it's FAR too early to tell if one decision will make a console triumphant over another. At E3, Sony showed a bunch of footage that they claim is real-time, and that the XB360 can't hold a candle to. Meanwhile, some say the Sony stuff was pre-rendered, and Rare said that their XB360 consoles on display were running at about 1/3 of the target system spec. And Nintendo.... Nintendo = wild card.
So basically, we should probably curb our announcements both of impending doom and impending triumph until the picture becomes a little clearer.
::looks up some of those words in the dictionary::
I don't know that the latin was totally necessary, but you do have a solid point. This is a big reason why most Christian games don't do well. Most either take the place of an action/fps type title where you're on the good side of a holy war (or literally a war between heaven and hell sometimes), or it's like a choose your own adventure stories, but with the world's most obvious "correct" choices. That's probably why the only really successful christian games I can think of are the old NES Bible Adventures games (because they did semi-fun things, like playing Noah and gathering animals to place in the ark).
When I really think of it, though, probably the most "christian" game I've ever played in terms of values and teachings would have to be Animal Crossing. There's no violence, but there's still lots to do, with a heavy emphasis on helping your neighbors and improving your neighborhood.
Granted, there's nothing officially christian in Animal Crossing, but it does teach a lot of the (often overlooked) values from the new testament.
I liked the sit-down rig they had better than Dactyl Nightmare. It was supposed to be like Battletech, and since you didn't have to worry about moving yourself around you didn't notice the cables all that much. It was actually a lot like sitting (surprise) in a cockpit.
The only problem is that that game sucked ass, they ran the entire cabinet on a cannibalized Amiga (aside for all you amiga fans, imagine the stress the machine is under handling all the data from the positional sensors, rendering two scenes per frame, and outputting it to a specialized stereoscopic visor,... and then know that these were not new Amigas, not even by 1990's standards), and if you took your hands off the controls, you couldn't see where your hands were to grasp them again.
With modern tech, though (or even semi-modern tech) a good VR cabinet could be done. These guys have a few VR-like arcade cabinets out there, and they're a shit-ton better than those old amiga-based ones. Now they just need to work on improving that visor.
Actually... the PS2 is $100 cheaper than that.... and that's the new slim one even.
Even though I'm a 20 year Nintendo customer, even I can see that the PSP is not a commercial failure like people are saying now. It isn't the New Crack that most magazines and newspapers made it out to be, but it's no N-Gage either. I think this is yet another example of over-hype and too-high-expectations.
I knew there was something up with the Calibur ending. I knew all along that it was spelled wrong and yet it seemed right. Tying it into Excalibur makes the spelling make sense now.:)
The big mistake is that the PS2 sales of SC2 were less than the GCN sales, and the X-Box sales wern't far behind the PS2 sales. (fanboyism aside, that's actually true, though unexpected) It would be a mistake to sacrifice one large market and one small one for the sake of a medium-sized one when you could have all three markets instead.
The other big mistake would be that Joystiq actually believed the rumor, which was started by notorius idiots at Gamepro magazine. They have a way of words that's just mystifying. They proclaimed on their cover one month "XBox Exclusive/Doom 3"... what they actually meant when they wrote it was "exclusive article about the X-Box version of Doom 3." I believe there's at least a chance this is another case of faulty wording.
He also says that at $100 more (with no pack-in game) the PSP is a better value. I question his knowledge of the word "value."
And not to nit-pick too much, but for functionality they say that the DS can only play games... but the built-in software is a chat/IM program. Also, the system can play video and music with the help of a PlayYan, like the PSP does off memory sticks (and even with the cost of a PlayYan, the DS is cheaper).
I was surprised that he gave the "control" category to the PSP. Sure, the analog-like stick may feel nicer than the d-pad, but it doesn't have a touch screen at all and the buttons are already notorious for getting stuck. That analog-like stick must be pretty damned good.
Look, it's simple. Most games avalible SHOULD be unavalible to minors.
With all due respect, that's not your decision to make. It is the responsibility (and the right) of each child's parent to decide what he or she should or should not be exposed to. This is not only my stance, but the stance the United States and most states take under the law.
And if you believe that your children should not be exposed to violence and sexuality in games, then please use the very descriptive ESRB box on the back of each game's packaging to make decisions about which games your children will play.
