I understand that sometimes a patch is necessary, but for the love of Baal, how many patches did Diablo 2 eventually see?
9 or 10 patches in a couple years isn't too bad. They did have some major problems that had to be fixed, but they used a lot more of those patches for gameplay and hack fixes than anything else (the D3D support had a couple of minor fixes and then a major fix around the time of the expansion release, which also included a major overhaul of the gameplay in terms of skill trees and difficulty). They could've easily stopped much earlier, but the expansion probably would've required some kind of patch in any case to allow them to co-exist as well as they currently do.
At least that game works. I've got a handful of other games that never worked completely right, no matter how many patches came for them (or even worse, that never received patches that were definitely needed).
Actually many of the Diablo 2 patches addressed the Direct3D support, which was barely usable when the game shipped, even on the best video cards available at the time (the glide support for 3dfx cards was significantly better).
The 'balancing' changes are, in themselves, a sign of the poor testing done on the game, though, for the most part, I'd say the game shipped mostly good (except for the Direct3D support).
Many people just don't like the phone in general. It tends to be very blind (ie it doesn't care whether you want to use it or not, it just makes noise until you answer it or the machine gets it), and many people don't communicate as well without seeing one another. It's 1-on-1 communication without the subtleties of communicating face-to-face.
At the same time, I don't use text messaging because it's as much an interruption in most cases as the phone is, not to mention that using it on my cell phone costs more money (actually only ~$5/month for unlimited use) and is harder to use (though the text interface on my phone is not bad, and it seems to be pretty common on different manufacturer's phones).
I've met quite a few people that can't seem to handle text as well for one reason or another. I prefer it because it gives me some time to string my thoughts together (though not much in a conversation). With people that don't like it so much, voice chat programs work perfectly well on the PC, or I can make a call on my phone to just about anywhere for free, I just prefer not to talk to people without being able to see them (and no, video over IP is not fast enough to get around this yet).
Link feels so "outside" the Soul Calibur paradigm:(... at least Spawn is a character that has a charisma comparable to Cervantes' (is Cervantes in SC2? Haven't played it yet... think that yesterday evening I was playing with the first, SoulEdge on PSX)
iirc Cervantes is an unlockable character in SC2 (I unlocked most of the characters this weekend so I'm not completely sure, I just know that he's definitely in there).
I'd say the only reason Spawn doesn't feel right in SC2 is because I know he is an outside character. He also has one or two moves that are a little outside normal for SC (ie shooting green crap across the screen, similar to the fireballs and other distance attacks in Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat).
The original XBox controller also seems to work really well, imo, for the game, and has gotten me through my inability to find the SC2 arcade stick in any local stores quite nicely (to the point where the only reason I really want that arcade stick is to have a multi-platform arcade stick for my other games).
When it came down to it, the added video and audio modes are pretty much what sold the XBox version over the GameCube version for me. Sure, Spawn seems to fit better than Link, but that's a non-issue to me. In fact, I'll probably buy the other two versions when they're budget titles just to get to play Link and Heihachi in Soul Calibur.
Sierra had no choice in either of those releases. Valve canned the Mac port because they said it wouldn't interoperate with the PC version online.
Why they canned the DreamCast version I don't know, but the storyline was released as Blue Shift, iirc.
Sierra's never had any control over Valve except in the QA process for titles Sierra is contracted to publish. In other words, Sierra can force Valve to fix bugs before releasing a title to retail or releasing a patch, but they can't force them to ship a title. Otherwise, we would've had Half-Life at least a year earlier and TF2 a long time ago.
Valve is an independent developer, as mentioned above. They were started by Gabe Newell (an ex-MS employee) and have been mostly self-funded from the start.
A Vivendi subsidiary would never have been allowed to delay their first title for nearly 2 years. The only reason Blizzard gets away with that kind of crap is because they have a track record of horrible predictions for release dates, but solid releases.
Valve is the developer of Half-Life, and they have very much been working on methods for self-publishing their titles (ie Steam).
Furthermore, whenever Sierra has had full control over a development house, they've had a nasty tendency to run it into the ground shortly after a major release, or even push it into that release before it was ready and then run the studio into the ground. Luckily, Sierra has no control over Valve except to delay release of retail packages and patches when they fail QA.
