The RIAA subpoenas the ISP for the information long before they decide whether or not to sue the people. Of course, once they file the subpoena, they still don't have the information on who it was that actually did the file sharing, simply the name registered with the ISP, which is usually not going to be a minor.
There's also no requirement for the ISP to contact you when your name is given over to the RIAA, so you may not be aware that they have gotten that information before you are sued.
Once they have your name and address, who knows what information the RIAA digs up to use as part of the decision process. An article in the BBC (about a 71-year old man being sued) linked earlier in the thread quotes the RIAA rep as stating (paraphrased) that they hope this makes parents realize what their children are doing.
don't usually bother with sequels: I have Soul Calibur for the Dreamcast, and I probably won't bother with Soul Calibur 2.
Playstation 2: GTA sequel
Gamecube: Pikmin, Starfox, Zelda, Monkeyball, Super Smash Bros., Mario Sunshine, Metroid. All of these are really good games. Really good new games only come out every month or so, but that's perfect for my buying rate. I just picked up F Zero GX and have been wearing my thumbs raw with it.
While I like my Gamecube and most of the games you listed, I just have to point out: Starfox: sequel, Zelda: sequel, Monkeyball 2: sequel, Super Smash Bros. Melee: sequel, Mario Sunshine: sequel, Metroid: sequel, F-Zero GX: sequel.
Each one every bit as much a sequel as GTA3, if not moreso because GTA3 (much like most Nintendo sequels) is very much a change of pace from the earlier games. I also happen to enjoy each of those games very much, except for StarFox and F-Zero, which I simply have not bought or played yet. F-Zero's definitely on my list of games to buy in the near future, though.
Soul Calibur 2 sold so many GC copies because there are no other fighting games for the GC worth buying (except may Super Smash Bros Melee). PS2 has Virtua Fighter, Xbox DOA. If a game has no competition on it's platform, of course it'll sell bucketloads. It's called a captive audience.
Generally, I don't think Soul Calibur 2 has much to worry about from Virtua Fighter and DOA. It's got it's own audience with quite a bit of overlap in those crowds because of it's weapons-based combat, without the Virtua Fighter fans poo-pooing the fighting system the way they do with Tekken (despite it being pretty much the same), and enough jiggly action for the DOA crowd without requiring too much knowledge to get into the game.
Hell, I own all 3 systems, and Virtua Fighter and DOA, and I bought SC2 for the XBox. I'll pick up the GC version and maybe the PS2 version when the price drops for the characters, and I'm still waiting for the arcade stick to show up (currently listed as 9/10 on GameStop's site, the people in the store have no clue if/when they'll get it). I've gotten most of the stuff in the game unlocked, but still have a little bit to go, and then I can get back to learning the characters and beating the crap out of the computer and friends;)
All Star Baseball sells better on the Cube than on the other systems. Probably because the series originated on the N64, and only went multiplatform this generation.
I thought that game started out on the NES, maybe I'm just thinking of some other baseball game. Whatever game it was, it was the first baseball game I ever played that had any real team management, and it seemed to be the primary focus of the game.
The only complaint I usually have about pacing is when a game hits a sudden wall. I don't mind if games are hard, and don't complain about games being too easy, but if things are going along for a good amount of time at a certain level (gradually increasing in difficulty), and then all of a sudden I hit something that seems almost impossibly difficult or requires an extraordinary number of retries, I often put the game away for a very long time. I love a challenge, but a sudden change in difficulty is often unwarranted and just kills the game when there are so many others I could play instead.
The link you posted is to a completely different study covering something completely different: cost of administration.
The study in this article is about cost of development of web-based applications.
Frankly, I don't think Linux factors into this study much, since the major cost differences cited are mostly related to J2EE vs.Net rather than Windows vs. Linux. You don't need a lot of OS-specific knowledge to write software in either environment, as long as you know the environment (though, of course, you need to make sure you don't use platform-specific extensions).
The study doesn't really have much to do with Linux, except that it was the OS used to host the J2EE apps. It's a study of the costs of developing web-based software for.Net vs. J2EE.
The study was based on interviews with 12 companies, seven of which use Microsoft's.NET platform and five of which use Linux.
Forrester said that the main difference in cost was not due to price of the basic software, but rather the price of developing the software, including labor costs.
Despite the difference in costs, however, the Forrester report also noted that "many organizations will adopt Linux instead of Microsoft's alternative" because of the expertise they have built up on the Unix platform, Sun's proprietary operating systems used to run computer server networks.
