The problem with your rap analogy is that, like fiction (an analogy other posters tried without much success), there's an understood disconnect from reality
Whether they're level headed or cuckoo for cocoa puffs, most of the time I hear people speak, especially about politics or recent events, I detect a distinct disconnect from reality.
If you are a programmer who can't do art (most of us), conceiving a product that will be competitive enough to sell (or even generate ad impressions in the flash space), you need budget for an artist (or you need to find a decent one that will work for free)..
I personally find it easier to fire up a 3d modeling tool and knock out low-poly spaceships or simple trees, than to have sat down with paper and pencil and done the same thing (god forbid I try 2D art on the computer, it still looks like I'm 7 and toying around in macpaint).
With modern hardware and commercial/indie/free-licensed engines, the complexity barrier just isn't there between 2D and 3D any longer. I know I could do something like Edelwiss's Ether Vapor (without the character portraits) far more easily than I could do something like RakeInGrass's Jets'n'Guns.
At least I took some music classes in college and can do that bit.
Firstly, if you have a bilaterally symmetric character, you only need 5 facings for 8 way movement as you can mirror left/right and the associated diagonals. If the characters aren't symmetric in this way, then it can lead to funny behavior (imagine a knight whose sword and shield swap hands when he turns from left to right). I can remember this happening in at least one game on the Genesis, though.
There isn't any way to do that without cheating a bit...
1. Render top down. Use sprite rotations to do just that. Pros: simple. Cons: your game will look like Gauntlet and the sprites you see in the action will have no personality whatsoever (BUT you can try the classic techniques of character portraits, or maybe something more advanced like the cartoon panels from the Penny Arcade games).
2. Do a fake 3d game with billboarded sprites. If you play enough of a game with billboarded sprites with multiple facings (say, the enemies from doom), the timing of the face changes of the sprite as your view angle changes allows your brain to infer the true facing of the entity. You could do an "over the shoulder" camera view, and only see the back of your avatar (which might solve other problems, like the number of animation frames you need for it).
The ultimate example of this technique would be Galaxy Force 1/2. It uses layered billboards to achieve depth. I can imagine that this technique could be combined with voxels for some visually interesting results.
3. Draw your sprites such that they can be compressed on one side and stretched on the other without looking bad. This could be used to simulate the character changing aspect relative to you. I've seen this proposed, but I don't think I've ever heard of the technique being used.
Did you miss my statement I own a Palm Treo 750? OK, its no iPhone in terms of screen size, but it is capable of any communications task my desktop is (ssh/telnet, voice, various IM protocols, email, web, etc.). I like using my smartphone, its a neato chunk of consumer electronics.
While I haven't personally owned a smartphone until recently, that doesn't mean I haven't enjoyed their use- I've been developing custom application software for the things for about 6 years, and at times had 3 or 4 of the things given to me by different employers or through contract work.
All I was trying to say is that there is a niche for a lightweight mobile phone that can power on and off quickly. I've no doubt that as the market expands in the US, we'll start to see some. In fact, phones that can quickly power on/off, go into a suspend, or can fake being powered off seem to be quite popular with high school and college students overseas, judging by how many I see floating around on the college campus I live next to (which caters to foreign students).
Well, if the companies you bought your "handheld computers" from would open up the phone part of the device, we would be assured of being able to disable that component without turning off the device, which would be nice. Also, these devices need to be available in a larger range of options, to help folks deal with all the places they need to take their device (many companies don't allow cameras, personal devices with wifi, SD slots, or things that can act like USB storage). Imho a computer is a customizable device, anything that is sold as "one size fits all" is consumer electronics; ergo I don't buy your handheld computer argument, you can't cripple gimped hardware much further.
I also might point out that in my case, I'm a contractor who happens to be working an 8 hour per day contract with short break windows during which I can make personal calls (which in my case is calling my personal voice system to find out if I have any critical emails or voicemail from other clients) in a breakroom area.
My Palm Treo 750 does allow me to simply turn off the network interfaces (wifi, 3g etc.), but that doesn't help with a site policy that doesn't allow camera phones or any personal device that has wifi. Therefore while I'm working my current large contract, I use an old Nokia brick, which for some reason takes 1 minute to power on, and about 30 seconds to power off.
