I remember that Carmack released some early rocket simulator programs of his a few years ago. I can't remember where they are and whether the source code was included, though:/
You PAY Microsoft to fix bugs. That's part of the cost you pay for a license.
Where in my Windows XP license can I find the clause that says my payment to Microsoft obligates them to fix bugs I encounter? Regardless of payment, no one's obligated to fix anything. Bugfixing is simply a voluntary activitity that happens to be necessary to keep the userbase, both for the Mozilla Foundation and Microsoft.
In binary: 11111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111 11111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111 11111111111111111111111111111111111111...
Your comment violated the "postercomment" compression filter. Try less whitespace and/or less repetition. Comment aborted.
You are correct. An asteroid 10 kilometers in diameter, a density of 3000 kg/m^3 and a velocity of 20000 m/s would have a kinetic energy of roughly 3 * 10^23 joules. The largest nuclear bomb ever detonated, the Tsar Bomba, had a yield of 50 megatons, which is equal to 2 * 10^17 joules. In other words, one impact will release (roughly) as much energy as 1500000 such bombs. And that's the biggest bomb ever detonated, compared to an asteroid that is only moderately huge. The world's nuclear arsenal is vanishingly small in comparison.
Part of the sheer speed of the game engine was due to a coding concept of Carmack's called raycasting - a technique in which the PC draws only the graphics seen on screen, rather than the whole world, leading to much-improved performance. A truly revolutionary idea.
Unless they're referring to Wolfenstein 3D, which uses raycasting, this is wrong. Doom doesn't use raycasting, it renders by recursively walking a precalculated binary space partition tree
Simplified (I won't provide a detailed explanation because I don't know it), the BSP tree is, as the name implies, a binary tree that partitions space. The level is partitioned recursively so that the root of the tree is the entire map, each node divides the parent node in two parts, and the leafs are convex subsectors which don't need to be divided further.
Determining what to render is then done by walking the tree recursively, starting from the root. The clever thing here is the occlusion: if the bounding box of a node is outside the field of view, it can be ditched, along with all of its children.
A node can also be ignored, along with its children, if its bounding box is fully occluded by nodes that have already been drawn. Since the child node closest to the camera is drawn first at each branch, close objects are generally drawn before far-away ones, efficiently allowing things out-of-sight to be occluded.
BSP rendering is not only fast but also elegant in its simple algorithmic setup. It has the disadvantage, however, that the tree has to be precalculated. This means walls can't move during the game, as the BSP tree would have to be recalculated continuously. Doom's BSP is two-dimensional, though, so it is still possible for floors and ceilings to move up and down.
Wolfenstein is able to do raycasting efficiently because all walls are aligned to a perpendicular grid; the same technique wouldn't work as well with the arbitrary geometry Doom allows, at least it wasn't possible with 1993's hardware.
And for the record, neither raycasting nor BSP were Carmack's revolutionary ideas, though he might have been the first to use BSP in a game - I'm not sure.
The age of the universe is 13.7 (+/- 0.2) billion years, as established by WMAP a year(?) ago. It is perfectly possible for the universe to have expanded faster than the speed of light since the very spacetime might have been expanding; only particle motion "within" it is constrained by the speed of light. Sort of like having a speed limit for the cars on a road while moving the road itself faster than this speed limit.
The sad thing is that Michael Moore has to shoulder what ought to be the main task of TV and other media in any democracy: ruthlessly scrutinizing and exposing the government.
Python's quicksort has also been shown to be faster than C's bubblesort
You got that comparison wrong; mergesort is algorithmically faster than quicksort. Mergesort operates in O(n log(n)) time for any input whereas quicksort generally operates in O(n log(n)) but jumps to O(n^2) in the worst case. Quicksort is the most widely used sort algorithm because it uses less overhead which makes it faster in practice.
* Fast - IronPython-0.2 is 1.4x faster than Python-2.3 on the standard pystone benchmark.
I don't know about pystone in particular, but Psyco (a dynamic compiler module that essentially replaces the Python interpreter's inner loop at runtime) tends to make code run much faster than that and can speed up algorithmic code tenfold or more.
