One core dedicated to enemy AI. One core for physics calculations One core for the game itself. One core for OS, daemons and to bring them all and in the darkness bind them
PC offers a wider range of choice. The problem is that consoles offer better bang for the buck.
You can spend $4000 and get an incredible PC capable of absolutely wonderful graphics. You can spend $200 and get something barely capable of running an average game. Or you spend $800 for an average setup that allows you to play at very nice, acceptable though not incredible level. Or you spend $400 and get a console capable of the same level as your $800 setup. PC is a pretty smooth performance-price curve. The console is a single point - but located quite a bit below that curve.
Very interesting idea (though I doubt it would be of much use in daylight, with sun shining on the screen surface...) - I just wonder what media devices (gfx cards, video players) and software/media support these devices.
For my SCADA systems exam, I was learning programming SCADA applications using a pirated version of InTouch. It costs around $10,000 for the version I used (old, single-node) in retail. It's a software for driving and controlling advanced factory machinery. Just to make things clear, I don't own a factory.
There is no way in hell I'd pay $10k just to buy a program that will allow me to learn for a single exam. Most likely I'd just use books, notes, two hours a week of real use when the SCADA lab at school is free to use. Wonderware wouldn't see a penny from me just the same as they didn't back then. But now I know the package better. I'm more likely to get a job involving it. I'm more likely to encourage implementing it - purchasing it by my employer.
or expose multiple frames per $interval (each with a different electronic shutter length) and then composite them.. however this last technique creates smear,
That's likely what could be nicely improved with the right electronics: the smear would be at worst equal to smear of the longest exposition shot.
You'd need a shot that doesn't reset current state of exposition of the sensor between readouts. Instead of: start, wait 1/120 s, stop, save, reset start, wait 1/60 s, stop, save, reset start, wait 1/30 s, stop, save, reset
but one which does: start, wait 1/120 s, save, wait 1/120 s (total 1/60 from start), save wait 1/60 s (total 1/30 from start), save stop, reset.
Still, displaying the result remains a problem. Real World is a medium of incredibly wide range of luminescences. Screen, paper, plasma TV, all have the dynamic range much smaller. You can squeeze the range of data you gathered into range of the device (and get horrible contrast), you can vary ranges of displayed areas (which creates bloom effects, looks cool, but for data processing - can't see shit, captain), extract variable info from the image (good for image processing but looks like shit for people), splice it into several images of various luminances (so why compounding it into one in the first place?) or... wait for a better display medium. Yeah, sucks.
The basic fallacy of criminalizing -any- copyright infringement is that it implies loss of profits, while way more often than not no profit is lost.
The way of thinking of RIAA and friends is: If I copy the file, I have it for free. If I didn't copy it, I would have paid for it. This obviously doesn't take into account the far more likely case: if I didn't copy it, I wouldn't ever have it - I wouldn't pay, I wouldn't buy. The likehood I'd spend $3000+ on a legit copy of AutoCAD is near zero, so implying that I cause any loss to Autodesk by drawing a plan of my garden in an illicit copy, is simply bullshit.
This case is entirely different though: the buyers were paying money for software they believed legit. The money would go to authors of the software, but instead they went to that guy. In this case the loss of profit is not potential, assumed and unlikely, but definite and a fact.
It's like a difference between charges of causing risk of life or injury and a first degree murder.
Agreed - games suffer all of the current illnesses of the movies, plus a handful of their own. The only really crappy scenes in Lord Of The Rings - the movie - were the ones inserted by Jackson. Wherever he kept to Tolkien's script, the movie was good.
That's the problem: Games could be art. And games that would be art, would likely be good games (unless you screw up the gameplay/interface part). But unfortunately: 170 pages describing cinematic moments, and 1,200 pages detailing interactive events - this is not art. This is craft, and a low craft. Industry. Production. Manufacturing.
Yeah, the "entertainment industry" is just that. Industry. Recent discussion about Episode 1 commentary was just about that - good plot well blending with the gameplay and the gameplay not breaking immersion into the plotline. Most of game plots are crafted, not created, projected, not inspired. It's bad, boring writing, broken even worse for making some "fun" gameplay elements possible. "The player may feel tired with combat by now so we introduce a physics puzzle arena here" and the player feels "oh god, another puzzle arena" instead of getting interested with how it influences or is influenced by the world events. Who, why built this nonsensical contraption, what for? The answer is one: developers, to keep the player occupied. The rebels wouldn't have time, condition and need to build this - it would take them a week to make, and you can't spend two minutes without being shot at. It's not their security device, it's a physics puzzle. Immersion broken. Or the player is to follow Mankar Camoran to the Paradise. So despite the fact that according to the game he's supposed to be your worst enemy, and should be killed at all cost, if using all your creativity you managed to smuggle your super-poison, super-dagger and all kinds of useful spells into the shrine, then you manage to stab him with the poisoned dagger before he makes it to his portal, he falls to the floor, you get a message saying he's unconscious (a quest character - cannot be killed) then he stands up and departs through the portal. The game simply cheats on you because the plotline dictates you're not supposed to kill him there. Horrible, horrible breaking of immersion. Craft, not art.