Not that I hold much faith in 'interviews with 12 companies' as a solid foundation for a sweeping generalization on the costs of development, but it's easy, for me, to see how developing for a Java platform would be more expensive for some people than developing for the.Net platform.
Like other posters said, the aren't after the niche stuff anymore with D&D. Every mall bookstore sells something because it's Hasbro at the top of the food chain.
Every mall bookstore carried the TSR AD&D stuff 14 years ago. Book stores could care less about Hasbro, what matters is whether or not the books sell. The only thing they have done recently is expand their rpg section significantly so that you don't have to go to a game shop to get some of the less popular stuff (and given that I've seen 1 game shop in the last 14 years, and then only by accident, it's no surprise). Book stores are really odd about freedom of speech, kindof like libraries, they're usually among the first to defend it.
I've read lots of books about vampires and werewolves, but scant few about necromancers. I was very interested in those parts of the story, from the first few books, and I'm sad to see that her innate talents seem to have been forgotten in the last few.
If you like to read about necromancy and can handle some rather graphic descriptions I'd recommend at least the first book in the Necroscope series by Brian Lumley. IIRC the second book went into necromancy a bit, as well, but it was in the form of a vampire's art, rather than a human's use of necromancy (in the first book the necromancer was human, again iirc).
The whole series offers a rather original look at vampires, but the original focus of the series is on humans and various psionic powers, and the first book focuses much more on that aspect than on the vampires that become the focus of the later part of the series (and the further series (plural) spawned from the original Necroscope books).
Actually, in the states we pay a tax on music CD-R discs, as well. The money goes to the RIAA.
IIRC, though, they don't apply the tax on data CD-R discs in the US.
That being said, it doesn't permit people to copy music, just admits that they will. It also doesn't mean that people buying the discs are copying music, although buying music CD-Rs is like putting a flashing neon sign over your head that you're either copying music CDs (most likely), or are making your own CDs.
How the RIAA splits up the money is a mystery to me, though some research might dig it up. I'm sure it's a long convuluted series of transactions that eats up the majority of the money long before it gets to any artist, and that any artist that actually receives some amount of money from it is most likely not seeing a sales loss due to people copying their CDs.
and was on one of the subpoena lists I saw, I think over on TechTV's website. It certainly gave me a good laugh, and made me wonder how many times they tried to find the contact information for the kazaa.lite domain.
And, if that's the case (which it undoubtedly is for many of these people), they must accept the punishment that they (knowingly) brought down upon themselves. After all, it's not like they didn't know what they were doing was illegal, or that they'd be fined massive sums of money if they were caught.
Whether or not they knew what they were doing was illegal is actually part of the case, in these instances, and has a drastic effect on the damages that could be awarded to the RIAA (in fact, there's a slight chance that someone that successfully proves they didn't know it was illegal could get off, but it's unlikely, because even unknowingly breaking the law in case of copyright infringement could be extremely expensive).
There is every reason for them to do their best to go after real pirates... after all, it sets an example for other would-be pirates.
Real 'pirates' are burning CDs and selling them as the real thing for prices ranging from bargain bin to the same price you'd see on the Wal-Mart racks. They're certainly doing this to set an example, but it's a war being waged against people that they already know quite well can't defend themselves (and they've admitted that they're targetting high school- and college- aged file sharers). The RIAA stays completely out of the court system until they've got as much information about the person sharing the files as they can possibly get, and then they pick and choose the easiest targets. If they were forced to go to court to get the subpoenas for the information in the first place (and pay court costs for doing so), they'd be issuing far fewer subpoenas and would be more likely to follow up on all of them rather than just those that could prove to do the least harm to their untested laws.
Sorry, no way. People who amass collections of in excess of 1,000 mp3s (of songs they do not posses on CD) are by no stretch of the imagination "victims".
There's nothing in these suits that can even determine whether or not any of these people owned any number of the 1000+ mp3s they supposedly had made available. At some point during the suit, if any of these people decide to defend themselves, it might come into question, but since having the mp3 files is not so much what they're under attack for but rather sharing the mp3s, it's unlikely to matter much in the end.
If I made the mistake (and it definitely would be a mistake) of allowing Kazaa to share my mp3 directory I'd be looking at a hell of a lot more than 1000 files, all from CDs I own legal copies of. A quick average of 15 songs per disc would put it closer to 7500.