Thats a significant portion of a 5 minute break, and there is NO reason a device as dumb as that one (no storage outside the SIM) should take that long to boot and find a network.
Gamastura is the web front of the CMP Game Group, which is in turn part of CMP Media at large. Amongst other things, this company organizes major industry events (such GDC), and publishes Game Developer Magazine. Gamasutra is mainly a web clearinghouse (and advertisement) for Game Developer Magazine content. Thusly, there are folks with editorial control over the content published on Gamasutra; this is not a blog, where a writer says whatever they want with nobody to edit their content for public consumption.
Ian Bogost is much more than a "blogger". Judging by the derisive fashion with which you wield the term, I'm guessing you take that to mean "person who writes about stuff because they are too untalented/lazy to actually be involved with any of the stuff they write about". No offense; that is the same way I bandy the word about. Check out his website, and take a look around. Yes, it links to a lot of articles he has written, and mentions in the mass media (including an appearance on The Colbert Report), but if you take a look at these, you'll find that in addition to doing real business with corporate advertisers hawking products, he is actually in involved in trying use games for conveying something beyond a fun experience or a product placement.
No, I don't work for him, and I'm not his #1 fanboy. I simply knew that the "publisher" and the author of the content you called a "blog" were so much more than that.
If there were a Computer Flea Market-Goers Anonymous, I'd be in and out of their support groups for life. I scrape up a lot of awesome hardware for almost nothing all the time; I've also sold surplus hardware and Linux CDs (back before the advent of widespread broadband and cd-burners) at these events.
However, every time I have bought business software at these shows, it inevitably consists of bundled or licensed software with non-transferable clauses, or nice Chinese copies. Some even have the holograms on the Certificates of Authenticity, and look quite official. You can only tell the difference if you regularly handle the real thing; indeed, I was bamboozled until I began taking contracts doing lease refreshes and hardware/software installs wherein I handled the genuine articles on a daily basis.
...I picked up a cheap copy of Visual Studio 2005 at a computer flee market.
This is the point where I imagine pandemonium as folks run in terror from the local bingo hall on computer sale weekend. As they should. Those places are out to get you.
tongue->cheek
So what you mean is that you picked up a Chinese copy of MSVS 2005? If you're going to aid and abet piracy, you might as well not give the other pirates encouragement in the form of hard currency.
tongue->back-in-normal-place
Recognizing that MSVS was facing real competition in the IDE arena, MS got smart and offered up a relatively non-encumbered free version, Visual Studio Express. For the major differences between Express and the other versions, see this page.
If all you are interested in is a C++ compiler and IDE, Express works. Its free as in crappy domestic (US) beer. The comparison seems to indicate that you don't get full access to MSDN, but that seems to be a lie. Granted, with Express you don't have it locally, but who wants to install all (eight last time I checked) gigs of the stuff when it is all online anyhow?
I forgot to mention my completely unscientific method for determining the size of the Gentoo community. I've been involved in a lot of open source projects, as a developer and a user, so therefore I have jumped ship from many of them. Usually, right before the quaterdeck gets wet, all the helpful users leave; the ones that remain and answer questions give you answers like "your hardware is rubbish, buy this, its what I have, it works" or "Go read the documentation."
The least that can be done is pointing the user at the right place in the documentation, if you don't feel like repeating it just now.
Firstly, thats my blog. Secondly, I had about 7 different issues over the space of 6 weeks, trying to get a completely fresh install of Gentoo on an [Athlon XP 2600+, 1GB RAM, ATi 9800 Pro]. Problems ran from circular dependencies, to Xorg building properly but barfing on my graphics card, circular dependencies in the ATi driver, KDE barfing on the Xorg build, and when everything got up and ran, Xorg randomly quit and dumped me to the shell. As I'm not a novice gentoo user, I resolved the circular dependencies, built with fewer use flags, and used more conservative compiler options. The issues that weren't dependencies persisted.
