Pay attention, son. His point was that this post is essentially an advertisement for Postal2, which Slashdot subscribers are not supposed to see.
Sadly, Slashdot is not getting any advertiser's fee for this one. Someone, just remove this from the front page. This game is not worthy of any news whatsoeverg, and it really makes me sick to think some fucknut is going to go out and buy it because it was on the Slashdot front page.
They think they're being controversial or something, but they're actually just being really stupid and immature. This game reeks of 13-year-old humor. This game has no artistic, comical, or technical value whatsoever. I like to support Linux games on general principle, but I just can't do that for this game.
I strongly agree with this. Blender is actually a fantastic piece of software, and is doubly cool because it's Free. But its user interface is really one of the most horrific things I've ever seen.
I can make a statement like this because first impressions mean everything with user interfaces. One of the major points of a GUI is to be reasonably intuitive.
The first time I sat down at Blender, I had no clue what it was all about and couldn't figure out how to do anything with it. But that was a long time ago, and I didn't really know much of anything about graphics yet at the time.
Skip ahead a couple years... I learn a decent amount about graphics.
I sit down in front of Realsoft3D on Linux, and while I can't yet produce beautiful scenes or complex models, within about 20 minutes of working with it I can use most of the basic modelling features. My main issues with Realsoft3D were that there were some general bugs in the GUI. The Windows version was great. (The Linux version was a beta release, so I didn't hold anything against Realsoft, Oy)
Later I sit down in front of Maya 5 on Linux, and I find that its user interface is fantastic. Again, within a short amount of time I am modelling some stuff in Maya. It will take time to master it and become at all good with it, just as with any fairly complicated technical software.
So then I figure it's time to take a look at Blender again. I still can't figure out crap with it, because its user interface is just THAT BAD. I could do some websearches, I could find some tutorials. But I've got Realsoft3D and Maya, and I'd just rather not waste any more time on Blender.
What would be amazing is if they would split Blender into frontend and backend units, and those who are accustomed to the current UI could continue using that frontend. But then some interested parties from GNOME and KDE camps could come along and write some beautiful user interfaces that are more intuitive. This would be a Very Good Thing.
Now let's get some real-time raytracing
on
Blender Adds Raytracing
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· Score: 3, Informative
Someone recently posted on NeoEngine's forum a link to a development, both software and hardware, towards Real-time raytracing. It's not yet a reality, but think about where it may be in only three years or so.
Of course, people also already have photon mapping working on the most recent generations of NVIDIA and ATI hardware offerings, and I think I recall someone from NVIDIA saying at some point that they expected this to be able to work at interactive framerates sometime during the NV4x cycle of GPUs.
Raytracing is *the* elegant solution. Rasterisers use smoke and mirrors to achieve the same effects. Often those tricks are not flawless -- for example, you often see a smoke or explosion texture intersecting with nearby walls, creating an ugly edge. This is not the kind of thing I would want to see in a production movie, but in a game, it's not so rough.
Keep in mind that all the Pixar movies use rasterization techniques, not raytracing or radiosity. The reason you see those problems you stated above has nothing to do with raytracing vs rasterization (because they're essentially geometric problems, and raytracers use geometry in the same way that OpenGL and other rasterizers do), it's because games are real-time, and thus all possibilities are not accounted for. In a movie, the artists have the ability to check every frame for such artifacts, but they don't have that luxery in game development.
I think it's pretty clear that right now, both offline global illumination renderers (raytracing and radiosity) and real-time rasterizers have their places in the current market.
There is a large, annoying watermark. And as far as I know, you cannot export your files in the standard Maya file format, which prevents you from sending the file to a friend who has the full version of Maya to let him render for you without watermark. And I'm fairly certain that you can't write Maya plugins for the PLE version either, although I'm not 100% certain of that. If you could, Maya would be a perfect tool for creating content for Free Software and Open Source video games.