Seriously, though... you're a little off your rocker if you think it's right that a football game is too violent for a 17 year old. If you can grant me that a 17 year old at a normal state of development would not be adversely affected by the "violence" of football, then you'd have to grant me that the law as proposed is unnecessarily broad.
It's sad that hearing these statements used in such contrived was has really killed the impact. The fact is that the groups you mentioned do need support, and legislation can help (though usually only when the budget is being drafted).
"for the children" - It's assumed that children do not have enough experience or psychological development to be able to make well reasoned decisions. Therefore, the government sets up some safeguards so that children aren't allowed to make certain decisions legally (i.e. entering into contracts, etc...)
"for the elderly" - most protections for the elderly are more appropriately titled for the retired. Older people must retire to free up jobs for the next generation, but they shouldn't face the risk of bankruptcy just because they retire. This is what social security is all about... a new-deal program meant to free up jobs by allowing people to retire.
"for the less fortunate" - think what you will about social welfare programs, but if you don't have any money, you really have next to no chance of making any money. Programs like this are meant to prevent real 3rd world poverty, and the myriad of problems that come with it (crime, lawlessness, epidemics, etc...)
"for the disabled" - Imagine that you have a child who is a parapalegeic, and then remember that elevators and ramps are required in public schools by law. It's easy to see the value in this.
I admit that when I hear these phrases, I immediately roll my eyes because I've seen them used for such selfish means in the past few years. But the truth is there are many people who are actually trying to do benevolent things with these rallying cries. It's a shame that we dismiss them so easily thanks to the real jerks out there.
Just adding to my previous comment about how the industry regulates itself, and that we usually are against these bills not because of the concept but because they're poorly written legislation. From the article:
Republican Chapin Rose voted against the proposal, arguing it was too broad and unconstitutional. "The problem with the bill as drafted was that it made no distinction between violent acts of extreme brutality and, say, a football game, hence the latest version of John Madden Football, would not be allowed under her bill," Rose said.
Now do you see why we rail against this particular one? This particular piece of legislation is poorly written and overly broad, to the point where most of the games published would be unavailable to minors. (to add to Rose's statement, every fighting game, from Smash Bros. to Mortal Kombat would be off limits to children because it involves the type of violence stated in the bill)
Slashdot Mirror
As far as black bars and image stretching on emulation ... HD support is not necessarily the same as widescreen support. I hope that even without support for 720p and 1080i, developers will see fit to have a widescreen and 4:3 mode on all their games (widescreen support must be handled in the software, there's no automatic way to do it in hardware). Ideally, their emulators should be able to switch back and forth at the user's will.
I also have an HDTV and I wouldn't have minded the support, but I think I'll still be happy at 480p as long as they start using antialiasing and anisotropic filtering.
The best they could do to pull the rug out from under Sony and MS would be to make the hardware support HDR rendering very well, and then make their SDK very HDR friendly. (and I don't mean cheesy glow effects, I mean real honest HDR rendering)
Also a 512 MB onboard flash rom drive. I ask ... to the end user, does it make a lick of difference that the onboard storage is a flash rom instead of a spinning disk? I really doubt it. Sure, you can't do game pre-loading like on the X-Box, but GCN load times from the disc were still better than X-Box load times from the hard drive, so I'm not worried.
- There are no specs release for the Revolution at all (outside of some extremely unsubstantiated rumors), and the PS3 ones are still a little vague (as is its price point)
- Outside of Sony and Nintendo, almost nobody has gotten to play a real PS3 or Revolution game yet, so it is a little hasty to make qualitative judgements (i.e. "better system") until you actually have a chance to play with them a little.
- It's definitely too early to say which gives you the most bang for your buck, since we don't know what "bang" the Revolution will give you, nor how much "buck" the PS3 will cost.
I don't want anyone to think I'm evangelizing for anyone... but calling systems "better" or "worse" based on rumors are how flame wars get started. Even if you're not saying it in a mean way, there's someone out there who will take it personally.First of all, it should be clear that the Rev. will support 480p and component cables. It would be stupid to think that they'd go below what the GCN already supports. A lot of aricles get that wrong, though, and someone new to this story following our posts might not understand that.