The advice I got from the community was more or less exactly as I was quoted; apparently my 9800 Pro was rubbish in their eyes. Or at least thats exactly what I was told in the IRC channel. I did a search on the forums and mailing list, found others with my issues, and they were told to get an NVidia card.
I'm not a Linux User per se; I just need to get my work done. My work environment is KDevelop, which necessitates KDE. There are few KDE-based/supported distros out there, apparently every distro manager loves the philosophy of Gnome. So proteus71 got me hooked up with Kubuntu, and that is where I have been getting my work done.
Disclaimer: I bought a PS2 to play Gran Turismo 4. I also bought the Logitech Racing Wheel. You could say I'm a fan.
A micropayment strategy for online games is still novel in the US; compare that to Korea, where developers have created a bustling market for addons purchased online. Many of the games eschew subscription fees in favor of allowing no-payers to play, but be significantly handicapped through game-mechanics (didn't buy that turbo boost?), or socially handicapped in the world (their avatar isn't decked out in the latest sprite fashion). It is my understanding that alternate forms of payment, like gamecards or charging items to your mobile phone account makes billing less painful (and more impulsive). The bottom line is that this model is appropriate for some types of online games.
That said, what implications might this have for Gran Turismo specifically? Having to pay for cars and tracks will certainly limit the appeal somewhat.
0. Having to purchase, presumably via credit card, vehicles to play online will restrict the audience. Especially in the U.S. where alternate forms of online payment are in their infancy.
1. It will encourage a new user to research the virtual autos available, and pick one/few suited to their desires/needs. This serves to extend the nature of the simulation somewhat.
2. It will encourage users to practice with that vehicle, to the point where they can actually handle it properly on the track. This also serves the overall simulation (if you buy all 750 cars, you aren't playing Gran Turismo, you're playing a game of Jay Leno).
3. A combination of 0, 1 and 2 will lead to a higher general level of competition online. Just like the barriers to real-life autocrossing; people mildly interested in cars are not to be found on a real racetrack. This will further serve the simulation. This will also tend to drive off casual players to a greater degree than 0 or 1. This will serve as a draw for the serious players, who will spend more money over time.
4. Which tracks I have will limit the number of other players I can race against. This reflects the real world in a rather un-fun way (I can't drive from Kansas to Japan to "attack the downhill" on their mountain passes).
5. Due to 4, the more casual players would tend to buy a few tracks, and practice them. They will likely have a favorite, likely one that matches their car well. This would put them at an advantage over another person who owns the track, but has a different sort of car and another favorite track. This could serve as sort of a handicap, skilled players challenging other players who specialize in one course or one type of course. Think Initial D, where you have an "86" (A sporty version of the early eighties Toyota Corrolla) defeating 400HP AWD R32 Nissan Skylines. Handicap races with cars unsuited to the course they are on could partially offset 4, because they might have a stream of more heavily invested/skilled players (i.e. bought more tracks and cars) interested in racing them on their home turf.
6. Over time, because the investment is low, the more casual players will get disatsfied with their tracks and vehicles and buy more. This would support the server infrastructure over time, and lend longevity to the game. Microsoft does a lot to support live, it is clear what Nintendo intends to do with the Wii, but Sony was approaching the new generation with the same general attitude towards online play as they did with the PS2; it is the publisher's problem. And since the publisher finds few people (proportionate to sales) are willing to pay any monthly or yearly fee at all to support online infrastructre, that makes those subscription fees high. Micropurchases over time
As a sophmore in high school, I used all my Christmas money in 1997 to purchase a HP48gx. It served me well, until 2002. Best. Calculator. Ever.
The 49g is a poor replacement. In it's default configuration, it lacks many of the keys in easy-to-access areas to make it useful as a RP device. As someone who heavily uses RPN (I find it forces me to use it more for arithmatic and less for the acctual algebra+calculus... it also made me check things like order of operations, etc.), this misfeature killed it.
You cannot tell me that they didn't outsource the UI/engineering factors for the device to non-users in India.
