Why wouldn't they give up? They create this huge complex document creation product, and/. jerks call it a "word processor." I bet they felt insulted and did it out of honor;)
No, I mean that a lot of PC game makers ignore gameplay in favor of graphics. Example of those that don't, Epic with UT. Examples of those who do, ID with Quake3.
Not necessarily. When you don't have an OS in the way and you get to run in ring0, you do everything you can to show up your competitors and tweek the system. The reason ASM and direct access have little use these days is because of all the diversity in PC hardware. Given a stable platform, game developers ALWAYS find a way to tweek games beyond what would be possible by going through the standard APIs. Saying that people will use DirectX8 all the time is like saying PS developers will use OpenGL all the time. It just won't happen.
Re:This is why Linux is so slow moving to the desk
on
Linux Sin Demo
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· Score: 2
Like I said, if you don't use hardware that doesn't have 50% market share, don't come complaining. Windows is very finacky about hardware, that's just the way it is. I don't like it, but if you use the right hardware, it isn't nearly as bad as everyone says it is. Your Matrox Millenium does NOT classify as the right hardware. Its 3D features are hideously limited, I'm not sure if it can do texturing, and if you turn on more than one 3D feature at a time, it breaks. The reason you had to turn on software rendering is because you basically have a 2D-only card. Its a good 2D card, but developers like MS cannot be expected to support crappy hardware. The fact that they support it at all is a miracle.
Re:3D Realism is becoming dangerous.
on
Nvidia's NV20
·
· Score: 2
Another implication of 3D games is the annihilation of imagination. Why try to think of your own universes, when they are provided them on a plate?
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Actually, the columnist from MaximumPC (can't remember his name, forgieve me, he's the one with the beard) poited out that games are much closer to books than movies in that movies give you a prepackaged world on a plate, while games give a tool for you own mind to imagine things more vividly. I am inclined to agree. Well-done games take a lot of imagination to play, and can often stimulate the mind like a book does. (I'm not talking Quake, I'm talking Final Fantasy or Zelda.)
Re:What I think is sad...
on
Nvidia's NV20
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· Score: 2
I don't know, it think it is just a PC-gamer demographic. If you look at console games, usually new technology is designed to create breathtaking works of art like Final Fantasy, Shenmeu, or Mario 64;)
Re:Developers will hit the wall sooner or later
on
Nvidia's NV20
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· Score: 2
Umm, complex scenes can be done just by setting MAX to not reduce the polygons so much. Trust me, people are FAR, FAR away from the day when the scene becomes too simple for the hardware.
Wow, a real non-gamer crowd! Doesn't anybody remember the PowerVR Series chips? The reason NV20 will be 7x faster for complex models and only 2x faster for simple ones is that it will use tiling (my hypothesis only.) In a tiling-based architecture, the 3D renderer first sorts all the geometry, and then splits it up into small tiles. The tiles are then loaded into small on chip buffers and rendered. This has several advantages:
A) It doesn't over-render. If geometry isn't going to be seen, it doesn't get rendered. Normally, cards have to render the pixel, and then discard it if the Zbuffer test fails. With tiling, there is no Zbuffer and pixels get discarded before they're rendered.
B) The sorting allows transparency to be handled very easily since geometry doesn't have to be presorted by the game engine.
C) It allows a hideous number of texture layers. The Kyro (PowerVR Series 3 chip-based) can apply up to 8 without taking a noticible speed hit. Also, it lower the bandwidth requirement significantly since the card doesn't have to access the framebuffer repeatedly.
D) It allows incredibly complex geometry. Even though the Kyro is a 120MHz chip, it can beat a GF2Ultra by nearly double the fps in games that have high overdraw (such as Deus Ex.)
The main problem with tiling is that standard APIs like OpenGL and D3D are designed for standard triangle accelerators. As such, the internal jiggering tiling cards have to do often outweight their performance benifets. Also, up until now, only 2bit companies have made tiling accelerators, so they haven't caught on.