Most of essential pieces of HL1 weren't directly scripted. They depended on game physics, enemy AI and player wits. I could sneak VERY slowly with the crossbow and shoot the assassin's kneee as soon as I saw it sticking from behind a corner, without them seeing me. I could drop a grenade down some pipe then see dead headcrabs on the bottom. Lots of it vanished in HL2. I run into a building and lob a grenade into a tiny locker. 20 seconds later I get ambushed by two grunts walking out of that very locker. If I run into it, I see them materializing from thin air, ready to fight. Trigger, scripted ambush sequence, no amount of player wits can overcome the cheating engine. Back in HL1 days the triggers were new and were used relatively sparsely. They were meaningful and believable or logically predictable. HL2 definitely abuses them. They are predictable due to player knowing the "game vocabulary" - jump down without a way back means a boss fight, right? Slow-moving device means "hold your ground" style battle. A crate of rockets? Watch out for gunships! Things no longer come as a surprise.
You got it all wrong. It's all about industrial espionage. She's not there to break Mozilla. She's to spy and learn their security practices and features to implement them in Windows!
Please reword or apply parenthesis. This sentence is way too ambigious.
sanctimonially ignorant game critiques:
- critiques of sanctimonial and ignorant game - sanctimonial and ignorant critiques of game - sanctimonial critiques of ignorant game
especially considering how sanctimonial the commentary track is, and pieces of real ignorance show through. (Alyx, with her piss-poor AI, leading the player through half the game and nagging him to hurry up continuously?!)
A well-scheduled plot twist here, a stat-driven character building dungeon there... all thought about down to the moment, all heavily planned, and all relying upon a simple batch of techniques that the devleopment team picked up over the years.
When you write a book or a story, you may lay out the plot schedule on paper, plan every piece of action and interaction, apply plot devices at strategical points, then wear it nicely in words and you most likely get a horrible, boring, unreadable pulp. Or you write as you feel the action would progress, try to feel what the characters would feel at different points, make smart decisions for both sides of the conflict, set up traps then let the characters foresee and avoid them instead of pushing them into them, and you get some great reading. The golden rule of GOOD books is: Know the genre conventions, then BREAK them in original and interesting manner. Same is true about good games: make the player used to certain idea then turn everything upside down. If you just follow the old tools of the trade, the result is boring.
Stop complaining about diskspace of the commentary track. It's relatively small and definitely a feature. Instead look into the "sound" folder and replay all the sounds that are there.
Developers sure didn't care to remove development, testing and obsolete files.
There's LOTS of quite lengthy sequences including at least two versions of every single sentence said by most major characters, including something that was scrapped from the game (secret shrine with Breen's busts collection anyone?), plethora of random sentences to be said by your squad (you get a squad of 1 or 2 for a really short piece of the game), and lots of other sounds you're never going to hear. I really wonder if the situation is similar with the rest of the game data. Seems likely.
The idea is nice but it reveals some of the internals which are NOT pleasant. What do I mean? "Player gets rewarded by the view of...", "Here we get an opportunity to display some Alex's emotions, making her more believable", "we tried [some horrible, really dumb idea] but we got reports from betatesters that they didn't like it, so we changed it." "It is important to reward the player with praises from Alex"
The story is not a result of a talent. Talent makes the story feel real, be believable because it feels like "if it ever happened, it would happen just like this". But both HL2 and EP1 felt simply fake - engineered, where characters follow script and play emotions, where events happen from script, because you entered a trigger area, not because they should happen about then. When you enter the car you -know- the crane will fail. When you enter the house and see the lift down and a button by it, it's like it was labelled "call lift and zombies". Places, devices, locations, layouts that make no sense but play well as puzzles. (HL1 is guilty of this heavily too).
The underlying script - the concept - is good. But when it left hands of the writer, it wasn't implemented with the game written around it. It got in hands of game designers and they hammered it into the concept of a game, mangling it beyond recognition. Real world isn't split into physics puzzles, vistas, combat arenas and storytelling locations. The commentary track just makes it painfully obvious.
I bet no amount of white hat education will help. What we need is a nice black-hat break-in, stealing all the collected data from EA and publishing it somewhere online. Users would learn it sucks, and EA would learn privacy violation lawsuits are costly.
>To really test WGA you need to do something like get a known >pirate key or take a non-volume copy of XP and install it on more >systems than you are allowed to.
