Yeah Digital Fortress was kinda embarassing if you knew about computers, but I thought it was a much better effort then, oh say, "Operation : Swordfish" or anything else computer based, at least that I know of. The idea behind the TRANSLTR super-computer was cool, he understood the concept of cracking code and how such a computer would make if faster, except well, you know, 1024 bit keys can't be cracked quickly, even if you have 3 million processors to do the job.:)
And for a woman with 170 of IQ, Susan sure was dumb. So were the other players in the story. It definitely was his weakest book. I'd say Deception Point was probably his best, tough I have to admit I know nothing about meteorites so it could have been all crap he was saying and I ate it all up anyway. I think that's what makes Dan Brown's book so engrossing : to the people who don't know much about a particular subject, he writes half-facts in such a convincing manner that most people think he's right. Reminds me of a certain president...
If the government can check everything each citizen does, nobody can keep the government in check. This reminds me of a saying that is quoted in "Digital Fortress", a book from Dan Brown : "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes", which is latin and roughly translates to "Who will guard the guards?".
Launch window and launch day are very different things. Microsoft had 16 launch day titles. Ubisoft and Midway are providing 13 launch WINDOW titles. So this means that the games can ship anywhere from day 1 to 3 months later, give or take. That's hardly a launch line-up.
Sorry, but if there is no press release, then it doesn't exist. Everybody says it's confirmed, but nobody points to a press release or any article that would confirm this.
I mean, I've heard people speculating for months about the launch line-up for the Wii. If those are indeed confirmed launch titles, then I must have been following Wii related news at the wrong places because I have never seen such a list anywhere. Tentative launch line-up, sure, but definitive??
The way I see it, there is nothing preventing me from learning about best practices on developing for the 360, then making my game for the PC with complete 360 controller support and then when my game is done, then I can buy into this program to compile it on the 360 and debug from there. You don't have to develop the thing for the 360 exclusively. 99$ a year is cheap when Sony charges you 50K and Nintendo 2K for a development system. And last time I heard, the Linux kit for thePS2 had dreadfull support. On the other hand, what Microsoft is releasing is a free version of what the devs uses. There is going to be great support for this.
Actually, the majority of the movies shipping on HDDVD rights now are encoded in VC1 because of the quality/compression ratio. If the trend continues, it certainly is going to become the standard way to encode HD-DVDs. Besides, HDDVD players have to support VC1 or they are not standard HDDVD players, just like regular DVD players have to support MPEG2 and Dolby Digital.
So yeah, VC1 is a standard. If nobody hasn't implemented it yet in the open source community, it's just a matter of time.
Home theater enthusiasts with the proper setups will be buying a professional high definition player from a different vender. Problem is, you seem to associate "enthusiasm" with "wealth", which, while I love home theaters and always look at them at stores and never miss an opportunity to watch a movie with my parents on their incredible home theater setup (100 inch projector screen, paradigm speaker set and Yamaha amp, [~5k]), I personally can't afford all of this. I'll gladly give MS another 200$ for their HD-DVD drive because I already own the 360 so this lowers the HD-DVD price of entry for me quite a bit. Besides, reports are that the quality is very good. so why would I spend two to three times more when the difference in quality is not that great? I'm all for being an enthusiast, but there's also fiscal responsibility at some point. While I'd love to have a 5k$ sound system like my dad's, I think a 1.5k$ setup will be just fine. And that's already more than what a lot of people are paying for this kind of stuff.
I mean. Nintendo is clearly making a game machine and that fits their goal quite nicely. Microsoft wanted to make a console with a little extra via Marketplace downloads and connectivity with USB devices and Windows and it works nicely. There's extra stuff on the horizon, like apparently movie downloads and such, but it's not there yet, so Microsoft isn't rushing anything. (Well, the launch of the console was rushed a bit but everything is fine now.) On the other hand, Sony tried to create a platform for browsing, playing games, movies, music and a new disk based media.
Nintendo and MS kept it simple. Sony tried to bite off more than they could chew.
Why would anyone want to become the next E3? The ESA said it themselves, the members themselves decided unanimously that E3 was too big and cost too much. Those are the same people who are going to look at Gen Con and say : "You know guys, there's a reason why E3 is dead. We won't take part in your E3-wanna be project. It just costs too much."
No matter what the bulk price becomes, it will never be as low as a 50 cent piece of plastic. That's the reason why nobody will probably ever go back to solid state on home consoles.