They won't be compatible. Games written for XBox will be assuming Ring0 operation on a stripped down Win2K kernel. It's going to take some work to port, though probably not as much as it normally would. Of course, if the developers take advantage of the console nature, they'll start using custom ASM routines and bypassing the OS, in which case a port might be much harder.
Re:it doesn't matter how great of card it is..
on
Nvidia's NV20
·
· Score: 2
Umm, with 3DFx down until Rampage comes out god knows when (Q2 next year), and Matrox sitting this round out, GPL fanatics have no choice but to sit on their G400MAX's and hope that ATI takes pity on them and decides to GPL the T&L part of their drivers. (The Radeon drivers are not completly OSS, just the rasterization parts are) Lastly, GPL fanatics will most likely ONLY get low quality drivers. Besides the legal reasons why NVIDIA cannot OSS their drivers, there is the fact that the drivers kick serious ass. They are the fastest, most stable implementation of OpenGL (what did you think an OpenGL driver was? This isn't an ethernet card!) on the face of consumer hardware. Now why in god's name would NVIDIA just give away an entire OpenGL pipeline to competitors who could take advantage of it (eg, ATI) to make their cards competitive with NVIDIA's?
Re:Enough with the polygons - lets get some physic
on
Nvidia's NV20
·
· Score: 2
Graphics are graphics, physics are something else. Physics engines are incredibly diverse in what they do. A one-size fits API handicaps physicas designers MUCH more than it does graphics designers. Gameplay and story don't really take any processing power. If you can offload graphics and audio processing to dedicated processesors (a much more practical design) then the remaining 1000MHz of your CPU can be dedicated to physics and AI. Gameplay and story is totally unlimited by hardware, and just dependant on what the designers do. The Final Fantasy series has great graphics, sound and gameplay. A lot of PC game makers just aren't that skilled.
Umm, BeIA already have Java2 ported, and a BeOS version of Java2 SE is forthcoming. Additionally, Kaffe already runs on BeOS. Mine was a site design issue, not a BeOS issue. All those people running older browsers have the same problem. My point is that unless you're going to use Javascript to make something cool/useful, don't use it at all.
PS> This all neglects the fact that Javascript has NOTHING whatsoever to do with Java.
Re:This is why Linux is so slow moving to the desk
on
Linux Sin Demo
·
· Score: 2
Yea, but we're not talking Windows just the game. Your install cycle for Windows is too long because
A) You don't keep your system up to date to begin with. If none of the drivers on your system are older than 30 days, you'll be a happy man in Windows-land.
B) You play crappy games and/or on crappy hardware. If anything from ATI is on your system, or your game developer's name has Sierra anywhere on it, please do us all a favor and try some decent games/hardware before complaining. My hardware is Dell conservative: Intel, NVIDIA, Microsoft, Altec-Lansing, Creative Labs. The most oddball thing I have on my system is Linksys. If you buy anything with less than 50% market share (or a nice relationship with MS) then you deserve any problems you get. (Sad, but true.) To tell the truth, Linux is hard to install no matter WHAT hardware you use. Futzing is just something that has to be done.
C) Install programs can and do satisfy gamers. People don't cralize that gamers aren't into tweeking, they're into playing. They CAN tweek, but don't want to.
You shouldn't have to tweek to play a game. In Windows, you generally don't have to. I get the MaximumPC disc that comes full of demos every month. I can tell you that at least a dozen games go on and off my harddrive in the space of a few days. I have yet to have to futz to install any of them. Install patches yes, but unless the developers are monkeys, installing them takes 5 minutes (on a DSL line;) Plus, patches are part of the experience on all non-console OSs. (Which is another reason why a harddrive is such a dumb idea for a console.)
If Windows sucks that badly for you, then you're doing something wrong.
