As a game developer, here's something I've seen several times: A gifted AI programmer puts together a complex, ambitious system to govern AI behaviors. The system is elegant and probably involves lots of interesting problems.
However, because the focus was on the system rather than the output, the behaviors on-screen don't actually reflect any of that. A character could be dynamically evaluating its environment, weighing its tactical options, and interpreting a complex set of stimuli, but all the player sees is the character standing there.
It's my feeling that the problem is better approached from the other direction -- what are all the possible outputs defined by the design? Is this a shooter in which these enemies see, hear, talk to each other, shoot, evade, and retreat? Then come up with behaviors that utilize those building blocks in an interesting and engaging way.
When we eventually have characters capable of MUCH more complex behavior (when I'm talking to this character, his or her subtle facial movements suggest they're lying, etc.), I think elaborate procedural systems will become far more valuable. Until then, however, effort spent on the underlying systems (without regard for the outputs) seems misguided.
It's called PCI express. Unlike AGP, it's symmetric - very fast both ways. PCI expresses is why putting Havok on a GPU makes sense.
Ahhh, interesting. See, that's all you had to say.
And don't complain about someone saying "bullshit" on slashdot! What line there is with regards to language is drawn somewhere between "fuck" and "cunt".
You know, it wasn't so much the expletive that bugged me, but the assertion that I was deliberately lying ("bullshitting"). "Misinformed" or "dumbass" would have been much better.
Well, I'm sure many things will be very different in the future than they are now, but at the moment, I'm pretty sure I'm right about this. The other scenario I can think of is that PhysX is currently not used for game-affecting systems is because developers can't rely on the existence of the accelerator on client systems. That, of course, is its own marketplace chicken-egg problem.
The whole point of the PPU is that objects can be read back and properties asserted.
Okay. I'm not a hardware engineer, but it's my understanding that the whole point of graphics accelerators is that you throw renderable data (triangles) at them. It's pretty much a one-way trip -- CPU->GPU->screen. GPUs are complex enough now that they can do a lot of logic operations on their own, but you still don't get to read that stuff back because the bus is slow from the card back to the CPU. So that obviously isn't an environment suitable to be sending lots of physics data back to the CPU.
Now, maybe busses have changed recently, and that reverse trip is much faster now. If that's the case, then sending game-critical data to a peripheral card and back may now be a viable strategy.
The new HavokFX thing on the graphics card simply cannot do that due to how the gfx pipelines are laid out, you cannot read, then change, then write back on the gfx card.
I don't know anything about HavokFX, and I certainly didn't mention it in my original post.
Let me clarify that I wasn't making a value judgement -- I think both systems have potential value.
It's my understanding that though they're both physics systems, their roles are completely different. Havok is integrated into an engine, and does all of its work on the CPU(s). That means the Havok-driven physics can actually drive game-play. You can toss a grenade over there, use proper physics to govern bounce, ricochet, and collision, and create an explosion that damages all nearby enemies, players, and interactive elements.
PhysX is on a card, which means there's not really a fast way to send accelerated results *back* to the game engine. So the elements accelerated by PhysX can be *generated* by game events, but they can't generate their own game events. Check out the examples provided by the AGEIA PR person:
With PhysX all destructible objects in the game now explode with greater realism.
All other particle behaviors in the game are physically simulated, including trash and grit blowing in the street, and bullets kicking up shards of any object shot in the environment.
AGEIA Smart Particle Fluids are utilized to enable enveloping smoke from explosions. There is no equivalent effect without PhysX.
So, yeah. They're very different animals, with different uses.
I fail to see... how patterns projected on a screen could be qualified as a sculpture.
This project could probably more accurately be filed under "installation", but it's not uncommon for sculpture to be a catch-all for anything that's not painting, video, photography, or craft work.
You can find some good contemporary installation coverage here.
"The game will allow players to interact with movie characters such as Jack Sparrow, Will Turner and Elizabeth Swann..."
