One of the more interesting games as of late is Neverwinter Nights. The core game engine is closed source, but the code for the campaign itself is completely visible. That means mod builders could poke around, play with the code, and do what they want with it.
I think this is going to be a fairly typical approach in the future, where the core game engine is off-limits to tweaking, but people can use the "official campaign" as a learning tool to see how the professional developers put it together.
Within the 65-nm process, Intel has also devised a second-generation strained silicon technology. "The second generation of Intel strained silicon increases transistor performance by 10 to 15 percent without increasing leakage," Intel said. "Conversely, these transistors can cut leakage by four times at constant performance compared to 90-nm transistors."
Actually, there was a recent article that discussed the fact that the symbiotic bacteria that made up corals was changing. So, though there's widespread bleaching of corals, it doesn't necessarily mean doom. The newer symbionts are much better adapted to warmer temperatures, so they should do better with the overall warming of the oceans.
What's probably happening with this artificial corals is that they're being colonized by the "clade D" symbionts right off the bat, which makes it look like they're thriving.
That's not to say that corals don't face other issues - pollution and disease most notably - but the situation may not be as dire as suspected.
The idea is to entangle two cesium atoms, then send one up into space. Back on earth, excite the one that remains and the one in space will do the same. In theory that could be used as an ion drive while keeping the bulk of your engine back on the ground.
Mandlebrot suggests donating 5% of the proceeds from all the online dating services to find out how to really get a date on a Saturday night.
But seriously, though there are patterns in most human endevors, it is an extraordinary complicated thing. The reason it hasn't succeeded in the past is that the chaotic factors that determine the outcome of the system are unknown and probably unknowable.
Who ever expected that a bunch of guys wearing hiking gear in Seattle would sweep through the music business in the 90's? How could you predict that scientifically? There's an interesting book called Bellweather by Connie Willis that talks about treads - it's a fun read with an element of truth about predicting future trends.
About two days ago, I shipped Demon after a year of development. It's a mod for Neverwinter Nights, the sequel to Shadowlords and Dreamcatcher. Both are in the Hall of Fame on the Vault and the Dreamcatcher series was Module of the Year. Yadda, yadda, yadda.
The closest I've come to understanding why I keep making these things is a comment made by a writer. They didn't write because they wanted to write, they write because they had it.
I make games because there are these stories inside me that keep wanting to pop out. Characters that demand being brought to life. Making the games can occasionally be fun, but the bugtesting and release is usually grueling and unpleasant.
So, I think I'll keep my day job of code wrangling and tip my hat out of respect to professional game developers. It's a tough job, putting something you've invested so much of yourself out there for the world to poke at.
It is a sad statement on human nature that when a person becomes so wealthy and powerful, they no longer get to enjoy the simpler things in peace. I suspect there are many days when he and his family wishes they could drive to Disneyland and go on the rides like everyone else. Most public places are probably off limits due to the complexity of managing security. Kidnapping is an endless concern.
I may not agree with all that Microsoft does as an entity, but I sometimes wish our world would let the man talk about his kids.
The issue wasn't that Double Click had problems, but that every site that uses them become very slow.
Until the basic routing infrastructure of the net changes, this is going to be a common issue anytime a number of big sites all require another organization to serve up their pages (e.g. Akamai).
Another Canadian team, the da Vinci Project in Toronto, is also building a rocket. But their rocket won't fire its engines until it's already 80,000 ft off the ground and tethered beneath a reusable, piloted helium balloon. It will hang in an 80 up angle. After starting its engines and cutting the tether, it will fly a 90, straight up profile. This lets the designers reduce the propulsion system to one-fourth of what a ground-launch would require. The craft, weighing 7,200 lb on take off (3,200 lb, empty), uses two kerosene and LOX engines, each generating 5,000 lb of thrust, to take it the rest of the way to 100 km. The engines are newly designed with emphasis on light weight, reliability, and low cost.
A helium-fueled cold gas-reaction control system (RCS) will give the ship attitude control. The pilot uses two control sticks, one for main-engine gimbals, the other for the RCS, or relies on an autopilot. Like other X-Prize contestants, the da Vinci rocket uses an inflated shuttlecock or ballute to increase drag on descent.
For something I just heard of today, it sounds quite clever.
I personally would rather have seen the 80 billion that the ISS will cost put into basic science such as materials and propulsion research. Eventually there will be a strong desire to explore, but it's simply too expensive with our current level of technology.