Now, how much does filesharing influence this? For music, I'd say quite a bit. Not so much for movies - it's l33t to have the latest blockbuster on (S)VCD, even before the premiere, but in the end - if you liked the movie - you still go to the theatre and watch it on the big screen. Supposedly true for music CDs also, but I guess to a lesser extend.
I think the music industry screwed themselves out of this by treating MP3s the same as they would full piracy, and by charging nearly as much for downloaded music as for the CDs. Many people already couldn't hear the difference between the two, but when they charge nearly the same thing and you don't even get the CD, there's no incentive for them not to pirate it. The perceived value of a product should be higher than what you're charging for it, not lower. People may like CDs because they last longer than tapes, but they still don't think most albums are worth $15-20. Movies are very different. DVDs are obviously higher quality to most viewers, and the movie theaters usually offer a much better experience than most home viewers can get. The worst thing P2P has done to the box office is allow people to see the movie for themselves to decide whether or not they should spend $7 to see it in the theater, wait for DVD release, or never watch the movie again. Not to mention that most people still don't have the bandwidth to download the movies, even in DivX formats, and so much of the trading of movies is offline, as it was before P2P became big.
What about games? Yes, you can find virtually any title on (most of) your favourite P2P network. Documentation may be missing, or may be included as a PDF, but there are commercial box version available that do not offer much more than that, especially since the advent of DVD cases...
So either John and Jane Doe take delight in d/l movies, but not games, or the number of people playing a game are much larger than the sales figures. If you have a pirated version of the game, the drawbacks are much lower than those of a pirated movie. And I'm not even convinced that the majority uses the pirated games as a "full demo" and buys the game afterwards, if they like it.
The biggest selling games are console games, which have a much bigger audience, and the average technical expertise is much lower (not really a hit against them, just that it can often take quite a bit of knowledge just to get a computer game running). Despite what it would seem to many people, most don't have their XBox or PS2 modded to play pirated games in the first place. Many XBox/PS2 owners don't even have a PC, which that any pirated games they could get would have to come from someone else, who either owns the games, knows someone who owns the games, or can download them.
But, companies like id are there spending years making games, and create a solid game, but making small amounts of profit out of it.
Yeah, that's why Carmack has a handful of Ferraris and builds rockets (to carry people into space) in his spare time, because they're making small profits, off two of the best selling PC franchises of all time combined with the best-selling FPS engines.
There are a few things to take into account: 75 hours means the average person is playing 2 games a year. *cough*I have a hard time keeping to 2 games a month*cough* (and the latter may illustrate a point, my girlfriend plays more than 75 hours every 2 months and I don't consider her much more than a casual gamer).
Also, the amount of time watching movies would include movies purchased, movies seen in theaters, and movies watched on TV (incl. premium TV such as HBO). Most people I know that regularly rent movies rarely get to watch every movie they rent, unless they keep them longer or watch them in a marathon the night before they have to go back.
Yes, I believe you're right, and I had no coffee until 11:30 this morning;)
Either way, the adapter I had couldn't even keep a steady video signal for very long, I'd hope that most of them are better than that.
For a while I really considered picking up one of the more multi-purpose units, but it was cheaper to buy a large TV and a video switch (and despite the lack of resolution on a standard TV, bigger is better for most console games).
But I also own an X-Box, and the chances of it doing the backwards-dealie are looking slimmer. Microsoft just ditched NVidia and have shifted to ATI to do their graphics chips for the XB2 -- will the old games still be playable on new hardware? Have coders worked with a generic API like Direct X, or did they go to the metal on the NVidia part and thus old XB games have no chance of dealing with the ATI part?
Assuming that Microsoft allow for backwards compatibility, the only reason that anything would not work would be because someone 'coded to the metal' as you stated. MS has been promoting Direct3D/DirectX as the method for coding for the XBox for quite some time, and eventually added OpenGL due to developer pressure, iirc, and both OpenGL (at least base OpenGL without nVidia extensions) and Direct3D should have no problems with changing the CPU, video card, and sound processor.
Actually, if you read the article closely, you'll see that although the author of the article states it, Sony did not.
"PSone runs on the PlayStation 2 through emulation rather than actual hardware. PlayStation 3 will offer the same compatibility for PS2 software and the format will continue forever," he explained.