Of course, the RIAA can't even claim to represent the copyright holders of a large number of the files on my computer, either.
I would say that #35 was the first one that really caught me off guard.
Still, it also reminded me that I have to go back and re-read my Necroscope books, because I don't remember if Lumley's vampires/werewolves cast reflections or not (and if they didn't, whether it was a physical property or simply something they manifested in the minds of humans).
Oh well, just a good reason to get off my ass and find the last couple of books I don't have in the series and read the one or two I haven't read yet that are on my shelf.
I put in the Work Order to my wife for a the GBA SP several times, but it has been rejected over and over again.
I put it in (the Work Order to my gf) with a couple of addendums: 1) trade-in of older Platinum GBA (non-SP) to reduce cost 2) blue GBA-SP goes to my gf upon receipt of black GBA-SP from retailer
If the older SP had been green I probably could've gotten by without #1, but that's ok. Now, the real question is will I be able to actually get ahold of both a black GBA-SP and FF:Tactics Advance in one place without going to several stores. I'm guessing I'll have to put my name on a list for at least one of them or look somewhere else.
How many 1st party games are there on PS2 and XBox? I don't think Sony themselves do any games directly, and I think XBox is all second-party too.
Nintendo pumps them out much faster, it seems, but Sony and MS both put out 1st party titles, as well. Off the top of my head are Legend of Dragoon (PSX) and Halo (XBox, err, or is that 2nd party since it's Bungie, who is owned by MS), though there're more, I just don't feel like looking them up. Not to mention that they're both working on titles as well.
Sony's probably not as concerned about developing 1st party titles because they have all of the 3rd party developers they need, plus the movie DVDs and music CDs that play on the system, too. Microsoft has had a hard time getting any titles exclusive to the XBox without buying developers or titles.
Kurt Loader even SAYS this on one of those 'Histroy of MTV' specials.
IIRC it came about after RunDMC's videos started getting a lot of airplay and adidas got a huge boost in sales.
Now a lot of brands pay artists to wear their crap or give it to them for free, so, since MTV isn't getting a cut, they don't show it (and if they do show it, they either screwed up or got a cut, and it's usually the latter).
is this classified or something, that they can't show a graph of the changes since the game was introduced? The only reason I can imagine them withholding that graph is that the increases are so small they fail to justify the expense...
Changes since the game was introduced could also be influenced by other forces, such as the current war.
The only statistics they could really come up with would be some sort of entrance or recruiting poll that included the game as an option under 'reason you decided to join the Army', but I don't even know if they do anything like that.
and of course games like The Sims are only so fiendishly addictive because of this stuff. So sometimes games do have good AI, but as you say, in things like RTS or FPS games other aspects often get priority.
umm The Sims doesn't really have an AI, it just has a set of scripts that run when your Sim gets near a particular area in the game world. The actions of the Sims are built into the world, not into some AI, and the Sims themselves just wander a limited distance from their path somewhat randomly until they encounter the action points on the map. They have a couple of variables that help them determine whether they'll prefer one point or another, but overall there isn't an AI there that would look much better than your average FPS (excepting Half-Life).
It talks about happiness as a motivating factor for Sims, and hunger driving them to some item marked as food in their environment, though they could easily be sidetracked. This could be seen as similar to a very simple hunting AI in an fps, where the AI is always switched on to go after the player, but may get sidetracked if another AI is also tagged as an enemy to that particular AI. Of course, it would also include embedded 'instructions' for the AI to use any usable objects in the environment, so they wouldn't be stopped by doors and elevators, even if they had to operate a switch, because the doors and elevators would tell them what to do to use them.
The info on the address to send it to and so on should be in the readme.txt file, which you can access without entering the CDKey (because you aren't prompted for the CDKey until you run the game iirc). Otherwise it should be posted online somewhere, and it's done through Sierra, not through Valve directly.
But I can hardly tell the difference between 85Hz and 100Hz. I think 100Hz is enough for most people.
I have to have a minimum of 85Hz in most lighting environments. I can tolerate refresh rates down to almost 60Hz with very low or no light, but once a light comes on it starts to interfere and the rate needs to come back up (I start getting headaches after about 30 minutes with 60-75Hz in a lit room).