Second, I'm not following the whole 512 MB USB stick thing... but as for why you'd remove HD support from 3rd party developers is because of the hardware costs. To render a full screen (assuming no overlap of polygons, which is laughable) at 640x480 and 60 fps requires an 18 megapixel fill-rate. To do it at 1280x720 (720p) takes 55 megapixels (about 3x the fill rate), and 1920x1080 (1080p/1080i) takes 124 megapixels (about 6.8x the fill rate). And that's just the bare minimum required just to draw the screen, much less do anything worthwhile with it. This should make it clear that supporting higher resolutions requires more powerful graphics processors, which in turn cost more money. I think it's obvious that the only real reason they have to hold the support back entirely is so that they can keep the console's price point at about $200 (using the MSRP for the N64 and Gamecube as a predictor) because increasing resolution means increasing fill rate, which means higher priced GPUs.
I think that for the majority of people (who don't have or don't have access to HDTV monitors), the lack of HD support will mean nothing whatsoever. They still will support component cables, which means I can wire it up like an HD device (which simplifies my home theater), and that's all I really care about.
Well, at least with a Revolution, you can play some of the SNES and N64 games you missed out on. I personally just hope the download games are cheap (like a buck or two) instead of the ridiculous prices they charge for GBA classic games.
Ther is not... but you could take Physics I and II in college. Then look into ball-and-spring meshes.
It's fairly easy to simulate a large mass of fatty matter using a 3D ball-and-spring mesh and an algorithm like the one used for dynamic cloth, but link the vertices to other vertices based upon distance, not whether they're neighbors on the mesh.
When I saw this title show up in my RSS reader, I thought it would be an aritlce about morals in AI programming. What it is is something much dumber.
To be fair, they didn't say "kiddy." They fucking said "toddlers." Asshats.
Yeah... I especially liked the part where they pretty much all said unanimously that if you're old enough to walk then you should throw away your gamecube. On their own shelves they can see games for the GCN like THPS4, THUG, Medal of Honor Frontline, NFSU, etc.... and not only are they common on the GCN, they're top sellers.
I also like how the Slashdot posting tries to rag on the store clerk for not knowing when next-gen systems are coming out, but by all accounts this survey was done in either January or February when details were scarse.
Downloading a copyrighted mp3 isn't stealing. Stealing necessitates depriving someone else of property. Downloading a copyrighted mp3 is copyright infringement.
And, no, copyright infringement isn't stealing. Copyright infringement is copyright infringement. That's why there's different laws for it... and why it has its own name and stuff.
Thank you for choosing Y. Now porting to x86 archetecture.........
Just a tip for making sure the title is clear in the future. In the console world, HD = high definition, HDD = hard disk drive.
Also, I have no doubts the X-Box 360 will sell well, but it's FAR too early to tell if one decision will make a console triumphant over another. At E3, Sony showed a bunch of footage that they claim is real-time, and that the XB360 can't hold a candle to. Meanwhile, some say the Sony stuff was pre-rendered, and Rare said that their XB360 consoles on display were running at about 1/3 of the target system spec. And Nintendo.... Nintendo = wild card.
So basically, we should probably curb our announcements both of impending doom and impending triumph until the picture becomes a little clearer.
Actually, they don't call him a pirate. He calls other people pirates. I think that may be part of the problem.
::looks up some of those words in the dictionary::
I don't know that the latin was totally necessary, but you do have a solid point. This is a big reason why most Christian games don't do well. Most either take the place of an action/fps type title where you're on the good side of a holy war (or literally a war between heaven and hell sometimes), or it's like a choose your own adventure stories, but with the world's most obvious "correct" choices. That's probably why the only really successful christian games I can think of are the old NES Bible Adventures games (because they did semi-fun things, like playing Noah and gathering animals to place in the ark).
When I really think of it, though, probably the most "christian" game I've ever played in terms of values and teachings would have to be Animal Crossing. There's no violence, but there's still lots to do, with a heavy emphasis on helping your neighbors and improving your neighborhood.
Granted, there's nothing officially christian in Animal Crossing, but it does teach a lot of the (often overlooked) values from the new testament.
I liked the sit-down rig they had better than Dactyl Nightmare. It was supposed to be like Battletech, and since you didn't have to worry about moving yourself around you didn't notice the cables all that much. It was actually a lot like sitting (surprise) in a cockpit.