Anybody has a CD of the game lying around. How many megs is it? I mean, I read the other day that Microsoft didn't want XBLA titles to be bigger than 50 megs so they could fir on 64megs memory cards. Is the game really that small? No FMVs or anything?
ALso, anyone downloaded the SFII game of XBLA. Did you notice the size. 50 MEGS!!!! Talk about a bloated piece of code! How did it get so huge? I mean, I remember the SNES version being a 4 MEGS cartridge.
By the way, when Kennedy said "We are going to be on the moon before the end of this decade.", nobody took him seriously. But we did (or at least, we were told we did:p)
The Japanese are maybe giving themselves a deadline just like JFK did.
Wake me up when Japanese industrialists figure out something they can do on the moon and want to send robots there or something. Considering it's the Japanese, they'll probably be giant fighting robots fighting together.
Wow. I mean. Wow. This has to be one of the best games last generation offered me with Halo, Burnout 3, Soul Caliber 2 and Knights of the Old Republic 1. I only had an Xbox, so I can't say about GC and PS2.
This might be the first game I played that actually FELT cinematic. The camera angles and the way everything was "filmed" during cut-scene was done extremely well. This was also one of the most beautful game I played on the Xbox. It wasn't shader or texture heavy, but the whole world was colorful and the design of the enemies and environments always felt like a cohesive whole. That's the game that made me realize who Michel Ancel was and why he was highly regarded. I was a bit distracted by the fact that my sidekick was a pig at first, but hey, it's a fantasy game. Even the Final Fantasy games have moogles, talking cats with a cybernetic suit or furry creatures as one of the main caracters (Umaro!!!:)), so who cares?
I liked the stealth aspect which was a lot more forgiving than Splinter Cell's. There were some really cool scenes to play like the one near the end of the game where you are running away from a mob on the roofs of the city and the perspective is made so that the camera is in front of you so that you can see your character running in front and the bad guys running at the back and you twist and turn your way to safety and you have to sometimes jump from one rooftop across the street to another and the game just switches view and gives you a slow-motion version of your jump and then picks up gameplay right afterwards. I didn't overwrite the save game just after this so I go play over it and over and over gain. The combat was simply, I mean you only had to push A to attack ennemies, but the heroine was very fluid in it's movement and you could turn around mid combo and attack another ennemy. I was really impressed at the maneuverability of the main character. She felt actually even more nimble than Ryu in Ninja Gaiden (another last-gen masterpiece).
All in all, one of the best game I ever played. It's a shame I sold my original Xbox and that the game is not backward compatible with the 360 yet.
I totally get your point. Last time the majority didn't screw up something for me that I absolutely loved, it was the X-Files and David Duchovny screwed it up himself. And Buffy I guess. It was time for the show to end. But Angel, Firefly, Invasion, and many other shows I loved got canceled because of suits or people not tuning in.
See, attempt at sarcasm just falls flat. I mean, if I had said "anyone can write a good Star Wars script" or "anyone can write better than Lucas" your comment would be acceptable, but I mentionned "anyone with decent writing skills", which clearly is not the majority of the people, and certainly not me. Thanks for trying.
Besides. you don't have to be a painter to recognize a good painting, but you certainly need to be one to make a good one. And George Lucas didn't make a nice painting in a very long while.
I meant the script. I mean, how worse can it really get than the prequels? Obviously the acting is going to suffer and the CG won't be as good, but anyone with good story-telling skills could write something decent in the SW universe.
Then these people should read the article. You need a special paint applied on your face and then be in a specially lit room in order to be recorded. There's is no concern to be had over this forgery "issue".
Read the article. It's apparently cheaper than motion capture. Traditionnal motion capturing of facial animation is nowhere near where what he claims his system is. I've asked a buddy from work who's at Siggraph this week to go and check it out. It seems really promising. This might be something nice to include in animation packages like Autodesk's (formely from Alias, originally from Kaydara) Motion Builder (originally Filmbox:p).
Hum. Considering the Bungie guys intend the FPS games as a trilogy (tough we'll probably have some sort of RTS game or MMORPGish game someday). If I wanted to express sequellitis, I would mention a game series that's actually not too far from there, Final Fantasy, now 13 and counting, not counting the Game Boy games and other derivative games that bear no ressemblance to the Final Fantasy mythos or gameplay except for the name and chocobos.
Slashdot Mirror
Loved how you summed up the male protagonist of every story he wrote. :)
Stop being such an elitist, I was simply quoting a book I read last week.