If 80 billion was instead sunk into developing ultrastrong material for space elevators or light composites to make standard rockets more efficient, I'd think it was money well spent.
People need to focus on the long term, not just election year slogans.
Joking aside, there's some truth behind Microsoft and their versions. One of the developer's had a blog that talked about it in detail.
Essentially, version 1.0 is a best guess at what the customer wants. Version 2.0 is started even before the customer sees the 1.0 version. Finally, customer feedback is incorporated into the 3.0 version and things might actually start getting useful.
Here's a good article on the technology behind Doom 3.
Essentially, it's geared towards a technology set that's already fairly well established. It relies heavily on normal mapping to produce seemingly high-polygon models when they're actually quite low-polygon. This is all done in OpenGL and not DirectX. Personally, I think it speaks highly of the ID developers that they can make an engine that looks so good on so many PCs.
Call me crazy, but BitTorrent seems to have been more widely accepted than other P2P technologies. The programmer of BitTorrent was hired by Valve recently and sites like FileRush are pretty commonly visited by the masses.
The listed article seemed vague about the MMORPG issue, but this one clearly states that it is not. There's some other interesting tidbits, such as their tentative plan to use their own technology (e.g. not Morrowind's) as well as developing for a number of different platforms.
Interplay has had some really nasty financial troubles in the last year as well as coming up with a wacky idea to create a Fallout MMORPG.
It's not certain that Fallout 3 is the same as this MMORPG. In fact, I'd seriously doubt it given Bethesda Software's past games. More likely it'll be a fairly open Morrowind-style game, though that's a big guess on my part.
Finally, if Interplay does go under and the Fallout license is sold, this doesn't bode well for future plans. The next license holder may not share Bethesda Software's vision of what a Fallout game is. I think this is far from a sure thing.
I picked up a Voodoo 2 card way back when for the incredibly high price of $300 (which was a ton close to ten years ago with the money I was making). A couple years later, I picked up my second Voodoo 2 for $30.
Think of it as an inexpensive way to nearly double your video card's performance at a fairly cheap price when others are upgrading to the new version of the card that is only 40-50% faster (unlike the SLI mode which is rumored to be 75-90% faster).
The tricky part will be that you have to have a motherboard to support it, which for now will only be the ones made for high-end workstations.
Too often do I hear tales of people going overboard trying to make a "fun" working environment. When John Romero was at Ion Storm, their Dallas office was an example of incredible excesses.
A Gamespy article has a nice quote predicting their downfall:
I knew that place was in trouble the day I walked into the Dallas office and saw the huge 10-foot wide Ion Storm logo inlaid in the floor in Italian marble.
Work should be a practical place to get things done - cubicles are reasonable balance between cost, privacy, and personal space. Having meeting rooms, bathrooms, and a kitchen is also nice. The traditional approaches to work spaces are done because they work well enough.
As the expression goes, half the battle is just showing up.
Unfortunately unfocused creative brilliance doesn't really do much good. Even artists need to focus on a project before creating something worthwhile.
I'd suggest you work on applying your mind to a specific topic - take classes that challenge and interest you. Pick up a hobby that you can stick with for more than a few weeks.
Remember, if you're really smart, you'll figure out how to get along with the rest of the world better than you currently do. Be patient. It takes awhile and the adjustments never seem to end.
I live down in Eugene, but visit Portland quite often. OMSI is a great science center, with an IMAX theater and a large area for kids to play. There's a top-notch zoo and Children's museum.
It does have it's big city problems, however. Traffic can be pretty bad and I managed to get assaulted there once. Eugene has most of the big city amenities without the big city problems.
I work for a large healthcare organization, writing custom software for the needs they have. There are occasional deadlines, but the pace is much more relaxed than for a for-profit organization. The work is interesting and meaningful.
In fact, I took off before lunch today to attend my son's preschool graduation. To put it in geek terms, my current job is so good, I turned down an offer from Bioware making games for a living.
The sad reality is that there's a huge underground market for kidneys and other organs, especially overseas. While growing new teeth are a start, the hope is that many of the other commonly failing organs will be replaceable over the next few decades.
Hopefully the ability to grow new organs from scratch will outpace the development of immune suppressants. In Niven's universe, the only reason organlegging thrived was that it was possible to transplant organs without problems. Now we know that rejection is a very real issue and only the latest classes of immune suppressants are making it almost a reality today.