When you have chosen a refresh rate, the optimal FPS is exactly the same number. Generating more FPS is waste because it is just gives worse quality. You would either be skiping frames, which harms animations. Or you would be showing parts of different frames at the same time, which gives visible horisontal lines, where the two parts doesn't match. And yes, you will spot those broken images even when only shown for 1/100th of a second.
That's why they invented v-synch. Turn it on in your adapter's control panel, and leave it on, make sure the game isn't disabling it, either. Benchmarks will disable it because they don't want the monitor to limit the card's results, but for actual playing you want it on to reduce artifacts.
But generating 100 FPS and showing 100 FPS is not enough, you have to ensure each frame is showed exactly once. It requires a litle help from the graphics hardware, but nothing that is hard to implement. Having a litle extra processing power is important, you must be able to produce ever frame fast enough. You don't want to miss a deadline because occationally one frame takes just a litle more CPU time to render.
Actually, this is where v-synch helps, too. If your monitor is set to 100Hz (like mine is right now), and your framerate is 200fps (which isn't likely unless you have a high end card and an older game), then you're generating an average of 2 frames for every frame displayed. This is also why games should use double (or triple) buffering, so that the frame being rendered currently is not the frame that's going to be displayed on the next refresh, but rather the frame after that (or the frame after that). At low framerates, the buffering can lead to sluggish controls, but at high framerates it's usually indistinguishable (because, again, it could be rendering an average of 2 frames for every 1 displayed, and displaying them at a high enough rate that the controls don't feel like they're behind what's displayed). Generally, you don't need 2x the refresh rate, or even 1x the refresh rate. You just need as consistant a rate as possible (above a personal limit based on what your own eyes perceive as good and what your monitor's refresh rate is set to). I may usually have a refresh rate of 85Hz, but I rarely allow my framerate to go much higher than 60 fps in multiplayer games (because it's bound to drop to 30 somewhere, eventually).
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The RIAA subpoenas the ISP for the information long before they decide whether or not to sue the people. Of course, once they file the subpoena, they still don't have the information on who it was that actually did the file sharing, simply the name registered with the ISP, which is usually not going to be a minor.
There's also no requirement for the ISP to contact you when your name is given over to the RIAA, so you may not be aware that they have gotten that information before you are sued.
Once they have your name and address, who knows what information the RIAA digs up to use as part of the decision process. An article in the BBC (about a 71-year old man being sued) linked earlier in the thread quotes the RIAA rep as stating (paraphrased) that they hope this makes parents realize what their children are doing.
don't usually bother with sequels: I have Soul Calibur for the Dreamcast, and I probably won't bother with Soul Calibur 2.
Playstation 2: GTA sequel
Gamecube: Pikmin, Starfox, Zelda, Monkeyball, Super Smash Bros., Mario Sunshine, Metroid. All of these are really good games. Really good new games only come out every month or so, but that's perfect for my buying rate. I just picked up F Zero GX and have been wearing my thumbs raw with it.
While I like my Gamecube and most of the games you listed, I just have to point out:
Starfox: sequel, Zelda: sequel, Monkeyball 2: sequel, Super Smash Bros. Melee: sequel, Mario Sunshine: sequel, Metroid: sequel, F-Zero GX: sequel.
Each one every bit as much a sequel as GTA3, if not moreso because GTA3 (much like most Nintendo sequels) is very much a change of pace from the earlier games. I also happen to enjoy each of those games very much, except for StarFox and F-Zero, which I simply have not bought or played yet. F-Zero's definitely on my list of games to buy in the near future, though.
Soul Calibur 2 sold so many GC copies because there are no other fighting games for the GC worth buying (except may Super Smash Bros Melee). PS2 has Virtua Fighter, Xbox DOA. If a game has no competition on it's platform, of course it'll sell bucketloads. It's called a captive audience.
;)
Generally, I don't think Soul Calibur 2 has much to worry about from Virtua Fighter and DOA. It's got it's own audience with quite a bit of overlap in those crowds because of it's weapons-based combat, without the Virtua Fighter fans poo-pooing the fighting system the way they do with Tekken (despite it being pretty much the same), and enough jiggly action for the DOA crowd without requiring too much knowledge to get into the game.
Hell, I own all 3 systems, and Virtua Fighter and DOA, and I bought SC2 for the XBox. I'll pick up the GC version and maybe the PS2 version when the price drops for the characters, and I'm still waiting for the arcade stick to show up (currently listed as 9/10 on GameStop's site, the people in the store have no clue if/when they'll get it). I've gotten most of the stuff in the game unlocked, but still have a little bit to go, and then I can get back to learning the characters and beating the crap out of the computer and friends
All Star Baseball sells better on the Cube than on the other systems. Probably because the series originated on the N64, and only went multiplatform this generation.