Said magical book is usually called the "Blue Book". It is sold by your local phone company (well, a middle-man publishes it), and contains all numbers that people are paying for; they usually cross reference by street address the number rings, as well as the full name of whomever is paying for the number (or name of a business). Also included are payphone numbers and locations.
I've utilized this tome at two seperate jobs I had whilst lower on the food chain; as a cab dispatcher, this was an indispensible tool for verifying valid addresses (when you have shady customers trying to put you on, or out-of-towners who got lost). When I (briefly) was forced to work in telemarketting, the "book" (this time in electronic form) was used to generate "leads".
As I spent a couple of years in the cab dispatch position, I watched the book's usefulness slide downhill; with VOIP and cellphones encroaching on the traditional telecom providers, the book was increasingly less accurate. Caller-id, which was the technology that enabled us to use the Blue Book to verify where the customer was calling from, also began to slide in terms of accuracy (what with the drug dealers and pimps learning how to spoof addresses, and of course knowing the address where the cell phone bill gets sent gets you nowhere...).
Sounds like it is time for the OS community to take the open fork and make it better than the closed one, therefore screwing over people who break their covenant with their userbase.
Yes, I do understand the reasons behind closing it (too many freeloaders, legal under the GPL and not).
...except that you won't be turning HDR off in many games- the idea is that this is used for gameplay effects like being partially blinded as if your eyes are adjusting to the light (when you move from a dark area to a bright one, or have a flashbang go off near you, etc.). In a multiplayer game, they will need to remove the ability for the player to turn these things off (as that would be cheating). Thus, your Steam/VAC or Punkbuster/whatever servers will flag you as a cheater (and kick you from the multiplayer server) even if you do find a way to disable HDR effects.
I love how the mainstream game press loves to liken games and the game industry to their Hollywood counterparts. Naturally, "cinematic" 3D effects are being likened now to "realistic" effects (3dfx marketed this first with their "t-buffer" temporal motion blur nonsense).
This is not the journalist's problem; the corporate/marketing guys in the game industry who talk to the press are the ones who hail such things as "realistic" and "revolutionary", when in fact they are not anywhere near photorealitic and are in fact quite passe in the world of computer graphics (i.e. the technology is based off of a 10-year-old SIGGRAPH presentation). Of course, the only people who ever talk to the corporate whores are the technical staff at the game companies, and none of them really care enough to correct the suits; alternatively they just like getting free pats on the back for doing such excellent work and making "the impossible possible" from a suit's POV (when in reality they are simply engineering the probable, extrapolating the new from last year's technology).
To be fair, the story of the last decade in computer graphics has been the effort to get enough computing power to do something close to photorealism. It was quite accurate to say that more fillrate (for resolutions beyond 320x240) made games more realistic, bilinear/trilinear or anisotropic texture filtering made the scene more realistic, that antialiasing makes the scene more realistic (no jaggies in real life), advanced animation techniques that bring the entities in the world makes the scene more realistic, that HDR effects that partially blind you when you look at the sun are more realistic- but notice as time has gone on, the graphical effects implimented have more and more effect on actual gameplay. The more realistic the graphics, the more realism people will come to expect in the gameplay- this is being overlooked, and I think this is a reason why game industry is not living up to performance projections.
Not to mention the question: If the graphics are there to present and support the gameplay, must not the graphics be suited to do so? Are realistic/cinematic graphics really the best way to do so? Aren't we wagging the dog a bit here?
I'm not a complainer, but the sexual content in Titanic warranted an R rating judging by how the MPAA rates many other movies. Its an issue about inconsistancy and vague standards, which can be and are bought off.
There are a few regional used DVD/CD store chains here, such as CD Tradepost at 21st and Woodlawn/Central+Ridge. GameXChange was certainly a mom+pop operation when I was a kid; I don't know about now. My comment below was directed straight at GameXChange, but applies equally to the other joints around town.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with your rap analogy is that, like fiction (an analogy other posters tried without much success), there's an understood disconnect from reality
Whether they're level headed or cuckoo for cocoa puffs, most of the time I hear people speak, especially about politics or recent events, I detect a distinct disconnect from reality.