My solution was to put my web server and main computer in an old sauna that we since turned into a closet (I don't have many sauna/fondue parties these days). It's completely quiet, the sauna being well insulated.
I run a bunch of wires through the wall for my monitor, speakers, and such, though I'm using wireless where possible. I even went as far as creating a "control panel" in the wall for my web server. It's an LCD monitor set in a metal panel, with some buttons and LEDs for turning on the two computers.
The only reason I have to run back into the sauna is to switch CDs, which is fairly rare these days. Now I just need to replace my CRT monitor with a flat screen as it has now become the loudest piece of equipment. Well, except for typing on the keyboard. I think I have to wait for brain interfaces before I can replace that.
Slashdot Mirror
One of the more interesting games as of late is Neverwinter Nights. The core game engine is closed source, but the code for the campaign itself is completely visible. That means mod builders could poke around, play with the code, and do what they want with it.
I think this is going to be a fairly typical approach in the future, where the core game engine is off-limits to tweaking, but people can use the "official campaign" as a learning tool to see how the professional developers put it together.
Forget the Coke ads. I want the Budweiser girls!
Actually, there was a recent article that discussed the fact that the symbiotic bacteria that made up corals was changing. So, though there's widespread bleaching of corals, it doesn't necessarily mean doom. The newer symbionts are much better adapted to warmer temperatures, so they should do better with the overall warming of the oceans.
What's probably happening with this artificial corals is that they're being colonized by the "clade D" symbionts right off the bat, which makes it look like they're thriving.
That's not to say that corals don't face other issues - pollution and disease most notably - but the situation may not be as dire as suspected.
I ran across this novel form of propulsion the other day that looks promising if it pans out.
The idea is to entangle two cesium atoms, then send one up into space. Back on earth, excite the one that remains and the one in space will do the same. In theory that could be used as an ion drive while keeping the bulk of your engine back on the ground.
Mandlebrot suggests donating 5% of the proceeds from all the online dating services to find out how to really get a date on a Saturday night.
But seriously, though there are patterns in most human endevors, it is an extraordinary complicated thing. The reason it hasn't succeeded in the past is that the chaotic factors that determine the outcome of the system are unknown and probably unknowable.
Who ever expected that a bunch of guys wearing hiking gear in Seattle would sweep through the music business in the 90's? How could you predict that scientifically? There's an interesting book called Bellweather by Connie Willis that talks about treads - it's a fun read with an element of truth about predicting future trends.
About two days ago, I shipped Demon after a year of development. It's a mod for Neverwinter Nights, the sequel to Shadowlords and Dreamcatcher. Both are in the Hall of Fame on the Vault and the Dreamcatcher series was Module of the Year. Yadda, yadda, yadda.
The closest I've come to understanding why I keep making these things is a comment made by a writer. They didn't write because they wanted to write, they write because they had it.
I make games because there are these stories inside me that keep wanting to pop out. Characters that demand being brought to life. Making the games can occasionally be fun, but the bugtesting and release is usually grueling and unpleasant.
So, I think I'll keep my day job of code wrangling and tip my hat out of respect to professional game developers. It's a tough job, putting something you've invested so much of yourself out there for the world to poke at.
It is a sad statement on human nature that when a person becomes so wealthy and powerful, they no longer get to enjoy the simpler things in peace. I suspect there are many days when he and his family wishes they could drive to Disneyland and go on the rides like everyone else. Most public places are probably off limits due to the complexity of managing security. Kidnapping is an endless concern.
I may not agree with all that Microsoft does as an entity, but I sometimes wish our world would let the man talk about his kids.
The issue wasn't that Double Click had problems, but that every site that uses them become very slow.
Until the basic routing infrastructure of the net changes, this is going to be a common issue anytime a number of big sites all require another organization to serve up their pages (e.g. Akamai).
For something I just heard of today, it sounds quite clever.
I personally would rather have seen the 80 billion that the ISS will cost put into basic science such as materials and propulsion research. Eventually there will be a strong desire to explore, but it's simply too expensive with our current level of technology.
If 80 billion was instead sunk into developing ultrastrong material for space elevators or light composites to make standard rockets more efficient, I'd think it was money well spent.
People need to focus on the long term, not just election year slogans.
Joking aside, there's some truth behind Microsoft and their versions. One of the developer's had a blog that talked about it in detail.
Essentially, version 1.0 is a best guess at what the customer wants. Version 2.0 is started even before the customer sees the 1.0 version. Finally, customer feedback is incorporated into the 3.0 version and things might actually start getting useful.