I thought that game started out on the NES, maybe I'm just thinking of some other baseball game. Whatever game it was, it was the first baseball game I ever played that had any real team management, and it seemed to be the primary focus of the game.
The only complaint I usually have about pacing is when a game hits a sudden wall. I don't mind if games are hard, and don't complain about games being too easy, but if things are going along for a good amount of time at a certain level (gradually increasing in difficulty), and then all of a sudden I hit something that seems almost impossibly difficult or requires an extraordinary number of retries, I often put the game away for a very long time. I love a challenge, but a sudden change in difficulty is often unwarranted and just kills the game when there are so many others I could play instead.
The link you posted is to a completely different study covering something completely different: cost of administration.
.Net rather than Windows vs. Linux. You don't need a lot of OS-specific knowledge to write software in either environment, as long as you know the environment (though, of course, you need to make sure you don't use platform-specific extensions).
The study in this article is about cost of development of web-based applications.
Frankly, I don't think Linux factors into this study much, since the major cost differences cited are mostly related to J2EE vs
The study doesn't really have much to do with Linux, except that it was the OS used to host the J2EE apps. It's a study of the costs of developing web-based software for .Net vs. J2EE.
.NET platform and five of which use Linux.
.Net platform.
The study was based on interviews with 12 companies, seven of which use Microsoft's
Forrester said that the main difference in cost was not due to price of the basic software, but rather the price of developing the software, including labor costs.
Despite the difference in costs, however, the Forrester report also noted that "many organizations will adopt Linux instead of Microsoft's alternative" because of the expertise they have built up on the Unix platform, Sun's proprietary operating systems used to run computer server networks.
Not that I hold much faith in 'interviews with 12 companies' as a solid foundation for a sweeping generalization on the costs of development, but it's easy, for me, to see how developing for a Java platform would be more expensive for some people than developing for the
Like other posters said, the aren't after the niche stuff anymore with D&D. Every mall bookstore sells something because it's Hasbro at the top of the food chain.
Every mall bookstore carried the TSR AD&D stuff 14 years ago. Book stores could care less about Hasbro, what matters is whether or not the books sell. The only thing they have done recently is expand their rpg section significantly so that you don't have to go to a game shop to get some of the less popular stuff (and given that I've seen 1 game shop in the last 14 years, and then only by accident, it's no surprise). Book stores are really odd about freedom of speech, kindof like libraries, they're usually among the first to defend it.
Yeah, but they can probably afford better lawyers ;p
Or they can just call in the X-Men or something...
or maybe have an X-Men, Punisher, Blade, Ghost Rider, wtf else crossover series to kick ass on WW and Sony.
I've read lots of books about vampires and werewolves, but scant few about necromancers. I was very interested in those parts of the story, from the first few books, and I'm sad to see that her innate talents seem to have been forgotten in the last few.
If you like to read about necromancy and can handle some rather graphic descriptions I'd recommend at least the first book in the Necroscope series by Brian Lumley. IIRC the second book went into necromancy a bit, as well, but it was in the form of a vampire's art, rather than a human's use of necromancy (in the first book the necromancer was human, again iirc).
The whole series offers a rather original look at vampires, but the original focus of the series is on humans and various psionic powers, and the first book focuses much more on that aspect than on the vampires that become the focus of the later part of the series (and the further series (plural) spawned from the original Necroscope books).
Wesley Snipes, please come to the White courtesy phone. White Wolf want a can of Whoop-ass, face first.
Just call in Marvel Comics, which is where Blade came from in the first place.
Actually, in the states we pay a tax on music CD-R discs, as well. The money goes to the RIAA.
IIRC, though, they don't apply the tax on data CD-R discs in the US.
That being said, it doesn't permit people to copy music, just admits that they will. It also doesn't mean that people buying the discs are copying music, although buying music CD-Rs is like putting a flashing neon sign over your head that you're either copying music CDs (most likely), or are making your own CDs.