An old crappy game gets ported! Seriously though, when are some GOOD games going to get ported? Freespace, AOEII (ha ha, that's funny!), something out of Jane's games, or the ever popular Half Life!
Umm, a DragonBall runs closer to 20MHz than 100. What I really want to see is somebody reserect the Z380. At 66MHz, you could make a damn nice TI-83 compatible machine! Think about it, znibbles at 66MHz!
(On a related note, I think the KDE and X programmers should be forced to spend time coding for these calculators. Fast, tight, optimized code. That's how REAL men program. Some guy wrote Mechwarrior for the Ti86, which has around 32k of RAM and a 6MHz processor!)
Damnit. People really shouldn't use JavaScript on crappy-looking sites. I had to open up Opera to look at the page. New people. If your going to design a site that doesn't look very nice, please don't use cool technology that limits your audience.
Umm, a LOT of OSs are small. If all they wanted was small, they could have used QNX (if they want to pay the exhorbent license fee.) It fits into like 512k of ROM. I think they just want a free OS, plain and simple. Linux doesn't have nearly as many advantages in the embeeded market as people like to believe, other than the fact than its free.
Yea, the kernel is nice, its the other 30million lines of code (Mozilla, X, KDE, GNOME, and the 300 other libraries that are necessary to compete with Win2K, feature-wise)
However, if graphics, sound, input, networking, or any number of non kernel services goes beserk, then everything still works. For example, if the current (fairy unstable and soon to be replaced) BeOS networking stack was running kernel mode, BeOS would be less stable than Windows. Now, however, it is just a matter of opening up a terminal, killing net_server, and restarting it. Given the stability of microkernel OSs like QNX and BeOS, especially under strange conditions, you have to admit that microkernel designes have SOME stability advantages. They also encourage tight, small code throughout the entire system, especially if the kernel developers are also working on the server and retain the (small, fast, minimal) mindset. (It's interesting that nobody ever mentions the fact that *NIX kernel developers tend to have the app-developer-like "general as possible" mentality.)
It IS a microkernel, just not religiously. And given the great performance NT offers, maybe its not such a bad trade-off. (The fact that NT isn't the fastest most stable OS is not an architecture problem, but an MS-developer-are-monkeys problem.)
Slashdot Mirror
Get your priorities straight.
Why wouldn't they give up? They create this huge complex document creation product, and /. jerks call it a "word processor." I bet they felt insulted and did it out of honor ;)
No, I mean that a lot of PC game makers ignore gameplay in favor of graphics. Example of those that don't, Epic with UT. Examples of those who do, ID with Quake3.
But its pronounced X Windows ;)
Damn, I thought I'd had it ;)
Not necessarily. When you don't have an OS in the way and you get to run in ring0, you do everything you can to show up your competitors and tweek the system. The reason ASM and direct access have little use these days is because of all the diversity in PC hardware. Given a stable platform, game developers ALWAYS find a way to tweek games beyond what would be possible by going through the standard APIs. Saying that people will use DirectX8 all the time is like saying PS developers will use OpenGL all the time. It just won't happen.
Actually, I think innovation is inversely proportional to popularity.
Umm, when did BSDI fold?
Like I said, if you don't use hardware that doesn't have 50% market share, don't come complaining. Windows is very finacky about hardware, that's just the way it is. I don't like it, but if you use the right hardware, it isn't nearly as bad as everyone says it is. Your Matrox Millenium does NOT classify as the right hardware. Its 3D features are hideously limited, I'm not sure if it can do texturing, and if you turn on more than one 3D feature at a time, it breaks. The reason you had to turn on software rendering is because you basically have a 2D-only card. Its a good 2D card, but developers like MS cannot be expected to support crappy hardware. The fact that they support it at all is a miracle.
Another implication of 3D games is the annihilation of imagination. Why try to think of your own universes, when they are provided them on a plate?