Of course, the other point that people have already brought up is that most of the PSOne 'emulation' on the PS2 is done by having PSOne hardware in the PS2 in the form of the I/O chip.
The question is, is the 'format [that] will continue forever' the format of supporting the previous generation's software, or continuing to support the software all the way back to the PSOne? That is only made clear by the author's comments, and not the comments of Kutaragi.
The actual quotes don't even make it clear that there will be any PS1 compatibility in the PS3. It just states that the trend will continue and explicitly states that PS2 games will run on PS3, as the PS1 games ran on PS2. Of course, having read earlier that the PS3 would run PS2 games but not PS1 games, I was specifically looking for him to mention that PS1 games would run on PS3, but the only statements like that are from the article's author, not direct quotes.
The PS1 emulation thing is just wrong, though, since they talked about the I/O chip being PS1 compatible from the release of the PS2 in Japan.
They do have the 2 primary chips (CPU/GPU) of the PS2 combined into 1 now, though, which should make stuffing a PS2 into a PS3 much easier. The hardware compatibility was fairly impressive to me, as well, even though it's obviously a function of the chip. Of course, it would be nice if I didn't have to have a PS1 memory card to save PS1 games (yeah, that's being a bit picky, but still... how much longer am I going to be able to buy memory cards for the PS1 games?).
From the Halflife2.net forum linked somewhere else in this thread (posted by McFace):
Distributed computing is harder than hyperthreading but it has the potential to increase performance by a huge amount (8X on our tools) as opposed to hyperthreading (30%). All of our tools are going to a distributed approach.
So the taxonomy looks like this:
- general algorithmic optimization (general good thing to do) - DX9 optimization (big gains, long term direction) - 64-bits (not that hard, solves memory problem as well as performance gains) - hyperthreading (hard initial cost, on-going code maintainence cost, limited unpredictable performance gains, benefits in multiprocessor environments as well) - distributed computing (hardest to do, biggest potential gains, great for tools, may be great for servers, not sure how it works with clients)
It doesn't look like they're quite ready to look at distributed servers in terms of players moving from server to server, but there are hints that it may be possible, or at least something they've looked at. The memory problems mentioned under 64-bit computing has more to do with the tools than either the client or server.
If you read the article, it mentions that any prizes, except a game engine, will go to charity, which is more than likely a requirement of the license they negotiated with LucasArts.
The first paragraph here: http://www.playonlan.com/oscarchen/crpg/rev iews/fa llout.html explains it pretty well
Wasteland was and still is a very popular role-playing game. People have often wondered why there wasn't a sequel to this game, especially since a sequel was all but promised in Faran Brygo's hideout in the game. The reason is that after Interplay's split with Electronic Arts, Electronic Arts held the rights to many of Interplay's most popular games including Wasteland and Bard's Tale. Wasteland 2, named Meantime, was already under development but serious complications ended that project's chances of ever seeing the light of day. Years later, Interplay has released another excellent post-apocalyptic RPG named Fallout. It may not be the direct sequel to Wasteland, but they definitely share the same genetic traits.
what's ps2's biggest fault (besides no VGA adapter)?
There is a VGA adapter available for the PS2 (not directly from Sony afaik, but there is one). In fact, a quick Google search brought up a number of them, though except for generic adapters (ie adapters that would convert anything that had standard video outputs) I could only find one when I bought it a couple years ago. Unfortunately, the one I found used one of the memory card ports for power and wasn't very good (sometimes the video would go out in the middle of a game and you had to flip the converter between signals, sometimes a couple times, before it worked again).
Either way, I have never seen a PS2 adapter that will handle 640x480 as well as the DreamCast did.
I guess its the pessimist side of engineers that floats up through their minds when they tries to do their work. We at management have started to see this as areal problem we have address by trying to innovate our management skills. In other words we have to convince them that nothing is impossible when developing software, its only old thinking and old views that holds you back.
The problem is that many engineers, as well as developers tries to find negative or limiting facts about a project and I belive that this limits growth and new thinking at many companies.
I think it's sometimes the exact opposite. The engineers or developers may be able to come up with better ways to do something, but management often tells them that it's good enough and moves them on to another project or forces them to start work on the project with a design that's flawed (or just good enough) rather than to work on a better design.