The only problem is that that game sucked ass, they ran the entire cabinet on a cannibalized Amiga (aside for all you amiga fans, imagine the stress the machine is under handling all the data from the positional sensors, rendering two scenes per frame, and outputting it to a specialized stereoscopic visor,... and then know that these were not new Amigas, not even by 1990's standards), and if you took your hands off the controls, you couldn't see where your hands were to grasp them again.
With modern tech, though (or even semi-modern tech) a good VR cabinet could be done. These guys have a few VR-like arcade cabinets out there, and they're a shit-ton better than those old amiga-based ones. Now they just need to work on improving that visor.
Actually... the PS2 is $100 cheaper than that.... and that's the new slim one even.
Even though I'm a 20 year Nintendo customer, even I can see that the PSP is not a commercial failure like people are saying now. It isn't the New Crack that most magazines and newspapers made it out to be, but it's no N-Gage either. I think this is yet another example of over-hype and too-high-expectations.
I knew there was something up with the Calibur ending. I knew all along that it was spelled wrong and yet it seemed right. Tying it into Excalibur makes the spelling make sense now. :)
The big mistake is that the PS2 sales of SC2 were less than the GCN sales, and the X-Box sales wern't far behind the PS2 sales. (fanboyism aside, that's actually true, though unexpected) It would be a mistake to sacrifice one large market and one small one for the sake of a medium-sized one when you could have all three markets instead.
The other big mistake would be that Joystiq actually believed the rumor, which was started by notorius idiots at Gamepro magazine. They have a way of words that's just mystifying. They proclaimed on their cover one month "XBox Exclusive/Doom 3"... what they actually meant when they wrote it was "exclusive article about the X-Box version of Doom 3." I believe there's at least a chance this is another case of faulty wording.
He also says that at $100 more (with no pack-in game) the PSP is a better value. I question his knowledge of the word "value."
And not to nit-pick too much, but for functionality they say that the DS can only play games... but the built-in software is a chat/IM program. Also, the system can play video and music with the help of a PlayYan, like the PSP does off memory sticks (and even with the cost of a PlayYan, the DS is cheaper).
I was surprised that he gave the "control" category to the PSP. Sure, the analog-like stick may feel nicer than the d-pad, but it doesn't have a touch screen at all and the buttons are already notorious for getting stuck. That analog-like stick must be pretty damned good.
And if you believe that your children should not be exposed to violence and sexuality in games, then please use the very descriptive ESRB box on the back of each game's packaging to make decisions about which games your children will play.
Seriously, though... you're a little off your rocker if you think it's right that a football game is too violent for a 17 year old. If you can grant me that a 17 year old at a normal state of development would not be adversely affected by the "violence" of football, then you'd have to grant me that the law as proposed is unnecessarily broad.
That's one of those sad side-effects of having a page that's aeons old. Seriously... this isn't new news... not even remotely close.
Okay... I'll rant away.
BILL O'REILLY
Rant complete. I've summed up and proven my point in 2 words. Oh! Wait! I feel a second proof coming on!
SEAN HANNITY
Well,... looks like those facts didn't really get in my way at all. The seemed to, what's the word... support what I'm saying.
It's sad that hearing these statements used in such contrived was has really killed the impact. The fact is that the groups you mentioned do need support, and legislation can help (though usually only when the budget is being drafted).
... a new-deal program meant to free up jobs by allowing people to retire.
"for the children" - It's assumed that children do not have enough experience or psychological development to be able to make well reasoned decisions. Therefore, the government sets up some safeguards so that children aren't allowed to make certain decisions legally (i.e. entering into contracts, etc...)
"for the elderly" - most protections for the elderly are more appropriately titled for the retired. Older people must retire to free up jobs for the next generation, but they shouldn't face the risk of bankruptcy just because they retire. This is what social security is all about
"for the less fortunate" - think what you will about social welfare programs, but if you don't have any money, you really have next to no chance of making any money. Programs like this are meant to prevent real 3rd world poverty, and the myriad of problems that come with it (crime, lawlessness, epidemics, etc...)
"for the disabled" - Imagine that you have a child who is a parapalegeic, and then remember that elevators and ramps are required in public schools by law. It's easy to see the value in this.
I admit that when I hear these phrases, I immediately roll my eyes because I've seen them used for such selfish means in the past few years. But the truth is there are many people who are actually trying to do benevolent things with these rallying cries. It's a shame that we dismiss them so easily thanks to the real jerks out there.