There's a project underway to do that, with silicon atoms. There's information on it here: http://www.npl.co.uk/mass/avogadro.html
Defining the kilogram as a fixed number of atoms is of course possible, the problem is counting the atoms... you need a huge number of them to get decent precision.
The second is defined as "the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the cesium-133 atom."
The kilogram is the only SI base unit that has not yet been defined in terms of a natural constant (speed of light, radioactivity, etc).
~800MHz processor, 256MB RAM, GeForce1 are as far as I know the minimum requirements. That practically means 320x240 without many visual effects, however, so I wouldn't try playing it with that. I'd personally go for something like a 2GHz CPU and a GeForce 4, but slightly less will probably provide an enjoyable experience as well.
For me, the SNES generation of music is the best by far. Final Fantasy 6, Super Mario World, Super Metroid, A Link to the Past, just for a few games...
An even better piece of buzzwords, though fabricated, from the TUNES FAQ:
A proven 32-bit cutting-edge state-of-the-art industrial-strength Y2K-compliant zero-administration plug-and-play industry-standard Java-enabled internet-ready multimedia professional personal-computer Operating System that is even newer and faster yet compatible, with a user-friendly object-oriented 3D graphical user interface, amazing inter-application communication and plug-in capability, an enhanced filesystem, full integration into Enterprise networks, an exclusive way to deploy distributed components, seamless network sharing of printers and files.
A work of art, except that it doesn't have "XML" in it somewhere.
Slashdot Mirror
Easily stopped by preventing an account from being accessed by more than a few IPs in a limited time.
June 15 didn't come from id Software, it was something Amazon pulled out of their ass. August 1 isn't official, either.
I remember that Carmack released some early rocket simulator programs of his a few years ago. I can't remember where they are and whether the source code was included, though :/
You PAY Microsoft to fix bugs. That's part of the cost you pay for a license.
Where in my Windows XP license can I find the clause that says my payment to Microsoft obligates them to fix bugs I encounter? Regardless of payment, no one's obligated to fix anything. Bugfixing is simply a voluntary activitity that happens to be necessary to keep the userbase, both for the Mozilla Foundation and Microsoft.
In binary: 11111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111 11111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111 11111111111111111111111111111111111111...
:/
Your comment violated the "postercomment" compression filter. Try less whitespace and/or less repetition. Comment aborted.
Sorry
Do not contact with body for 30 minutes after purchase.
How do you drink coffee without having it contact your body?
You are correct. An asteroid 10 kilometers in diameter, a density of 3000 kg/m^3 and a velocity of 20000 m/s would have a kinetic energy of roughly 3 * 10^23 joules. The largest nuclear bomb ever detonated, the Tsar Bomba, had a yield of 50 megatons, which is equal to 2 * 10^17 joules. In other words, one impact will release (roughly) as much energy as 1500000 such bombs. And that's the biggest bomb ever detonated, compared to an asteroid that is only moderately huge. The world's nuclear arsenal is vanishingly small in comparison.
Unless they're referring to Wolfenstein 3D, which uses raycasting, this is wrong. Doom doesn't use raycasting, it renders by recursively walking a precalculated binary space partition tree
Simplified (I won't provide a detailed explanation because I don't know it), the BSP tree is, as the name implies, a binary tree that partitions space. The level is partitioned recursively so that the root of the tree is the entire map, each node divides the parent node in two parts, and the leafs are convex subsectors which don't need to be divided further.
Determining what to render is then done by walking the tree recursively, starting from the root. The clever thing here is the occlusion: if the bounding box of a node is outside the field of view, it can be ditched, along with all of its children.
A node can also be ignored, along with its children, if its bounding box is fully occluded by nodes that have already been drawn. Since the child node closest to the camera is drawn first at each branch, close objects are generally drawn before far-away ones, efficiently allowing things out-of-sight to be occluded.
BSP rendering is not only fast but also elegant in its simple algorithmic setup. It has the disadvantage, however, that the tree has to be precalculated. This means walls can't move during the game, as the BSP tree would have to be recalculated continuously. Doom's BSP is two-dimensional, though, so it is still possible for floors and ceilings to move up and down.