Many times people take what engineers and developers say as negative when the statement they made was simply very specific. In other words, as in the article, the problem isn't space flight or even the shuttle in general, it's this shuttle. Some minor changes to the design could result in a much safer shuttle, and possibly even cheaper space flights. Much like I make it a point to let my managers know that users and administrators are complaining about an application flaw that I have already offered design changes to fix, but haven't been permitted to work on.
Then the first thing will be to establish a censorship of the writers of fiction, and let the censors receive any tale of fiction which is good, and reject the bad; and we will desire mothers and nurses to tell their children the authorised ones only. Let them fashion the mind with such tales, even more fondly than they mould the body with their hands; but most of those which are now in use must be discarded.
Of what tales are you speaking? he said.
You may find a model of the lesser in the greater, I said; for they are necessarily of the same type, and there is the same spirit in both of them.
Very likely, he replied; but I do not as yet know what you would term the greater.
Those, I said, which are narrated by Homer and Hesiod, and the rest of the poets, who have ever been the great story-tellers of mankind.
But which stories do you mean, he said; and what fault do you find with them?
A fault which is most serious, I said; the fault of telling a lie, and, what is more, a bad lie.
But when is this fault committed?
Whenever an erroneous representation is made of the nature of gods and heroes,--as when a painter paints a portrait not having the shadow of a likeness to the original.
(this is one of the earliest points on music in The Republic, after the discussion lumps music together with literature and most other parts of what we consider art today)
But we all must remember two things: 1) Plato was describing in the Republic his view of a perfect society, one which was built from the very beginning to be self-sufficient and was meant to raise it's children (every one, women included) to be warriors for the defense of the society. Every other job was put in place only to provide for that function, and every law as well. Furthermore, the entire construction of the Republic was simply for the purpose of finding the truth of Justice in an example of the perfect Republic.
2) At the time of Plato the basic idea of logic and the methods of logical discussion were unknown, as were many other things that we take for granted (such as fractions and the idea of the number 0). Many of Plato's dialogues (The Republic included) contain a great deal of logical fallacy because of this.
Beyond those points, Socrates himself was executed for corrupting the youth, probably before Plato wrote the Republic.
Now, try to discredit the final scene, the interview with Charleston Heston. Is somebody going to tell me that that was edited together fraudulently? Good job if it was. The fact is that when he was pressed with the facts presented to him, he couldn't handle it. What that means? Well, Moore left you to make your own conclusions didn't he?
The site did make some statements regarding that last interview, maybe you should re-read it. Personally, I'm thinking of going back and taking another look at the movie to see if I can see it for myself (ie the clock showing ~20 minutes pass in an interview that takes 5 minutes on film). Not to mention the point of the movie starting out making points in one direction and then turning around in the end to make a completely different point.
I setup a gun turret so I could shoot down the incoming Soviet missles just like in Missle Command, but I got bored because they weren't coming down as fast as they did in the game. So I went over and stomped on some centipedes, but that wasn't nearly as interesting as that particular game, either. So, I went back inside to play more games.
It's the end of the world, let's patent a 'button to launch a menu of applications to be run on the system', we'll call it a 'start button', but the word start isn't required to be on a button. Next, let's patent a 'bar that contains a number of buttons for the applications currently running on the system', we'll call it a taskbar, though it doesn't matter what it's called. Oh, and a clock, that should be patented, too. Oh no, Linux development is now hampered because they can't make window systems that look like Windows. Oh, wait, there's prior art in about 20 million different places, but no one gives a shit.
Think about it this way: I don't care that Europe is perfectly happy with PAL when I want HDTV, and I don't care if Europeans allow people to get stupid software patents. I, being a person living in the US, can not change what happens in Europe unless I manage to influence my government to invade Europe and forcibly control the entire continent. The EU is a fucked up place to live, in my opinion, and so is the US. Since I live in the US, I'm slightly more concerned about getting the government to stop fucking up the place where I live.
Then again, if going to http://slashdot.org brings up some message telling me the site is down because the EU is being stupid, it really won't change much for me, unless they do it for the sub-sections as well, and pull the whole site down. Then I might have to, *GASP* go somewhere else.
Slashdot Mirror
I understand that sometimes a patch is necessary, but for the love of Baal, how many patches did Diablo 2 eventually see?