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Actually, the columnist from MaximumPC (can't remember his name, forgieve me, he's the one with the beard) poited out that games are much closer to books than movies in that movies give you a prepackaged world on a plate, while games give a tool for you own mind to imagine things more vividly. I am inclined to agree. Well-done games take a lot of imagination to play, and can often stimulate the mind like a book does. (I'm not talking Quake, I'm talking Final Fantasy or Zelda.)
I don't know, it think it is just a PC-gamer demographic. If you look at console games, usually new technology is designed to create breathtaking works of art like Final Fantasy, Shenmeu, or Mario 64 ;)
Umm, complex scenes can be done just by setting MAX to not reduce the polygons so much. Trust me, people are FAR, FAR away from the day when the scene becomes too simple for the hardware.
Wow, a real non-gamer crowd! Doesn't anybody remember the PowerVR Series chips? The reason NV20 will be 7x faster for complex models and only 2x faster for simple ones is that it will use tiling (my hypothesis only.) In a tiling-based architecture, the 3D renderer first sorts all the geometry, and then splits it up into small tiles. The tiles are then loaded into small on chip buffers and rendered. This has several advantages:
A) It doesn't over-render. If geometry isn't going to be seen, it doesn't get rendered. Normally, cards have to render the pixel, and then discard it if the Zbuffer test fails. With tiling, there is no Zbuffer and pixels get discarded before they're rendered.
B) The sorting allows transparency to be handled very easily since geometry doesn't have to be presorted by the game engine.
C) It allows a hideous number of texture layers. The Kyro (PowerVR Series 3 chip-based) can apply up to 8 without taking a noticible speed hit. Also, it lower the bandwidth requirement significantly since the card doesn't have to access the framebuffer repeatedly.
D) It allows incredibly complex geometry. Even though the Kyro is a 120MHz chip, it can beat a GF2Ultra by nearly double the fps in games that have high overdraw (such as Deus Ex.)
The main problem with tiling is that standard APIs like OpenGL and D3D are designed for standard triangle accelerators. As such, the internal jiggering tiling cards have to do often outweight their performance benifets. Also, up until now, only 2bit companies have made tiling accelerators, so they haven't caught on.
If you want to read the Kyro preview, head over to Sharky Extreme.
They won't be compatible. Games written for XBox will be assuming Ring0 operation on a stripped down Win2K kernel. It's going to take some work to port, though probably not as much as it normally would. Of course, if the developers take advantage of the console nature, they'll start using custom ASM routines and bypassing the OS, in which case a port might be much harder.
Umm, with 3DFx down until Rampage comes out god knows when (Q2 next year), and Matrox sitting this round out, GPL fanatics have no choice but to sit on their G400MAX's and hope that ATI takes pity on them and decides to GPL the T&L part of their drivers. (The Radeon drivers are not completly OSS, just the rasterization parts are) Lastly, GPL fanatics will most likely ONLY get low quality drivers. Besides the legal reasons why NVIDIA cannot OSS their drivers, there is the fact that the drivers kick serious ass. They are the fastest, most stable implementation of OpenGL (what did you think an OpenGL driver was? This isn't an ethernet card!) on the face of consumer hardware. Now why in god's name would NVIDIA just give away an entire OpenGL pipeline to competitors who could take advantage of it (eg, ATI) to make their cards competitive with NVIDIA's?
Graphics are graphics, physics are something else. Physics engines are incredibly diverse in what they do. A one-size fits API handicaps physicas designers MUCH more than it does graphics designers. Gameplay and story don't really take any processing power. If you can offload graphics and audio processing to dedicated processesors (a much more practical design) then the remaining 1000MHz of your CPU can be dedicated to physics and AI. Gameplay and story is totally unlimited by hardware, and just dependant on what the designers do. The Final Fantasy series has great graphics, sound and gameplay. A lot of PC game makers just aren't that skilled.
Umm, BeIA already have Java2 ported, and a BeOS version of Java2 SE is forthcoming. Additionally, Kaffe already runs on BeOS. Mine was a site design issue, not a BeOS issue. All those people running older browsers have the same problem. My point is that unless you're going to use Javascript to make something cool/useful, don't use it at all.