How the RIAA splits up the money is a mystery to me, though some research might dig it up. I'm sure it's a long convuluted series of transactions that eats up the majority of the money long before it gets to any artist, and that any artist that actually receives some amount of money from it is most likely not seeing a sales loss due to people copying their CDs.
and was on one of the subpoena lists I saw, I think over on TechTV's website. It certainly gave me a good laugh, and made me wonder how many times they tried to find the contact information for the kazaa.lite domain.
And, if that's the case (which it undoubtedly is for many of these people), they must accept the punishment that they (knowingly) brought down upon themselves. After all, it's not like they didn't know what they were doing was illegal, or that they'd be fined massive sums of money if they were caught.
Whether or not they knew what they were doing was illegal is actually part of the case, in these instances, and has a drastic effect on the damages that could be awarded to the RIAA (in fact, there's a slight chance that someone that successfully proves they didn't know it was illegal could get off, but it's unlikely, because even unknowingly breaking the law in case of copyright infringement could be extremely expensive).
There is every reason for them to do their best to go after real pirates... after all, it sets an example for other would-be pirates.
Real 'pirates' are burning CDs and selling them as the real thing for prices ranging from bargain bin to the same price you'd see on the Wal-Mart racks. They're certainly doing this to set an example, but it's a war being waged against people that they already know quite well can't defend themselves (and they've admitted that they're targetting high school- and college- aged file sharers). The RIAA stays completely out of the court system until they've got as much information about the person sharing the files as they can possibly get, and then they pick and choose the easiest targets. If they were forced to go to court to get the subpoenas for the information in the first place (and pay court costs for doing so), they'd be issuing far fewer subpoenas and would be more likely to follow up on all of them rather than just those that could prove to do the least harm to their untested laws.
It also makes it a willful offense, which is an important distinction in civil copyright infringement suits.
In other words, you give up a chance at a small(er) fine and possibly even an out, for a chance to get royally screwed if you ever do it again.
Sorry, no way. People who amass collections of in excess of 1,000 mp3s (of songs they do not posses on CD) are by no stretch of the imagination "victims".
There's nothing in these suits that can even determine whether or not any of these people owned any number of the 1000+ mp3s they supposedly had made available. At some point during the suit, if any of these people decide to defend themselves, it might come into question, but since having the mp3 files is not so much what they're under attack for but rather sharing the mp3s, it's unlikely to matter much in the end.
If I made the mistake (and it definitely would be a mistake) of allowing Kazaa to share my mp3 directory I'd be looking at a hell of a lot more than 1000 files, all from CDs I own legal copies of. A quick average of 15 songs per disc would put it closer to 7500.
Of course, the RIAA can't even claim to represent the copyright holders of a large number of the files on my computer, either.
I would say that #35 was the first one that really caught me off guard.
Still, it also reminded me that I have to go back and re-read my Necroscope books, because I don't remember if Lumley's vampires/werewolves cast reflections or not (and if they didn't, whether it was a physical property or simply something they manifested in the minds of humans).
Oh well, just a good reason to get off my ass and find the last couple of books I don't have in the series and read the one or two I haven't read yet that are on my shelf.
I put in the Work Order to my wife for a the GBA SP several times, but it has been rejected over and over again.
I put it in (the Work Order to my gf) with a couple of addendums:
1) trade-in of older Platinum GBA (non-SP) to reduce cost
2) blue GBA-SP goes to my gf upon receipt of black GBA-SP from retailer
If the older SP had been green I probably could've gotten by without #1, but that's ok. Now, the real question is will I be able to actually get ahold of both a black GBA-SP and FF:Tactics Advance in one place without going to several stores. I'm guessing I'll have to put my name on a list for at least one of them or look somewhere else.
How many 1st party games are there on PS2 and XBox? I don't think Sony themselves do any games directly, and I think XBox is all second-party too.
Nintendo pumps them out much faster, it seems, but Sony and MS both put out 1st party titles, as well. Off the top of my head are Legend of Dragoon (PSX) and Halo (XBox, err, or is that 2nd party since it's Bungie, who is owned by MS), though there're more, I just don't feel like looking them up. Not to mention that they're both working on titles as well.
Sony's probably not as concerned about developing 1st party titles because they have all of the 3rd party developers they need, plus the movie DVDs and music CDs that play on the system, too. Microsoft has had a hard time getting any titles exclusive to the XBox without buying developers or titles.
and there was that whole Final Fantasy VII thing, so don't knock them entirely.
They only published the PC version of FFVII, and that thing was a pretty horrid mess, too, for anyone not running a 3dfx card.