If you are a programmer who can't do art (most of us), conceiving a product that will be competitive enough to sell (or even generate ad impressions in the flash space), you need budget for an artist (or you need to find a decent one that will work for free)..
I personally find it easier to fire up a 3d modeling tool and knock out low-poly spaceships or simple trees, than to have sat down with paper and pencil and done the same thing (god forbid I try 2D art on the computer, it still looks like I'm 7 and toying around in macpaint).
With modern hardware and commercial/indie/free-licensed engines, the complexity barrier just isn't there between 2D and 3D any longer. I know I could do something like Edelwiss's Ether Vapor (without the character portraits) far more easily than I could do something like RakeInGrass's Jets'n'Guns.
At least I took some music classes in college and can do that bit.
Firstly, if you have a bilaterally symmetric character, you only need 5 facings for 8 way movement as you can mirror left/right and the associated diagonals. If the characters aren't symmetric in this way, then it can lead to funny behavior (imagine a knight whose sword and shield swap hands when he turns from left to right). I can remember this happening in at least one game on the Genesis, though.
There isn't any way to do that without cheating a bit...
1. Render top down. Use sprite rotations to do just that. Pros: simple. Cons: your game will look like Gauntlet and the sprites you see in the action will have no personality whatsoever (BUT you can try the classic techniques of character portraits, or maybe something more advanced like the cartoon panels from the Penny Arcade games).
2. Do a fake 3d game with billboarded sprites. If you play enough of a game with billboarded sprites with multiple facings (say, the enemies from doom), the timing of the face changes of the sprite as your view angle changes allows your brain to infer the true facing of the entity. You could do an "over the shoulder" camera view, and only see the back of your avatar (which might solve other problems, like the number of animation frames you need for it).
The ultimate example of this technique would be Galaxy Force 1/2. It uses layered billboards to achieve depth. I can imagine that this technique could be combined with voxels for some visually interesting results.
3. Draw your sprites such that they can be compressed on one side and stretched on the other without looking bad. This could be used to simulate the character changing aspect relative to you. I've seen this proposed, but I don't think I've ever heard of the technique being used.
Did you miss my statement I own a Palm Treo 750? OK, its no iPhone in terms of screen size, but it is capable of any communications task my desktop is (ssh/telnet, voice, various IM protocols, email, web, etc.). I like using my smartphone, its a neato chunk of consumer electronics.
While I haven't personally owned a smartphone until recently, that doesn't mean I haven't enjoyed their use- I've been developing custom application software for the things for about 6 years, and at times had 3 or 4 of the things given to me by different employers or through contract work.
All I was trying to say is that there is a niche for a lightweight mobile phone that can power on and off quickly. I've no doubt that as the market expands in the US, we'll start to see some. In fact, phones that can quickly power on/off, go into a suspend, or can fake being powered off seem to be quite popular with high school and college students overseas, judging by how many I see floating around on the college campus I live next to (which caters to foreign students).
Well, if the companies you bought your "handheld computers" from would open up the phone part of the device, we would be assured of being able to disable that component without turning off the device, which would be nice. Also, these devices need to be available in a larger range of options, to help folks deal with all the places they need to take their device (many companies don't allow cameras, personal devices with wifi, SD slots, or things that can act like USB storage). Imho a computer is a customizable device, anything that is sold as "one size fits all" is consumer electronics; ergo I don't buy your handheld computer argument, you can't cripple gimped hardware much further.
I also might point out that in my case, I'm a contractor who happens to be working an 8 hour per day contract with short break windows during which I can make personal calls (which in my case is calling my personal voice system to find out if I have any critical emails or voicemail from other clients) in a breakroom area.
My Palm Treo 750 does allow me to simply turn off the network interfaces (wifi, 3g etc.), but that doesn't help with a site policy that doesn't allow camera phones or any personal device that has wifi. Therefore while I'm working my current large contract, I use an old Nokia brick, which for some reason takes 1 minute to power on, and about 30 seconds to power off.
Thats a significant portion of a 5 minute break, and there is NO reason a device as dumb as that one (no storage outside the SIM) should take that long to boot and find a network.