I feel like this another indication that many of the suits don't *get* MMOs. I don't think most MMO players care about interacting with the static characters from your franchise. For passive media that's fine, tell us more about Jack blah blah. But for interactive media, I'm less interested in your characters than I am in your world. (And is the Pirates of the Carribean world rich enough to support the demands of an MMO? I dunno.)
I feel like the City of Heroes folks have made some similar mistakes. They spend (what seems to be) a lot of time and energy documenting the ongoing activities of the main good guys (Statesman, Positron, Synapse, etc.) and the main bad guys (Lord Recluse, etc), but I don't care. In an MMO, if it's not interactive, I don't really care about it. (That's not to say that it's not important to provide a rich history for the locations in an MMO; but that history needs to be reflected in the interactive present to really have any meaning for players.)
In the Stone Age, at the dawn of human civilization, primitive dentists were forced to use physical drills to grind away tooth decay. This barbaric practice was undoubtedly painful for the patient, who may have had nothing but a local anaesthetic to help them through the procedure.
(Implied wink)
But seriously, screw the flying cars, screw the house-cleaning robots... where's my pain-free dentistry? Shouldn't we have something better than drills and shots by now?
(And yes, I'm terrified of dentists and way overdue for a visit.)
The gamepad is a brain damaged interface for anything except Soul Calibur, Final Fantasy and possibly Mario Tennis.
Yeah, that must be why the PC has lots of different genres, while in consoles the only games that you can find are RTSs, RPGs and FPSs. And, most FPSs are about WW2 or counter terrorism. How boring!
(Psst -- I don't think he was bad-mouthing consoles; he was talking about the controllers and specifically how poorly ported PC games play on them. That being the subject of the article and all -- porting a PC game to a console.)
Just stop buying medicin for stupid things. You don't need drugs for treating a cold. There is no fucking cure...
That's ridiculous. The point of such medication is to minimize the symptoms, making the cold more tolerable and helping reduce the impact on your daily activities.
For example, your partial failure to capitalize the first word of your sentences make your post a little harder to read than it would be otherwise.
...should, of course, be:
For example, your partial failure to capitalize the first word of your sentences makes your post a little harder to read than it would be otherwise. (It's the singular failure that does the making, not the sentences, even if the suffix alliteration does sound a bit strange.)
I'm an excellent example here of someone not evolving the language.
there is always paranoia about "declining communication skills." At the same time there are always contradicting studies showing how language skills are actually increasing. Langauge and usage is always being analyzed way too much.. language is what it is. It is a method of communicating thoughts and ideas with others. As long as we understand each other there is nothing "wrong" and we are devolving or whatever these people seem to think. language exists because we created it for our benefit. People who can't accept that language evolves and branches off for different purposes are close-minded and ignorant to reality.
Yet there are reasons why grammatical rules exist -- those rules facilitate the accurate communication of thoughts and ideas to others. For example, your partial failure to capitalize the first word of your sentences make your post a little harder to read than it would be otherwise. When you misspell "language" as "langauge", it's a distraction from the flow of points you're trying to make. When you say "Langauge and usage skills is always being analyzed way too much", and you use the singular "is" rather than the plural "are", are you referring only to language or only to skills? This sort of imprecision may seem trivial, but if you stack enough of those trivial imprecisions up your text quickly becomes incomprehensible.
It's true that language evolves to serve the needs of its users, but I think it's important that we distinguish between evolution and simple poor grammar.
(Sure, -1 Grammar Nazi, but it's relevant here, right?):)
If you have 50 rounds in a PPsh Soviet submachine gun and squeeze the trigger for 2 seconds... How many bullets to you have in the gun? What about a Mp41 or a Stg44?
You might be able to make a guess of how many bullets are left by your guns weight or pervious experience, but there weren't Aliens-esque LED's on these guns back in 1941 telling you how many bullets were in the thing.