Yeah Digital Fortress was kinda embarassing if you knew about computers, but I thought it was a much better effort then, oh say, "Operation : Swordfish" or anything else computer based, at least that I know of. The idea behind the TRANSLTR super-computer was cool, he understood the concept of cracking code and how such a computer would make if faster, except well, you know, 1024 bit keys can't be cracked quickly, even if you have 3 million processors to do the job. :)
And for a woman with 170 of IQ, Susan sure was dumb. So were the other players in the story. It definitely was his weakest book. I'd say Deception Point was probably his best, tough I have to admit I know nothing about meteorites so it could have been all crap he was saying and I ate it all up anyway. I think that's what makes Dan Brown's book so engrossing : to the people who don't know much about a particular subject, he writes half-facts in such a convincing manner that most people think he's right. Reminds me of a certain president...
If the government can check everything each citizen does, nobody can keep the government in check.
This reminds me of a saying that is quoted in "Digital Fortress", a book from Dan Brown : "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes", which is latin and roughly translates to "Who will guard the guards?".
Launch window and launch day are very different things. Microsoft had 16 launch day titles. Ubisoft and Midway are providing 13 launch WINDOW titles. So this means that the games can ship anywhere from day 1 to 3 months later, give or take. That's hardly a launch line-up.
Sorry, but if there is no press release, then it doesn't exist. Everybody says it's confirmed, but nobody points to a press release or any article that would confirm this.
I mean, I've heard people speculating for months about the launch line-up for the Wii. If those are indeed confirmed launch titles, then I must have been following Wii related news at the wrong places because I have never seen such a list anywhere. Tentative launch line-up, sure, but definitive??
The way I see it, there is nothing preventing me from learning about best practices on developing for the 360, then making my game for the PC with complete 360 controller support and then when my game is done, then I can buy into this program to compile it on the 360 and debug from there. You don't have to develop the thing for the 360 exclusively. 99$ a year is cheap when Sony charges you 50K and Nintendo 2K for a development system. And last time I heard, the Linux kit for thePS2 had dreadfull support. On the other hand, what Microsoft is releasing is a free version of what the devs uses. There is going to be great support for this.
I can't wait to download it!
Actually, the majority of the movies shipping on HDDVD rights now are encoded in VC1 because of the quality/compression ratio. If the trend continues, it certainly is going to become the standard way to encode HD-DVDs. Besides, HDDVD players have to support VC1 or they are not standard HDDVD players, just like regular DVD players have to support MPEG2 and Dolby Digital.
So yeah, VC1 is a standard. If nobody hasn't implemented it yet in the open source community, it's just a matter of time.
Home theater enthusiasts with the proper setups will be buying a professional high definition player from a different vender.
Problem is, you seem to associate "enthusiasm" with "wealth", which, while I love home theaters and always look at them at stores and never miss an opportunity to watch a movie with my parents on their incredible home theater setup (100 inch projector screen, paradigm speaker set and Yamaha amp, [~5k]), I personally can't afford all of this. I'll gladly give MS another 200$ for their HD-DVD drive because I already own the 360 so this lowers the HD-DVD price of entry for me quite a bit. Besides, reports are that the quality is very good. so why would I spend two to three times more when the difference in quality is not that great? I'm all for being an enthusiast, but there's also fiscal responsibility at some point. While I'd love to have a 5k$ sound system like my dad's, I think a 1.5k$ setup will be just fine. And that's already more than what a lot of people are paying for this kind of stuff.
I mean. Nintendo is clearly making a game machine and that fits their goal quite nicely. Microsoft wanted to make a console with a little extra via Marketplace downloads and connectivity with USB devices and Windows and it works nicely. There's extra stuff on the horizon, like apparently movie downloads and such, but it's not there yet, so Microsoft isn't rushing anything. (Well, the launch of the console was rushed a bit but everything is fine now.) On the other hand, Sony tried to create a platform for browsing, playing games, movies, music and a new disk based media.
Nintendo and MS kept it simple. Sony tried to bite off more than they could chew.
Why would anyone want to become the next E3? The ESA said it themselves, the members themselves decided unanimously that E3 was too big and cost too much. Those are the same people who are going to look at Gen Con and say : "You know guys, there's a reason why E3 is dead. We won't take part in your E3-wanna be project. It just costs too much."
No matter what the bulk price becomes, it will never be as low as a 50 cent piece of plastic. That's the reason why nobody will probably ever go back to solid state on home consoles.