Some people work at companies that:
1. Don't allow cell phone use, or allow them only in break areas, and
2. Have such awful parking lot security that you're not going to leave it in your car.
As such, its really nice to have a phone that doesn't take a minute to power on/off.
Gamastura is the web front of the CMP Game Group, which is in turn part of CMP Media at large. Amongst other things, this company organizes major industry events (such GDC), and publishes Game Developer Magazine. Gamasutra is mainly a web clearinghouse (and advertisement) for Game Developer Magazine content. Thusly, there are folks with editorial control over the content published on Gamasutra; this is not a blog, where a writer says whatever they want with nobody to edit their content for public consumption.
Ian Bogost is much more than a "blogger". Judging by the derisive fashion with which you wield the term, I'm guessing you take that to mean "person who writes about stuff because they are too untalented/lazy to actually be involved with any of the stuff they write about". No offense; that is the same way I bandy the word about. Check out his website, and take a look around. Yes, it links to a lot of articles he has written, and mentions in the mass media (including an appearance on The Colbert Report), but if you take a look at these, you'll find that in addition to doing real business with corporate advertisers hawking products, he is actually in involved in trying use games for conveying something beyond a fun experience or a product placement.
No, I don't work for him, and I'm not his #1 fanboy. I simply knew that the "publisher" and the author of the content you called a "blog" were so much more than that.
If there were a Computer Flea Market-Goers Anonymous, I'd be in and out of their support groups for life. I scrape up a lot of awesome hardware for almost nothing all the time; I've also sold surplus hardware and Linux CDs (back before the advent of widespread broadband and cd-burners) at these events.
However, every time I have bought business software at these shows, it inevitably consists of bundled or licensed software with non-transferable clauses, or nice Chinese copies. Some even have the holograms on the Certificates of Authenticity, and look quite official. You can only tell the difference if you regularly handle the real thing; indeed, I was bamboozled until I began taking contracts doing lease refreshes and hardware/software installs wherein I handled the genuine articles on a daily basis.
I wasted a lot of money buying the fakes.
I was also Not Really Serious.
Check out what tongue->cheek means.
...I picked up a cheap copy of Visual Studio 2005 at a computer flee market.This is the point where I imagine pandemonium as folks run in terror from the local bingo hall on computer sale weekend. As they should. Those places are out to get you.
tongue->cheek
So what you mean is that you picked up a Chinese copy of MSVS 2005? If you're going to aid and abet piracy, you might as well not give the other pirates encouragement in the form of hard currency.
tongue->back-in-normal-place
Recognizing that MSVS was facing real competition in the IDE arena, MS got smart and offered up a relatively non-encumbered free version, Visual Studio Express. For the major differences between Express and the other versions, see this page.
If all you are interested in is a C++ compiler and IDE, Express works. Its free as in crappy domestic (US) beer. The comparison seems to indicate that you don't get full access to MSDN, but that seems to be a lie. Granted, with Express you don't have it locally, but who wants to install all (eight last time I checked) gigs of the stuff when it is all online anyhow?
...KDevelop wins!
I forgot to mention my completely unscientific method for determining the size of the Gentoo community. I've been involved in a lot of open source projects, as a developer and a user, so therefore I have jumped ship from many of them. Usually, right before the quaterdeck gets wet, all the helpful users leave; the ones that remain and answer questions give you answers like "your hardware is rubbish, buy this, its what I have, it works" or "Go read the documentation."
The least that can be done is pointing the user at the right place in the documentation, if you don't feel like repeating it just now.
Firstly, thats my blog. Secondly, I had about 7 different issues over the space of 6 weeks, trying to get a completely fresh install of Gentoo on an [Athlon XP 2600+, 1GB RAM, ATi 9800 Pro]. Problems ran from circular dependencies, to Xorg building properly but barfing on my graphics card, circular dependencies in the ATi driver, KDE barfing on the Xorg build, and when everything got up and ran, Xorg randomly quit and dumped me to the shell. As I'm not a novice gentoo user, I resolved the circular dependencies, built with fewer use flags, and used more conservative compiler options. The issues that weren't dependencies persisted.