One might argue that realism does not necessarily equate to fun.:)
They basically have removed all crosshairs, ammo counts, and health stastics.
The thing is... those are tools the player generally needs in order to succeed in the game. If you're going to go with something vague like, "your clip is getting light", you'd better not make it catastrophic for the player to run out of ammo.
The few games I've played that used naturalistic elements like these to communicate your character's health ended up being quite frustrating, because I was unable to properly gauge whether I was healthy enough to undertake an impending challenge.
If folks can develop a more immersive HUD, that's fine, but it had better provide me with all the same information that a normal HUD would.
Some of the users of Mozilla don't particularly like the UI of Firefox, so we revived Mozilla Suite. Unfortunately, Mozilla is a trademark and the Mozilla Foundation does not let them call it Mozilla Suite, so it is now SeaMonkey.
As one of those users who prefers the Mozilla UI and likes having Composer around on the rare occasions it's needed, I'm glad that the Suite has a new lease on life.
IMHO, the worst thing is that when a video is rejected, there's no reason given. It could be a copyright issue, or the wrong video format, or the wrong audio format, or any number of other potential problems. After being left to guess why my video was rejected, I just gave up and deleted it.
To heck with getting her back: introduce her to the world of MMORPGs or even MUDs, if the command line is her thing.
Having recently gotten over my own MMO addiction, I can't see recommending that anybody urge anybody else (particularly their spouse) to get into MMOs. Couple-friendly offline co-op games, like Diablo (which you also suggest) I can see, but I'm begging the OP, don't go MMO.
...as the article points out and many projects I've worked on demonstrate, keeping the customers/gamers/end-users away from the coders/programmers/designers/makers is a common management error.
Honestly, we can't expect any better conduct from Bush, a president who has been quoted as saying the Constitution is'just a goddamned piece of paper'.
Wasn't that Capitol Hill Blue article highly suspect? When I read it it just didn't sound real; no source is cited, and the quotes were just ridiculously over-the-top.
I'm not defending the President, mind you; I'm just saying we don't need fictional arguments against him when we have plenty of factual ones.
Slashdot Mirror
As a game developer, here's something I've seen several times: A gifted AI programmer puts together a complex, ambitious system to govern AI behaviors. The system is elegant and probably involves lots of interesting problems.
However, because the focus was on the system rather than the output, the behaviors on-screen don't actually reflect any of that. A character could be dynamically evaluating its environment, weighing its tactical options, and interpreting a complex set of stimuli, but all the player sees is the character standing there.
It's my feeling that the problem is better approached from the other direction -- what are all the possible outputs defined by the design? Is this a shooter in which these enemies see, hear, talk to each other, shoot, evade, and retreat? Then come up with behaviors that utilize those building blocks in an interesting and engaging way.
When we eventually have characters capable of MUCH more complex behavior (when I'm talking to this character, his or her subtle facial movements suggest they're lying, etc.), I think elaborate procedural systems will become far more valuable. Until then, however, effort spent on the underlying systems (without regard for the outputs) seems misguided.
It's called PCI express. Unlike AGP, it's symmetric - very fast both ways. PCI expresses is why putting Havok on a GPU makes sense.
Ahhh, interesting. See, that's all you had to say.
And don't complain about someone saying "bullshit" on slashdot! What line there is with regards to language is drawn somewhere between "fuck" and "cunt".
You know, it wasn't so much the expletive that bugged me, but the assertion that I was deliberately lying ("bullshitting"). "Misinformed" or "dumbass" would have been much better.
Very civil subject line there.
Its actually the other way about (or will be)...
Well, I'm sure many things will be very different in the future than they are now, but at the moment, I'm pretty sure I'm right about this. The other scenario I can think of is that PhysX is currently not used for game-affecting systems is because developers can't rely on the existence of the accelerator on client systems. That, of course, is its own marketplace chicken-egg problem.
The whole point of the PPU is that objects can be read back and properties asserted.