PS> This all neglects the fact that Javascript has NOTHING whatsoever to do with Java.
Yea, but we're not talking Windows just the game. Your install cycle for Windows is too long because
;) Plus, patches are part of the experience on all non-console OSs. (Which is another reason why a harddrive is such a dumb idea for a console.)
A) You don't keep your system up to date to begin with. If none of the drivers on your system are older than 30 days, you'll be a happy man in Windows-land.
B) You play crappy games and/or on crappy hardware. If anything from ATI is on your system, or your game developer's name has Sierra anywhere on it, please do us all a favor and try some decent games/hardware before complaining. My hardware is Dell conservative: Intel, NVIDIA, Microsoft, Altec-Lansing, Creative Labs. The most oddball thing I have on my system is Linksys. If you buy anything with less than 50% market share (or a nice relationship with MS) then you deserve any problems you get. (Sad, but true.) To tell the truth, Linux is hard to install no matter WHAT hardware you use. Futzing is just something that has to be done.
C) Install programs can and do satisfy gamers. People don't cralize that gamers aren't into tweeking, they're into playing. They CAN tweek, but don't want to.
You shouldn't have to tweek to play a game. In Windows, you generally don't have to. I get the MaximumPC disc that comes full of demos every month. I can tell you that at least a dozen games go on and off my harddrive in the space of a few days. I have yet to have to futz to install any of them. Install patches yes, but unless the developers are monkeys, installing them takes 5 minutes (on a DSL line
If Windows sucks that badly for you, then you're doing something wrong.
An old crappy game gets ported! Seriously though, when are some GOOD games going to get ported? Freespace, AOEII (ha ha, that's funny!), something out of Jane's games, or the ever popular Half Life!
Umm, a DragonBall runs closer to 20MHz than 100. What I really want to see is somebody reserect the Z380. At 66MHz, you could make a damn nice TI-83 compatible machine! Think about it, znibbles at 66MHz!
(On a related note, I think the KDE and X programmers should be forced to spend time coding for these calculators. Fast, tight, optimized code. That's how REAL men program. Some guy wrote Mechwarrior for the Ti86, which has around 32k of RAM and a 6MHz processor!)
Damnit. People really shouldn't use JavaScript on crappy-looking sites. I had to open up Opera to look at the page. New people. If your going to design a site that doesn't look very nice, please don't use cool technology that limits your audience.
Umm, a LOT of OSs are small. If all they wanted was small, they could have used QNX (if they want to pay the exhorbent license fee.) It fits into like 512k of ROM. I think they just want a free OS, plain and simple. Linux doesn't have nearly as many advantages in the embeeded market as people like to believe, other than the fact than its free.
Yea, the kernel is nice, its the other 30million lines of code (Mozilla, X, KDE, GNOME, and the 300 other libraries that are necessary to compete with Win2K, feature-wise)
However, if graphics, sound, input, networking, or any number of non kernel services goes beserk, then everything still works. For example, if the current (fairy unstable and soon to be replaced) BeOS networking stack was running kernel mode, BeOS would be less stable than Windows. Now, however, it is just a matter of opening up a terminal, killing net_server, and restarting it. Given the stability of microkernel OSs like QNX and BeOS, especially under strange conditions, you have to admit that microkernel designes have SOME stability advantages. They also encourage tight, small code throughout the entire system, especially if the kernel developers are also working on the server and retain the (small, fast, minimal) mindset. (It's interesting that nobody ever mentions the fact that *NIX kernel developers tend to have the app-developer-like "general as possible" mentality.)
It IS a microkernel, just not religiously. And given the great performance NT offers, maybe its not such a bad trade-off. (The fact that NT isn't the fastest most stable OS is not an architecture problem, but an MS-developer-are-monkeys problem.)