The advice I got from the community was more or less exactly as I was quoted; apparently my 9800 Pro was rubbish in their eyes. Or at least thats exactly what I was told in the IRC channel. I did a search on the forums and mailing list, found others with my issues, and they were told to get an NVidia card.
I'm not a Linux User per se; I just need to get my work done. My work environment is KDevelop, which necessitates KDE. There are few KDE-based/supported distros out there, apparently every distro manager loves the philosophy of Gnome. So proteus71 got me hooked up with Kubuntu, and that is where I have been getting my work done.
Sims aren't games. There is a deliniation there, which was the part of the point of the parent you missed.
Disclaimer: I bought a PS2 to play Gran Turismo 4. I also bought the Logitech Racing Wheel. You could say I'm a fan.
A micropayment strategy for online games is still novel in the US; compare that to Korea, where developers have created a bustling market for addons purchased online. Many of the games eschew subscription fees in favor of allowing no-payers to play, but be significantly handicapped through game-mechanics (didn't buy that turbo boost?), or socially handicapped in the world (their avatar isn't decked out in the latest sprite fashion). It is my understanding that alternate forms of payment, like gamecards or charging items to your mobile phone account makes billing less painful (and more impulsive). The bottom line is that this model is appropriate for some types of online games.
That said, what implications might this have for Gran Turismo specifically? Having to pay for cars and tracks will certainly limit the appeal somewhat.
0. Having to purchase, presumably via credit card, vehicles to play online will restrict the audience. Especially in the U.S. where alternate forms of online payment are in their infancy.
1. It will encourage a new user to research the virtual autos available, and pick one/few suited to their desires/needs. This serves to extend the nature of the simulation somewhat.
2. It will encourage users to practice with that vehicle, to the point where they can actually handle it properly on the track. This also serves the overall simulation (if you buy all 750 cars, you aren't playing Gran Turismo, you're playing a game of Jay Leno).
3. A combination of 0, 1 and 2 will lead to a higher general level of competition online. Just like the barriers to real-life autocrossing; people mildly interested in cars are not to be found on a real racetrack. This will further serve the simulation. This will also tend to drive off casual players to a greater degree than 0 or 1. This will serve as a draw for the serious players, who will spend more money over time.
4. Which tracks I have will limit the number of other players I can race against. This reflects the real world in a rather un-fun way (I can't drive from Kansas to Japan to "attack the downhill" on their mountain passes).
5. Due to 4, the more casual players would tend to buy a few tracks, and practice them. They will likely have a favorite, likely one that matches their car well. This would put them at an advantage over another person who owns the track, but has a different sort of car and another favorite track. This could serve as sort of a handicap, skilled players challenging other players who specialize in one course or one type of course. Think Initial D, where you have an "86" (A sporty version of the early eighties Toyota Corrolla) defeating 400HP AWD R32 Nissan Skylines. Handicap races with cars unsuited to the course they are on could partially offset 4, because they might have a stream of more heavily invested/skilled players (i.e. bought more tracks and cars) interested in racing them on their home turf.
6. Over time, because the investment is low, the more casual players will get disatsfied with their tracks and vehicles and buy more. This would support the server infrastructure over time, and lend longevity to the game. Microsoft does a lot to support live, it is clear what Nintendo intends to do with the Wii, but Sony was approaching the new generation with the same general attitude towards online play as they did with the PS2; it is the publisher's problem. And since the publisher finds few people (proportionate to sales) are willing to pay any monthly or yearly fee at all to support online infrastructre, that makes those subscription fees high. Micropurchases over time
As a sophmore in high school, I used all my Christmas money in 1997 to purchase a HP48gx. It served me well, until 2002. Best. Calculator. Ever.
The 49g is a poor replacement. In it's default configuration, it lacks many of the keys in easy-to-access areas to make it useful as a RP device. As someone who heavily uses RPN (I find it forces me to use it more for arithmatic and less for the acctual algebra+calculus... it also made me check things like order of operations, etc.), this misfeature killed it.
You cannot tell me that they didn't outsource the UI/engineering factors for the device to non-users in India.