9 or 10 patches in a couple years isn't too bad. They did have some major problems that had to be fixed, but they used a lot more of those patches for gameplay and hack fixes than anything else (the D3D support had a couple of minor fixes and then a major fix around the time of the expansion release, which also included a major overhaul of the gameplay in terms of skill trees and difficulty). They could've easily stopped much earlier, but the expansion probably would've required some kind of patch in any case to allow them to co-exist as well as they currently do.
At least that game works. I've got a handful of other games that never worked completely right, no matter how many patches came for them (or even worse, that never received patches that were definitely needed).
Actually many of the Diablo 2 patches addressed the Direct3D support, which was barely usable when the game shipped, even on the best video cards available at the time (the glide support for 3dfx cards was significantly better).
The 'balancing' changes are, in themselves, a sign of the poor testing done on the game, though, for the most part, I'd say the game shipped mostly good (except for the Direct3D support).
Many people just don't like the phone in general. It tends to be very blind (ie it doesn't care whether you want to use it or not, it just makes noise until you answer it or the machine gets it), and many people don't communicate as well without seeing one another. It's 1-on-1 communication without the subtleties of communicating face-to-face.
At the same time, I don't use text messaging because it's as much an interruption in most cases as the phone is, not to mention that using it on my cell phone costs more money (actually only ~$5/month for unlimited use) and is harder to use (though the text interface on my phone is not bad, and it seems to be pretty common on different manufacturer's phones).
I've met quite a few people that can't seem to handle text as well for one reason or another. I prefer it because it gives me some time to string my thoughts together (though not much in a conversation). With people that don't like it so much, voice chat programs work perfectly well on the PC, or I can make a call on my phone to just about anywhere for free, I just prefer not to talk to people without being able to see them (and no, video over IP is not fast enough to get around this yet).
Link feels so "outside" the Soul Calibur paradigm :(... at least Spawn is a character that has a charisma comparable to Cervantes' (is Cervantes in SC2? Haven't played it yet... think that yesterday evening I was playing with the first, SoulEdge on PSX)
iirc Cervantes is an unlockable character in SC2 (I unlocked most of the characters this weekend so I'm not completely sure, I just know that he's definitely in there).
I'd say the only reason Spawn doesn't feel right in SC2 is because I know he is an outside character. He also has one or two moves that are a little outside normal for SC (ie shooting green crap across the screen, similar to the fireballs and other distance attacks in Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat).
The original XBox controller also seems to work really well, imo, for the game, and has gotten me through my inability to find the SC2 arcade stick in any local stores quite nicely (to the point where the only reason I really want that arcade stick is to have a multi-platform arcade stick for my other games).
When it came down to it, the added video and audio modes are pretty much what sold the XBox version over the GameCube version for me. Sure, Spawn seems to fit better than Link, but that's a non-issue to me. In fact, I'll probably buy the other two versions when they're budget titles just to get to play Link and Heihachi in Soul Calibur.
Sierra had no choice in either of those releases. Valve canned the Mac port because they said it wouldn't interoperate with the PC version online.
Why they canned the DreamCast version I don't know, but the storyline was released as Blue Shift, iirc.
Sierra's never had any control over Valve except in the QA process for titles Sierra is contracted to publish. In other words, Sierra can force Valve to fix bugs before releasing a title to retail or releasing a patch, but they can't force them to ship a title. Otherwise, we would've had Half-Life at least a year earlier and TF2 a long time ago.
Valve is an independent developer, as mentioned above. They were started by Gabe Newell (an ex-MS employee) and have been mostly self-funded from the start.
A Vivendi subsidiary would never have been allowed to delay their first title for nearly 2 years. The only reason Blizzard gets away with that kind of crap is because they have a track record of horrible predictions for release dates, but solid releases.
but note that he said Sierra as a developer.
Valve is the developer of Half-Life, and they have very much been working on methods for self-publishing their titles (ie Steam).
Furthermore, whenever Sierra has had full control over a development house, they've had a nasty tendency to run it into the ground shortly after a major release, or even push it into that release before it was ready and then run the studio into the ground. Luckily, Sierra has no control over Valve except to delay release of retail packages and patches when they fail QA.
Now, how much does filesharing influence this? For music, I'd say quite a bit. Not so much for movies - it's l33t to have the latest blockbuster on (S)VCD, even before the premiere, but in the end - if you liked the movie - you still go to the theatre and watch it on the big screen. Supposedly true for music CDs also, but I guess to a lesser extend.