Re:What happened to Robert Jordan?
on
A Game of Thrones
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· Score: 1
You should really read George R R Martin. You'll love it in a way that you never loved Robert Jordan. At least, that is how I was. Jordan's books are predictable, and they're very adolescent it seems. Martin's books are very raw and nasty at times. Nice little girls dreaming of chivalry and stuff, only to learn the truth of the world to their great disappointment.
Thanks for this link, and thanks for the information. I'm a big fan of Martin and this series after reading the first three and eagerly waiting for the fourth book. I was sitting here wonderng, "Where did these guys here that there are going to be six books?" and stuff. It's great to find out that there are supposed to be six or seven books to the series, and that he actually has a goal to everything. I've been getting really saddened and bored by the way the Wheel of Time has been turning out recently.
We don't need widget toolkits to wrap an existing layer. This is one of the major problems with X these days. We have GTK, Qt, and numerous smaller widget systems. For anything like picoGUI or any other new system to really come along and try to be useful, it needs to either implement its own widget system and provide a common application developer interface for everything, or use an existing system. The latter is probably not going to work without heavy redesign, because systems like GNOME and KDE are essentially built upon X.
So realistically, an X replacement needs to try to be what GNOME or KDE are trying to be, not what X currently is.
I have a 1ghz with a GeForce2 and it works just fine.
Still, if what you say is correct then they should simply license out the PC development to another company, like Gearbox. They are developing the PC version of Halo now. Instead they're just cutting out a huge market.
I'm pissed that GTA:VC is only being released on PS2 and not on PC. Historically, GTA games have always been released on PC. It is the platform the original GTA was written for. When GTA3 came out on PS2 first, Rockstar assured everyone that it would be released on PC as well, because they said something like "GTA belongs on PC". Now only one game later and they're specifically making it only for PS2, with no future plans to support PC. Word around the campfire is that Sony paid them off to release it only for PS2. This sounds very expensive on Sony's part, because I seem to recall that PC sales of GTA3 were higher than PS2 sales. I love GTA, but I will not buy GTA:VC and contribute towards Rockstar's newly acquired hypocritical attitude. They should be aware that they're alienating many of their big fans by dumping PC support.
Please don't tell me to just buy a PS2. Personally, I think console game machines are all shitty, but that's a different discussion altogether, and we could have a whole Slashdot article about why game consoles suck ass.
Slashdot Mirror
Pay attention, son. His point was that this post is essentially an advertisement for Postal2, which Slashdot subscribers are not supposed to see. Sadly, Slashdot is not getting any advertiser's fee for this one. Someone, just remove this from the front page. This game is not worthy of any news whatsoeverg, and it really makes me sick to think some fucknut is going to go out and buy it because it was on the Slashdot front page.
They think they're being controversial or something, but they're actually just being really stupid and immature. This game reeks of 13-year-old humor. This game has no artistic, comical, or technical value whatsoever. I like to support Linux games on general principle, but I just can't do that for this game.
I strongly agree with this. Blender is actually a fantastic piece of software, and is doubly cool because it's Free. But its user interface is really one of the most horrific things I've ever seen.
I can make a statement like this because first impressions mean everything with user interfaces. One of the major points of a GUI is to be reasonably intuitive.
The first time I sat down at Blender, I had no clue what it was all about and couldn't figure out how to do anything with it. But that was a long time ago, and I didn't really know much of anything about graphics yet at the time.
Skip ahead a couple years... I learn a decent amount about graphics.
I sit down in front of Realsoft3D on Linux, and while I can't yet produce beautiful scenes or complex models, within about 20 minutes of working with it I can use most of the basic modelling features. My main issues with Realsoft3D were that there were some general bugs in the GUI. The Windows version was great. (The Linux version was a beta release, so I didn't hold anything against Realsoft, Oy)
Later I sit down in front of Maya 5 on Linux, and I find that its user interface is fantastic. Again, within a short amount of time I am modelling some stuff in Maya. It will take time to master it and become at all good with it, just as with any fairly complicated technical software.