...my HP calculator has had an SD card slot and USB port for 4 years. This is news? On Slashdot?
This isn't Digg or anything...
Said magical book is usually called the "Blue Book". It is sold by your local phone company (well, a middle-man publishes it), and contains all numbers that people are paying for; they usually cross reference by street address the number rings, as well as the full name of whomever is paying for the number (or name of a business). Also included are payphone numbers and locations.
I've utilized this tome at two seperate jobs I had whilst lower on the food chain; as a cab dispatcher, this was an indispensible tool for verifying valid addresses (when you have shady customers trying to put you on, or out-of-towners who got lost). When I (briefly) was forced to work in telemarketting, the "book" (this time in electronic form) was used to generate "leads".
As I spent a couple of years in the cab dispatch position, I watched the book's usefulness slide downhill; with VOIP and cellphones encroaching on the traditional telecom providers, the book was increasingly less accurate. Caller-id, which was the technology that enabled us to use the Blue Book to verify where the customer was calling from, also began to slide in terms of accuracy (what with the drug dealers and pimps learning how to spoof addresses, and of course knowing the address where the cell phone bill gets sent gets you nowhere...).
DirectXX must mean 100, not 20.
Because suicide bomber chicks are hawt.
Sounds like it is time for the OS community to take the open fork and make it better than the closed one, therefore screwing over people who break their covenant with their userbase.
Yes, I do understand the reasons behind closing it (too many freeloaders, legal under the GPL and not).
...except that you won't be turning HDR off in many games- the idea is that this is used for gameplay effects like being partially blinded as if your eyes are adjusting to the light (when you move from a dark area to a bright one, or have a flashbang go off near you, etc.). In a multiplayer game, they will need to remove the ability for the player to turn these things off (as that would be cheating). Thus, your Steam/VAC or Punkbuster/whatever servers will flag you as a cheater (and kick you from the multiplayer server) even if you do find a way to disable HDR effects.
I love how the mainstream game press loves to liken games and the game industry to their Hollywood counterparts. Naturally, "cinematic" 3D effects are being likened now to "realistic" effects (3dfx marketed this first with their "t-buffer" temporal motion blur nonsense).
This is not the journalist's problem; the corporate/marketing guys in the game industry who talk to the press are the ones who hail such things as "realistic" and "revolutionary", when in fact they are not anywhere near photorealitic and are in fact quite passe in the world of computer graphics (i.e. the technology is based off of a 10-year-old SIGGRAPH presentation). Of course, the only people who ever talk to the corporate whores are the technical staff at the game companies, and none of them really care enough to correct the suits; alternatively they just like getting free pats on the back for doing such excellent work and making "the impossible possible" from a suit's POV (when in reality they are simply engineering the probable, extrapolating the new from last year's technology).
To be fair, the story of the last decade in computer graphics has been the effort to get enough computing power to do something close to photorealism. It was quite accurate to say that more fillrate (for resolutions beyond 320x240) made games more realistic, bilinear/trilinear or anisotropic texture filtering made the scene more realistic, that antialiasing makes the scene more realistic (no jaggies in real life), advanced animation techniques that bring the entities in the world makes the scene more realistic, that HDR effects that partially blind you when you look at the sun are more realistic- but notice as time has gone on, the graphical effects implimented have more and more effect on actual gameplay. The more realistic the graphics, the more realism people will come to expect in the gameplay- this is being overlooked, and I think this is a reason why game industry is not living up to performance projections.
Not to mention the question: If the graphics are there to present and support the gameplay, must not the graphics be suited to do so? Are realistic/cinematic graphics really the best way to do so? Aren't we wagging the dog a bit here?
I'm not a complainer, but the sexual content in Titanic warranted an R rating judging by how the MPAA rates many other movies. Its an issue about inconsistancy and vague standards, which can be and are bought off.
...so its like the Falkland Islands?
There are a few regional used DVD/CD store chains here, such as CD Tradepost at 21st and Woodlawn/Central+Ridge. GameXChange was certainly a mom+pop operation when I was a kid; I don't know about now. My comment below was directed straight at GameXChange, but applies equally to the other joints around town.