I think the music industry screwed themselves out of this by treating MP3s the same as they would full piracy, and by charging nearly as much for downloaded music as for the CDs. Many people already couldn't hear the difference between the two, but when they charge nearly the same thing and you don't even get the CD, there's no incentive for them not to pirate it. The perceived value of a product should be higher than what you're charging for it, not lower. People may like CDs because they last longer than tapes, but they still don't think most albums are worth $15-20. Movies are very different. DVDs are obviously higher quality to most viewers, and the movie theaters usually offer a much better experience than most home viewers can get. The worst thing P2P has done to the box office is allow people to see the movie for themselves to decide whether or not they should spend $7 to see it in the theater, wait for DVD release, or never watch the movie again. Not to mention that most people still don't have the bandwidth to download the movies, even in DivX formats, and so much of the trading of movies is offline, as it was before P2P became big.
What about games? Yes, you can find virtually any title on (most of) your favourite P2P network. Documentation may be missing, or may be included as a PDF, but there are commercial box version available that do not offer much more than that, especially since the advent of DVD cases...
So either John and Jane Doe take delight in d/l movies, but not games, or the number of people playing a game are much larger than the sales figures. If you have a pirated version of the game, the drawbacks are much lower than those of a pirated movie. And I'm not even convinced that the majority uses the pirated games as a "full demo" and buys the game afterwards, if they like it.
The biggest selling games are console games, which have a much bigger audience, and the average technical expertise is much lower (not really a hit against them, just that it can often take quite a bit of knowledge just to get a computer game running). Despite what it would seem to many people, most don't have their XBox or PS2 modded to play pirated games in the first place. Many XBox/PS2 owners don't even have a PC, which that any pirated games they could get would have to come from someone else, who either owns the games, knows someone who owns the games, or can download them.
But, companies like id are there spending years making games, and create a solid game, but making small amounts of profit out of it.
Yeah, that's why Carmack has a handful of Ferraris and builds rockets (to carry people into space) in his spare time, because they're making small profits, off two of the best selling PC franchises of all time combined with the best-selling FPS engines.
There are a few things to take into account:
75 hours means the average person is playing 2 games a year. *cough*I have a hard time keeping to 2 games a month*cough* (and the latter may illustrate a point, my girlfriend plays more than 75 hours every 2 months and I don't consider her much more than a casual gamer).
Also, the amount of time watching movies would include movies purchased, movies seen in theaters, and movies watched on TV (incl. premium TV such as HBO). Most people I know that regularly rent movies rarely get to watch every movie they rent, unless they keep them longer or watch them in a marathon the night before they have to go back.
Yes, I believe you're right, and I had no coffee until 11:30 this morning ;)
Either way, the adapter I had couldn't even keep a steady video signal for very long, I'd hope that most of them are better than that.
For a while I really considered picking up one of the more multi-purpose units, but it was cheaper to buy a large TV and a video switch (and despite the lack of resolution on a standard TV, bigger is better for most console games).
But I also own an X-Box, and the chances of it doing the backwards-dealie are looking slimmer. Microsoft just ditched NVidia and have shifted to ATI to do their graphics chips for the XB2 -- will the old games still be playable on new hardware? Have coders worked with a generic API like Direct X, or did they go to the metal on the NVidia part and thus old XB games have no chance of dealing with the ATI part?
Assuming that Microsoft allow for backwards compatibility, the only reason that anything would not work would be because someone 'coded to the metal' as you stated. MS has been promoting Direct3D/DirectX as the method for coding for the XBox for quite some time, and eventually added OpenGL due to developer pressure, iirc, and both OpenGL (at least base OpenGL without nVidia extensions) and Direct3D should have no problems with changing the CPU, video card, and sound processor.
Actually, if you read the article closely, you'll see that although the author of the article states it, Sony did not.
"PSone runs on the PlayStation 2 through emulation rather than actual hardware. PlayStation 3 will offer the same compatibility for PS2 software and the format will continue forever," he explained.
Of course, the other point that people have already brought up is that most of the PSOne 'emulation' on the PS2 is done by having PSOne hardware in the PS2 in the form of the I/O chip.