So then I figure it's time to take a look at Blender again. I still can't figure out crap with it, because its user interface is just THAT BAD. I could do some websearches, I could find some tutorials. But I've got Realsoft3D and Maya, and I'd just rather not waste any more time on Blender.
What would be amazing is if they would split Blender into frontend and backend units, and those who are accustomed to the current UI could continue using that frontend. But then some interested parties from GNOME and KDE camps could come along and write some beautiful user interfaces that are more intuitive. This would be a Very Good Thing.
Of course, people also already have photon mapping working on the most recent generations of NVIDIA and ATI hardware offerings, and I think I recall someone from NVIDIA saying at some point that they expected this to be able to work at interactive framerates sometime during the NV4x cycle of GPUs.
Keep in mind that all the Pixar movies use rasterization techniques, not raytracing or radiosity. The reason you see those problems you stated above has nothing to do with raytracing vs rasterization (because they're essentially geometric problems, and raytracers use geometry in the same way that OpenGL and other rasterizers do), it's because games are real-time, and thus all possibilities are not accounted for. In a movie, the artists have the ability to check every frame for such artifacts, but they don't have that luxery in game development.
I think it's pretty clear that right now, both offline global illumination renderers (raytracing and radiosity) and real-time rasterizers have their places in the current market.
There is a large, annoying watermark. And as far as I know, you cannot export your files in the standard Maya file format, which prevents you from sending the file to a friend who has the full version of Maya to let him render for you without watermark. And I'm fairly certain that you can't write Maya plugins for the PLE version either, although I'm not 100% certain of that. If you could, Maya would be a perfect tool for creating content for Free Software and Open Source video games.
You should really read George R R Martin. You'll love it in a way that you never loved Robert Jordan. At least, that is how I was. Jordan's books are predictable, and they're very adolescent it seems. Martin's books are very raw and nasty at times. Nice little girls dreaming of chivalry and stuff, only to learn the truth of the world to their great disappointment.
Thanks for this link, and thanks for the information. I'm a big fan of Martin and this series after reading the first three and eagerly waiting for the fourth book. I was sitting here wonderng, "Where did these guys here that there are going to be six books?" and stuff. It's great to find out that there are supposed to be six or seven books to the series, and that he actually has a goal to everything. I've been getting really saddened and bored by the way the Wheel of Time has been turning out recently.
We don't need widget toolkits to wrap an existing layer. This is one of the major problems with X these days. We have GTK, Qt, and numerous smaller widget systems. For anything like picoGUI or any other new system to really come along and try to be useful, it needs to either implement its own widget system and provide a common application developer interface for everything, or use an existing system. The latter is probably not going to work without heavy redesign, because systems like GNOME and KDE are essentially built upon X.
So realistically, an X replacement needs to try to be what GNOME or KDE are trying to be, not what X currently is.
(And killer OpenGL performance wouldn't hurt either!)
I have a 1ghz with a GeForce2 and it works just fine.
Still, if what you say is correct then they should simply license out the PC development to another company, like Gearbox. They are developing the PC version of Halo now. Instead they're just cutting out a huge market.
I'm pissed that GTA:VC is only being released on PS2 and not on PC. Historically, GTA games have always been released on PC. It is the platform the original GTA was written for. When GTA3 came out on PS2 first, Rockstar assured everyone that it would be released on PC as well, because they said something like "GTA belongs on PC". Now only one game later and they're specifically making it only for PS2, with no future plans to support PC. Word around the campfire is that Sony paid them off to release it only for PS2. This sounds very expensive on Sony's part, because I seem to recall that PC sales of GTA3 were higher than PS2 sales. I love GTA, but I will not buy GTA:VC and contribute towards Rockstar's newly acquired hypocritical attitude. They should be aware that they're alienating many of their big fans by dumping PC support.
Please don't tell me to just buy a PS2. Personally, I think console game machines are all shitty, but that's a different discussion altogether, and we could have a whole Slashdot article about why game consoles suck ass.