I predict I'll get laid by aliens in 2020.
Here's a good article on the technology behind Doom 3.
Essentially, it's geared towards a technology set that's already fairly well established. It relies heavily on normal mapping to produce seemingly high-polygon models when they're actually quite low-polygon. This is all done in OpenGL and not DirectX. Personally, I think it speaks highly of the ID developers that they can make an engine that looks so good on so many PCs.
Call me crazy, but BitTorrent seems to have been more widely accepted than other P2P technologies. The programmer of BitTorrent was hired by Valve recently and sites like FileRush are pretty commonly visited by the masses.
There's another article here. Though similarly vague, it does mention that they have the license for Fallout 4 and 5 as well.
The listed article seemed vague about the MMORPG issue, but this one clearly states that it is not. There's some other interesting tidbits, such as their tentative plan to use their own technology (e.g. not Morrowind's) as well as developing for a number of different platforms.
Interplay has had some really nasty financial troubles in the last year as well as coming up with a wacky idea to create a Fallout MMORPG.
It's not certain that Fallout 3 is the same as this MMORPG. In fact, I'd seriously doubt it given Bethesda Software's past games. More likely it'll be a fairly open Morrowind-style game, though that's a big guess on my part.
Finally, if Interplay does go under and the Fallout license is sold, this doesn't bode well for future plans. The next license holder may not share Bethesda Software's vision of what a Fallout game is. I think this is far from a sure thing.
I picked up a Voodoo 2 card way back when for the incredibly high price of $300 (which was a ton close to ten years ago with the money I was making). A couple years later, I picked up my second Voodoo 2 for $30.
Think of it as an inexpensive way to nearly double your video card's performance at a fairly cheap price when others are upgrading to the new version of the card that is only 40-50% faster (unlike the SLI mode which is rumored to be 75-90% faster).
The tricky part will be that you have to have a motherboard to support it, which for now will only be the ones made for high-end workstations.
A Gamespy article has a nice quote predicting their downfall: Work should be a practical place to get things done - cubicles are reasonable balance between cost, privacy, and personal space. Having meeting rooms, bathrooms, and a kitchen is also nice. The traditional approaches to work spaces are done because they work well enough.
As the expression goes, half the battle is just showing up.
Unfortunately unfocused creative brilliance doesn't really do much good. Even artists need to focus on a project before creating something worthwhile.
I'd suggest you work on applying your mind to a specific topic - take classes that challenge and interest you. Pick up a hobby that you can stick with for more than a few weeks.
Remember, if you're really smart, you'll figure out how to get along with the rest of the world better than you currently do. Be patient. It takes awhile and the adjustments never seem to end.
I live down in Eugene, but visit Portland quite often. OMSI is a great science center, with an IMAX theater and a large area for kids to play. There's a top-notch zoo and Children's museum.
It does have it's big city problems, however. Traffic can be pretty bad and I managed to get assaulted there once. Eugene has most of the big city amenities without the big city problems.
I work for a large healthcare organization, writing custom software for the needs they have. There are occasional deadlines, but the pace is much more relaxed than for a for-profit organization. The work is interesting and meaningful.
In fact, I took off before lunch today to attend my son's preschool graduation. To put it in geek terms, my current job is so good, I turned down an offer from Bioware making games for a living.
The sad reality is that there's a huge underground market for kidneys and other organs, especially overseas. While growing new teeth are a start, the hope is that many of the other commonly failing organs will be replaceable over the next few decades.
Hopefully the ability to grow new organs from scratch will outpace the development of immune suppressants. In Niven's universe, the only reason organlegging thrived was that it was possible to transplant organs without problems. Now we know that rejection is a very real issue and only the latest classes of immune suppressants are making it almost a reality today.
My solution was to put my web server and main computer in an old sauna that we since turned into a closet (I don't have many sauna/fondue parties these days). It's completely quiet, the sauna being well insulated.
I run a bunch of wires through the wall for my monitor, speakers, and such, though I'm using wireless where possible. I even went as far as creating a "control panel" in the wall for my web server. It's an LCD monitor set in a metal panel, with some buttons and LEDs for turning on the two computers.
The only reason I have to run back into the sauna is to switch CDs, which is fairly rare these days. Now I just need to replace my CRT monitor with a flat screen as it has now become the loudest piece of equipment. Well, except for typing on the keyboard. I think I have to wait for brain interfaces before I can replace that.