The question is, is the 'format [that] will continue forever' the format of supporting the previous generation's software, or continuing to support the software all the way back to the PSOne? That is only made clear by the author's comments, and not the comments of Kutaragi.
The actual quotes don't even make it clear that there will be any PS1 compatibility in the PS3. It just states that the trend will continue and explicitly states that PS2 games will run on PS3, as the PS1 games ran on PS2. Of course, having read earlier that the PS3 would run PS2 games but not PS1 games, I was specifically looking for him to mention that PS1 games would run on PS3, but the only statements like that are from the article's author, not direct quotes.
The PS1 emulation thing is just wrong, though, since they talked about the I/O chip being PS1 compatible from the release of the PS2 in Japan.
They do have the 2 primary chips (CPU/GPU) of the PS2 combined into 1 now, though, which should make stuffing a PS2 into a PS3 much easier. The hardware compatibility was fairly impressive to me, as well, even though it's obviously a function of the chip. Of course, it would be nice if I didn't have to have a PS1 memory card to save PS1 games (yeah, that's being a bit picky, but still... how much longer am I going to be able to buy memory cards for the PS1 games?).
From the Halflife2.net forum linked somewhere else in this thread (posted by McFace):
Distributed computing is harder than hyperthreading but it has the potential to increase performance by a huge amount (8X on our tools) as opposed to hyperthreading (30%). All of our tools are going to a distributed approach.
So the taxonomy looks like this:
- general algorithmic optimization (general good thing to do)
- DX9 optimization (big gains, long term direction)
- 64-bits (not that hard, solves memory problem as well as performance gains)
- hyperthreading (hard initial cost, on-going code maintainence cost, limited unpredictable performance gains, benefits in multiprocessor environments as well)
- distributed computing (hardest to do, biggest potential gains, great for tools, may be great for servers, not sure how it works with clients)
It doesn't look like they're quite ready to look at distributed servers in terms of players moving from server to server, but there are hints that it may be possible, or at least something they've looked at. The memory problems mentioned under 64-bit computing has more to do with the tools than either the client or server.
If you read the article, it mentions that any prizes, except a game engine, will go to charity, which is more than likely a requirement of the license they negotiated with LucasArts.
The first paragraph here:v iews/fa llout.html
http://www.playonlan.com/oscarchen/crpg/re
explains it pretty well
Wasteland was and still is a very popular role-playing game. People have often wondered why there wasn't a sequel to this game, especially since a sequel was all but promised in Faran Brygo's hideout in the game. The reason is that after Interplay's split with Electronic Arts, Electronic Arts held the rights to many of Interplay's most popular games including Wasteland and Bard's Tale. Wasteland 2, named Meantime, was already under development but serious complications ended that project's chances of ever seeing the light of day. Years later, Interplay has released another excellent post-apocalyptic RPG named Fallout. It may not be the direct sequel to Wasteland, but they definitely share the same genetic traits.
what's ps2's biggest fault (besides no VGA adapter)?
There is a VGA adapter available for the PS2 (not directly from Sony afaik, but there is one). In fact, a quick Google search brought up a number of them, though except for generic adapters (ie adapters that would convert anything that had standard video outputs) I could only find one when I bought it a couple years ago. Unfortunately, the one I found used one of the memory card ports for power and wasn't very good (sometimes the video would go out in the middle of a game and you had to flip the converter between signals, sometimes a couple times, before it worked again).
Either way, I have never seen a PS2 adapter that will handle 640x480 as well as the DreamCast did.
I guess its the pessimist side of engineers that floats up through their minds when they tries to do their work. We at management have started to see this as areal problem we have address by trying to innovate our management skills. In other words we have to convince them that nothing is impossible when developing software, its only old thinking and old views that holds you back.
The problem is that many engineers, as well as developers tries to find negative or limiting facts about a project and I belive that this limits growth and new thinking at many companies.
I think it's sometimes the exact opposite. The engineers or developers may be able to come up with better ways to do something, but management often tells them that it's good enough and moves them on to another project or forces them to start work on the project with a design that's flawed (or just good enough) rather than to work on a better design.
Many times people take what engineers and developers say as negative when the statement they made was simply very specific. In other words, as in the article, the problem isn't space flight or even the shuttle in general, it's this shuttle. Some minor changes to the design could result in a much safer shuttle, and possibly even cheaper space flights. Much like I make it a point to let my managers know that users and administrators are complaining about an application flaw that I have already offered design changes to fix, but haven't been permitted to work on.