Wolfenstein is able to do raycasting efficiently because all walls are aligned to a perpendicular grid; the same technique wouldn't work as well with the arbitrary geometry Doom allows, at least it wasn't possible with 1993's hardware.
And for the record, neither raycasting nor BSP were Carmack's revolutionary ideas, though he might have been the first to use BSP in a game - I'm not sure.
The age of the universe is 13.7 (+/- 0.2) billion years, as established by WMAP a year(?) ago. It is perfectly possible for the universe to have expanded faster than the speed of light since the very spacetime might have been expanding; only particle motion "within" it is constrained by the speed of light. Sort of like having a speed limit for the cars on a road while moving the road itself faster than this speed limit.
You think Cube 2 would stand a chance, then?
The sad thing is that Michael Moore has to shoulder what ought to be the main task of TV and other media in any democracy: ruthlessly scrutinizing and exposing the government.
Well, I've encountered the term "algorithmic speed" myself as referring to complexity, but I guess it might be inaccurate.
Python's quicksort has also been shown to be faster than C's bubblesort
You got that comparison wrong; mergesort is algorithmically faster than quicksort. Mergesort operates in O(n log(n)) time for any input whereas quicksort generally operates in O(n log(n)) but jumps to O(n^2) in the worst case. Quicksort is the most widely used sort algorithm because it uses less overhead which makes it faster in practice.
* Fast - IronPython-0.2 is 1.4x faster than Python-2.3 on the standard pystone benchmark.
I don't know about pystone in particular, but Psyco (a dynamic compiler module that essentially replaces the Python interpreter's inner loop at runtime) tends to make code run much faster than that and can speed up algorithmic code tenfold or more.
When running with Psyco, quicksort written in Python is actually faster than Python's built-in C mergesort!
There's a project underway to do that, with silicon atoms. There's information on it here: http://www.npl.co.uk/mass/avogadro.html
Defining the kilogram as a fixed number of atoms is of course possible, the problem is counting the atoms... you need a huge number of them to get decent precision.
The second is defined as "the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the cesium-133 atom."
The kilogram is the only SI base unit that has not yet been defined in terms of a natural constant (speed of light, radioactivity, etc).
~800MHz processor, 256MB RAM, GeForce1 are as far as I know the minimum requirements. That practically means 320x240 without many visual effects, however, so I wouldn't try playing it with that. I'd personally go for something like a 2GHz CPU and a GeForce 4, but slightly less will probably provide an enjoyable experience as well.
Of course now he's doing all the music and sound design for Doom III
Nope. He quit.
The minimum requirements for Doom 3 are, essentially:
* 1 GHz CPU
* 256 MB RAM
* GeForce 1 or equivalent
In other words, a medium-range (or even low-range, depending on definition) computer today. Just to set things straight.
the ex -executive branch of Enron, the CEO of SCO, Hitler, Stalin, Amelia Marcos, the list goes on
Hitler really doesn't deserve being listed next to McBride. Don't be such a troll.
For me, the SNES generation of music is the best by far. Final Fantasy 6, Super Mario World, Super Metroid, A Link to the Past, just for a few games...
By the way, here's an interesting essay I found a while back: Video game music: not just kid stuff
From the title, I thought this was going to be a deep mathematical or philosophical piece that I would have to give a lot of thought to.
;)
Then you might want to check out the axiom of choice instead, if you haven't already
Indeed. You need to account for friction, though. Wikipedia article on escape velocity.
So, write a Java interpreter in it. Problem solved.
An even better piece of buzzwords, though fabricated, from the TUNES FAQ:
A proven 32-bit cutting-edge state-of-the-art industrial-strength Y2K-compliant zero-administration plug-and-play industry-standard Java-enabled internet-ready multimedia professional personal-computer Operating System that is even newer and faster yet compatible, with a user-friendly object-oriented 3D graphical user interface, amazing inter-application communication and plug-in capability, an enhanced filesystem, full integration into Enterprise networks, an exclusive way to deploy distributed components, seamless network sharing of printers and files.
A work of art, except that it doesn't have "XML" in it somewhere.