Okay. I'm not a hardware engineer, but it's my understanding that the whole point of graphics accelerators is that you throw renderable data (triangles) at them. It's pretty much a one-way trip -- CPU->GPU->screen. GPUs are complex enough now that they can do a lot of logic operations on their own, but you still don't get to read that stuff back because the bus is slow from the card back to the CPU. So that obviously isn't an environment suitable to be sending lots of physics data back to the CPU.
Now, maybe busses have changed recently, and that reverse trip is much faster now. If that's the case, then sending game-critical data to a peripheral card and back may now be a viable strategy.
The new HavokFX thing on the graphics card simply cannot do that due to how the gfx pipelines are laid out, you cannot read, then change, then write back on the gfx card.
I don't know anything about HavokFX, and I certainly didn't mention it in my original post.
Let me clarify that I wasn't making a value judgement -- I think both systems have potential value.
PhysX is on a card, which means there's not really a fast way to send accelerated results *back* to the game engine. So the elements accelerated by PhysX can be *generated* by game events, but they can't generate their own game events. Check out the examples provided by the AGEIA PR person: So, yeah. They're very different animals, with different uses.
I fail to see... how patterns projected on a screen could be qualified as a sculpture.
This project could probably more accurately be filed under "installation", but it's not uncommon for sculpture to be a catch-all for anything that's not painting, video, photography, or craft work.
You can find some good contemporary installation coverage here.
"The game will allow players to interact with movie characters such as Jack Sparrow, Will Turner and Elizabeth Swann..."
I feel like this another indication that many of the suits don't *get* MMOs. I don't think most MMO players care about interacting with the static characters from your franchise. For passive media that's fine, tell us more about Jack blah blah. But for interactive media, I'm less interested in your characters than I am in your world. (And is the Pirates of the Carribean world rich enough to support the demands of an MMO? I dunno.)
I feel like the City of Heroes folks have made some similar mistakes. They spend (what seems to be) a lot of time and energy documenting the ongoing activities of the main good guys (Statesman, Positron, Synapse, etc.) and the main bad guys (Lord Recluse, etc), but I don't care. In an MMO, if it's not interactive, I don't really care about it. (That's not to say that it's not important to provide a rich history for the locations in an MMO; but that history needs to be reflected in the interactive present to really have any meaning for players.)
In the Stone Age, at the dawn of human civilization, primitive dentists were forced to use physical drills to grind away tooth decay. This barbaric practice was undoubtedly painful for the patient, who may have had nothing but a local anaesthetic to help them through the procedure.
(Implied wink)
But seriously, screw the flying cars, screw the house-cleaning robots... where's my pain-free dentistry? Shouldn't we have something better than drills and shots by now?
(And yes, I'm terrified of dentists and way overdue for a visit.)
"Fetch me a ladder". Overwhelming were the Battle-Leprechaun hordes I had to fight to get that ladder.
Kitsch an acquired taste, and something that many people are unlikely to gravitate toward without a certain set of influences.
Yeah, that must be why the PC has lots of different genres, while in consoles the only games that you can find are RTSs, RPGs and FPSs. And, most FPSs are about WW2 or counter terrorism. How boring!
(Psst -- I don't think he was bad-mouthing consoles; he was talking about the controllers and specifically how poorly ported PC games play on them. That being the subject of the article and all -- porting a PC game to a console.)
Just stop buying medicin for stupid things. You don't need drugs for treating a cold. There is no fucking cure...
That's ridiculous. The point of such medication is to minimize the symptoms, making the cold more tolerable and helping reduce the impact on your daily activities.
Grammar naziing myself:
...should, of course, be:
For example, your partial failure to capitalize the first word of your sentences make your post a little harder to read than it would be otherwise.
For example, your partial failure to capitalize the first word of your sentences makes your post a little harder to read than it would be otherwise. (It's the singular failure that does the making, not the sentences, even if the suffix alliteration does sound a bit strange.)