Anybody has a CD of the game lying around. How many megs is it? I mean, I read the other day that Microsoft didn't want XBLA titles to be bigger than 50 megs so they could fir on 64megs memory cards. Is the game really that small? No FMVs or anything?
ALso, anyone downloaded the SFII game of XBLA. Did you notice the size. 50 MEGS!!!! Talk about a bloated piece of code! How did it get so huge? I mean, I remember the SNES version being a 4 MEGS cartridge.
By the way, when Kennedy said "We are going to be on the moon before the end of this decade.", nobody took him seriously. But we did (or at least, we were told we did :p)
The Japanese are maybe giving themselves a deadline just like JFK did.
Wake me up when Japanese industrialists figure out something they can do on the moon and want to send robots there or something.
Considering it's the Japanese, they'll probably be giant fighting robots fighting together.
Wow. I mean. Wow. This has to be one of the best games last generation offered me with Halo, Burnout 3, Soul Caliber 2 and Knights of the Old Republic 1. I only had an Xbox, so I can't say about GC and PS2.
:)), so who cares?
This might be the first game I played that actually FELT cinematic. The camera angles and the way everything was "filmed" during cut-scene was done extremely well. This was also one of the most beautful game I played on the Xbox. It wasn't shader or texture heavy, but the whole world was colorful and the design of the enemies and environments always felt like a cohesive whole. That's the game that made me realize who Michel Ancel was and why he was highly regarded. I was a bit distracted by the fact that my sidekick was a pig at first, but hey, it's a fantasy game. Even the Final Fantasy games have moogles, talking cats with a cybernetic suit or furry creatures as one of the main caracters (Umaro!!!
I liked the stealth aspect which was a lot more forgiving than Splinter Cell's. There were some really cool scenes to play like the one near the end of the game where you are running away from a mob on the roofs of the city and the perspective is made so that the camera is in front of you so that you can see your character running in front and the bad guys running at the back and you twist and turn your way to safety and you have to sometimes jump from one rooftop across the street to another and the game just switches view and gives you a slow-motion version of your jump and then picks up gameplay right afterwards. I didn't overwrite the save game just after this so I go play over it and over and over gain. The combat was simply, I mean you only had to push A to attack ennemies, but the heroine was very fluid in it's movement and you could turn around mid combo and attack another ennemy. I was really impressed at the maneuverability of the main character. She felt actually even more nimble than Ryu in Ninja Gaiden (another last-gen masterpiece).
All in all, one of the best game I ever played. It's a shame I sold my original Xbox and that the game is not backward compatible with the 360 yet.
I totally get your point. Last time the majority didn't screw up something for me that I absolutely loved, it was the X-Files and David Duchovny screwed it up himself. And Buffy I guess. It was time for the show to end. But Angel, Firefly, Invasion, and many other shows I loved got canceled because of suits or people not tuning in.
Interrestingly, the NUMBER datatype in Oracle has a maximum number of 38 digits....
See, attempt at sarcasm just falls flat. I mean, if I had said "anyone can write a good Star Wars script" or "anyone can write better than Lucas" your comment would be acceptable, but I mentionned "anyone with decent writing skills", which clearly is not the majority of the people, and certainly not me. Thanks for trying.
Besides. you don't have to be a painter to recognize a good painting, but you certainly need to be one to make a good one. And George Lucas didn't make a nice painting in a very long while.
I meant the script. I mean, how worse can it really get than the prequels? Obviously the acting is going to suffer and the CG won't be as good, but anyone with good story-telling skills could write something decent in the SW universe.
The face on George Lucas when he sees the film and sees that it's better than what he wrote : priceless.
Sure. But the reaction to this particular implementation of the technology is still overblown.
Then these people should read the article. You need a special paint applied on your face and then be in a specially lit room in order to be recorded. There's is no concern to be had over this forgery "issue".
Read the article. It's apparently cheaper than motion capture. Traditionnal motion capturing of facial animation is nowhere near where what he claims his system is. I've asked a buddy from work who's at Siggraph this week to go and check it out. It seems really promising. This might be something nice to include in animation packages like Autodesk's (formely from Alias, originally from Kaydara) Motion Builder (originally Filmbox :p).
Halo 17?
Hum. Considering the Bungie guys intend the FPS games as a trilogy (tough we'll probably have some sort of RTS game or MMORPGish game someday). If I wanted to express sequellitis, I would mention a game series that's actually not too far from there, Final Fantasy, now 13 and counting, not counting the Game Boy games and other derivative games that bear no ressemblance to the Final Fantasy mythos or gameplay except for the name and chocobos.