Kurt Loader even SAYS this on one of those 'Histroy of MTV' specials.
IIRC it came about after RunDMC's videos started getting a lot of airplay and adidas got a huge boost in sales.
Now a lot of brands pay artists to wear their crap or give it to them for free, so, since MTV isn't getting a cut, they don't show it (and if they do show it, they either screwed up or got a cut, and it's usually the latter).
is this classified or something, that they can't show a graph of the changes since the game was introduced? The only reason I can imagine them withholding that graph is that the increases are so small they fail to justify the expense...
Changes since the game was introduced could also be influenced by other forces, such as the current war.
The only statistics they could really come up with would be some sort of entrance or recruiting poll that included the game as an option under 'reason you decided to join the Army', but I don't even know if they do anything like that.
and of course games like The Sims are only so fiendishly addictive because of this stuff. So sometimes games do have good AI, but as you say, in things like RTS or FPS games other aspects often get priority.
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umm The Sims doesn't really have an AI, it just has a set of scripts that run when your Sim gets near a particular area in the game world. The actions of the Sims are built into the world, not into some AI, and the Sims themselves just wander a limited distance from their path somewhat randomly until they encounter the action points on the map. They have a couple of variables that help them determine whether they'll prefer one point or another, but overall there isn't an AI there that would look much better than your average FPS (excepting Half-Life).
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.03/aigame
It talks about happiness as a motivating factor for Sims, and hunger driving them to some item marked as food in their environment, though they could easily be sidetracked. This could be seen as similar to a very simple hunting AI in an fps, where the AI is always switched on to go after the player, but may get sidetracked if another AI is also tagged as an enemy to that particular AI. Of course, it would also include embedded 'instructions' for the AI to use any usable objects in the environment, so they wouldn't be stopped by doors and elevators, even if they had to operate a switch, because the doors and elevators would tell them what to do to use them.
The info on the address to send it to and so on should be in the readme.txt file, which you can access without entering the CDKey (because you aren't prompted for the CDKey until you run the game iirc). Otherwise it should be posted online somewhere, and it's done through Sierra, not through Valve directly.
But I can hardly tell the difference between 85Hz and 100Hz. I think 100Hz is enough for most people.
I have to have a minimum of 85Hz in most lighting environments. I can tolerate refresh rates down to almost 60Hz with very low or no light, but once a light comes on it starts to interfere and the rate needs to come back up (I start getting headaches after about 30 minutes with 60-75Hz in a lit room).
When you have chosen a refresh rate, the optimal FPS is exactly the same number. Generating more FPS is waste because it is just gives worse quality. You would either be skiping frames, which harms animations. Or you would be showing parts of different frames at the same time, which gives visible horisontal lines, where the two parts doesn't match. And yes, you will spot those broken images even when only shown for 1/100th of a second.
That's why they invented v-synch. Turn it on in your adapter's control panel, and leave it on, make sure the game isn't disabling it, either. Benchmarks will disable it because they don't want the monitor to limit the card's results, but for actual playing you want it on to reduce artifacts.
But generating 100 FPS and showing 100 FPS is not enough, you have to ensure each frame is showed exactly once. It requires a litle help from the graphics hardware, but nothing that is hard to implement. Having a litle extra processing power is important, you must be able to produce ever frame fast enough. You don't want to miss a deadline because occationally one frame takes just a litle more CPU time to render.
Actually, this is where v-synch helps, too. If your monitor is set to 100Hz (like mine is right now), and your framerate is 200fps (which isn't likely unless you have a high end card and an older game), then you're generating an average of 2 frames for every frame displayed. This is also why games should use double (or triple) buffering, so that the frame being rendered currently is not the frame that's going to be displayed on the next refresh, but rather the frame after that (or the frame after that). At low framerates, the buffering can lead to sluggish controls, but at high framerates it's usually indistinguishable (because, again, it could be rendering an average of 2 frames for every 1 displayed, and displaying them at a high enough rate that the controls don't feel like they're behind what's displayed). Generally, you don't need 2x the refresh rate, or even 1x the refresh rate. You just need as consistant a rate as possible (above a personal limit based on what your own eyes perceive as good and what your monitor's refresh rate is set to). I may usually have a refresh rate of 85Hz, but I rarely allow my framerate to go much higher than 60 fps in multiplayer games (because it's bound to drop to 30 somewhere, eventually).