I'm an excellent example here of someone not evolving the language.
Yet there are reasons why grammatical rules exist -- those rules facilitate the accurate communication of thoughts and ideas to others. For example, your partial failure to capitalize the first word of your sentences make your post a little harder to read than it would be otherwise. When you misspell "language" as "langauge", it's a distraction from the flow of points you're trying to make. When you say "Langauge and usage skills is always being analyzed way too much", and you use the singular "is" rather than the plural "are", are you referring only to language or only to skills? This sort of imprecision may seem trivial, but if you stack enough of those trivial imprecisions up your text quickly becomes incomprehensible.
It's true that language evolves to serve the needs of its users, but I think it's important that we distinguish between evolution and simple poor grammar.
(Sure, -1 Grammar Nazi, but it's relevant here, right?)
If you have 50 rounds in a PPsh Soviet submachine gun and squeeze the trigger for 2 seconds... How many bullets to you have in the gun? What about a Mp41 or a Stg44?
:)
You might be able to make a guess of how many bullets are left by your guns weight or pervious experience, but there weren't Aliens-esque LED's on these guns back in 1941 telling you how many bullets were in the thing.
One might argue that realism does not necessarily equate to fun.
They basically have removed all crosshairs, ammo counts, and health stastics.
The thing is... those are tools the player generally needs in order to succeed in the game. If you're going to go with something vague like, "your clip is getting light", you'd better not make it catastrophic for the player to run out of ammo.
The few games I've played that used naturalistic elements like these to communicate your character's health ended up being quite frustrating, because I was unable to properly gauge whether I was healthy enough to undertake an impending challenge.
If folks can develop a more immersive HUD, that's fine, but it had better provide me with all the same information that a normal HUD would.
Some of the users of Mozilla don't particularly like the UI of Firefox, so we revived Mozilla Suite. Unfortunately, Mozilla is a trademark and the Mozilla Foundation does not let them call it Mozilla Suite, so it is now SeaMonkey.
As one of those users who prefers the Mozilla UI and likes having Composer around on the rare occasions it's needed, I'm glad that the Suite has a new lease on life.
Interesting analysis. I wonder what the effect might be on Disney's many subsidiaries.
6) Monsters
;)
7) Aliens
8) Baddies
So obviously, any PS3 game that is lacking one or more of these elements is not harnessing the full power of the console.
IMHO, the worst thing is that when a video is rejected, there's no reason given. It could be a copyright issue, or the wrong video format, or the wrong audio format, or any number of other potential problems. After being left to guess why my video was rejected, I just gave up and deleted it.
To heck with getting her back: introduce her to the world of MMORPGs or even MUDs, if the command line is her thing.
Having recently gotten over my own MMO addiction, I can't see recommending that anybody urge anybody else (particularly their spouse) to get into MMOs. Couple-friendly offline co-op games, like Diablo (which you also suggest) I can see, but I'm begging the OP, don't go MMO.
...as the article points out and many projects I've worked on demonstrate, keeping the customers/gamers/end-users away from the coders/programmers/designers/makers is a common management error.
:)
Ah, gotcha. Agreed, then!
It was also a bad sign that the programmers (game designers) were not allowed to talk to the customers (fanbase).
Semi-OT, but "programmer" and "game designer" are not generally synonymous these days.
Kameo. The best 360 launch title is also a great one for female gamers.
Having played Kameo, I'm not sure I agree -- just because it features a female protagonist, that doesn't mean it's a game female gamers will enjoy.
Honestly, we can't expect any better conduct from Bush, a president who has been quoted as saying the Constitution is'just a goddamned piece of paper'.
Wasn't that Capitol Hill Blue article highly suspect? When I read it it just didn't sound real; no source is cited, and the quotes were just ridiculously over-the-top.
I'm not defending the President, mind you; I'm just saying we don't need fictional arguments against him when we have plenty of factual ones.