Unreal only had glide and software renderers originally.
UT had Glide, Software, and Direct3D.
I still remember how good Unreal looked on my dual-Voodoo2 setup, but then UT looked much better on a much cheaper GeForce card.
Then the first thing will be to establish a censorship of the writers of fiction, and let the censors receive any tale of fiction which is good, and reject the bad; and we will desire mothers and nurses to tell their children the authorised ones only. Let them fashion the mind with such tales, even more fondly than they mould the body with their hands; but most of those which are now in use must be discarded.
Of what tales are you speaking? he said.
You may find a model of the lesser in the greater, I said; for they are necessarily of the same type, and there is the same spirit in both of them.
Very likely, he replied; but I do not as yet know what you would term the greater.
Those, I said, which are narrated by Homer and Hesiod, and the rest of the poets, who have ever been the great story-tellers of mankind.
But which stories do you mean, he said; and what fault do you find with them?
A fault which is most serious, I said; the fault of telling a lie, and, what is more, a bad lie.
But when is this fault committed?
Whenever an erroneous representation is made of the nature of gods and heroes,--as when a painter paints a portrait not having the shadow of a likeness to the original.
(this is one of the earliest points on music in The Republic, after the discussion lumps music together with literature and most other parts of what we consider art today)
But we all must remember two things:
1) Plato was describing in the Republic his view of a perfect society, one which was built from the very beginning to be self-sufficient and was meant to raise it's children (every one, women included) to be warriors for the defense of the society. Every other job was put in place only to provide for that function, and every law as well. Furthermore, the entire construction of the Republic was simply for the purpose of finding the truth of Justice in an example of the perfect Republic.
2) At the time of Plato the basic idea of logic and the methods of logical discussion were unknown, as were many other things that we take for granted (such as fractions and the idea of the number 0). Many of Plato's dialogues (The Republic included) contain a great deal of logical fallacy because of this.
Beyond those points, Socrates himself was executed for corrupting the youth, probably before Plato wrote the Republic.
Now, try to discredit the final scene, the interview with Charleston Heston. Is somebody going to tell me that that was edited together fraudulently? Good job if it was. The fact is that when he was pressed with the facts presented to him, he couldn't handle it. What that means? Well, Moore left you to make your own conclusions didn't he?
The site did make some statements regarding that last interview, maybe you should re-read it. Personally, I'm thinking of going back and taking another look at the movie to see if I can see it for myself (ie the clock showing ~20 minutes pass in an interview that takes 5 minutes on film). Not to mention the point of the movie starting out making points in one direction and then turning around in the end to make a completely different point.
I setup a gun turret so I could shoot down the incoming Soviet missles just like in Missle Command, but I got bored because they weren't coming down as fast as they did in the game. So I went over and stomped on some centipedes, but that wasn't nearly as interesting as that particular game, either. So, I went back inside to play more games.
right on, so subtract 5 or so, add 7 or so, and you get the Doom 3 staff.
At least id isn't bloating as fast as I thought they were when I read that 12 people were on Doom 3.
and I supposed I'm supposed to care?
It's the end of the world, let's patent a 'button to launch a menu of applications to be run on the system', we'll call it a 'start button', but the word start isn't required to be on a button. Next, let's patent a 'bar that contains a number of buttons for the applications currently running on the system', we'll call it a taskbar, though it doesn't matter what it's called. Oh, and a clock, that should be patented, too. Oh no, Linux development is now hampered because they can't make window systems that look like Windows. Oh, wait, there's prior art in about 20 million different places, but no one gives a shit.
Think about it this way: I don't care that Europe is perfectly happy with PAL when I want HDTV, and I don't care if Europeans allow people to get stupid software patents. I, being a person living in the US, can not change what happens in Europe unless I manage to influence my government to invade Europe and forcibly control the entire continent. The EU is a fucked up place to live, in my opinion, and so is the US. Since I live in the US, I'm slightly more concerned about getting the government to stop fucking up the place where I live.
Then again, if going to http://slashdot.org brings up some message telling me the site is down because the EU is being stupid, it really won't change much for me, unless they do it for the sub-sections as well, and pull the whole site down. Then I might have to, *GASP* go somewhere else.