Nope. That's what you need to trigger it. To test it, you take most obscure cases of license violation plus most convoluted cases of legal use. And then as result the test shows WGA is hopelessly broken.
I'm not sure, aut AFAIR their price was... scary. I mean, like $100 more than identical Windows boxen.
Re:This is why I don't use GIMP
on
Beginning GIMP
·
· Score: 1
I want the best tool for the job that's the easiest/quickest route to completeing that job.
Most CEOs use the best text editors there are. The best text editor enter over 200wpm per minute using voice recognition, corrects your spelling and grammar, can enter a good template matching your intentions then fill it in according to general guidelines, has good legs and firm breasts and makes you coffee or gives blowjob when you ask.
Similar with gfx, if you want the job done easiest, quickest and best, hire a professional. It will work much better than you yourself playing with Photoshop or any super-duper program.
On the other hand, if you want to take costs into account, you might want to install Photoshop instead. Or thinking more about the costs, maybe GIMP?
Actually, if you buy a Dell, it goes cheaper if you buy windows (and dump it down the drain the moment you exit the shop) than if you don't. Computers with no OS preinstalled cost more than ones with Windows.
Of course if you "roll your own"...
Waiting till harddrives in shops come with windows preinstalled, cheaper than the blank ones.
$80 may be low in the US, but in countries like Poland it's still ridiculously expensive. Firms, companies etc may buy Photoshop. Home users install pirated. That's the reality. If photoshop is not essential in a firm and the boss wants to play it safe, you get GIMP instead.
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately, it's not MACH, it's ix86.
One core dedicated to enemy AI.
One core for physics calculations
One core for the game itself.
One core for OS, daemons and to bring them all and in the darkness bind them
Sure nothing for any -current- game.
The problem is people are comparing the $400 bare bones Dell PC with a $399 "extended version" XBOX 360. Dollar for dollar, consoles are better.
PC offers a wider range of choice.
The problem is that consoles offer better bang for the buck.
You can spend $4000 and get an incredible PC capable of absolutely wonderful graphics. You can spend $200 and get something barely capable of running an average game. Or you spend $800 for an average setup that allows you to play at very nice, acceptable though not incredible level. Or you spend $400 and get a console capable of the same level as your $800 setup. PC is a pretty smooth performance-price curve. The console is a single point - but located quite a bit below that curve.
Very interesting idea (though I doubt it would be of much use in daylight, with sun shining on the screen surface...) - I just wonder what media devices (gfx cards, video players) and software/media support these devices.
For my SCADA systems exam, I was learning programming SCADA applications using a pirated version of InTouch. It costs around $10,000 for the version I used (old, single-node) in retail. It's a software for driving and controlling advanced factory machinery. Just to make things clear, I don't own a factory.
There is no way in hell I'd pay $10k just to buy a program that will allow me to learn for a single exam. Most likely I'd just use books, notes, two hours a week of real use when the SCADA lab at school is free to use. Wonderware wouldn't see a penny from me just the same as they didn't back then. But now I know the package better. I'm more likely to get a job involving it. I'm more likely to encourage implementing it - purchasing it by my employer.
How did I hurt authors of InTouch?
or expose multiple frames per $interval (each with a different electronic shutter length) and then composite them.. however this last technique creates smear,
That's likely what could be nicely improved with the right electronics: the smear would be at worst equal to smear of the longest exposition shot.
You'd need a shot that doesn't reset current state of exposition of the sensor between readouts. Instead of:
start, wait 1/120 s, stop, save, reset
start, wait 1/60 s, stop, save, reset
start, wait 1/30 s, stop, save, reset
but one which does:
start, wait 1/120 s, save,
wait 1/120 s (total 1/60 from start), save
wait 1/60 s (total 1/30 from start), save
stop, reset.
Still, displaying the result remains a problem. Real World is a medium of incredibly wide range of luminescences. Screen, paper, plasma TV, all have the dynamic range much smaller. You can squeeze the range of data you gathered into range of the device (and get horrible contrast), you can vary ranges of displayed areas (which creates bloom effects, looks cool, but for data processing - can't see shit, captain), extract variable info from the image (good for image processing but looks like shit for people), splice it into several images of various luminances (so why compounding it into one in the first place?) or... wait for a better display medium. Yeah, sucks.
The basic fallacy of criminalizing -any- copyright infringement is that it implies loss of profits, while way more often than not no profit is lost.
The way of thinking of RIAA and friends is: If I copy the file, I have it for free. If I didn't copy it, I would have paid for it. This obviously doesn't take into account the far more likely case: if I didn't copy it, I wouldn't ever have it - I wouldn't pay, I wouldn't buy. The likehood I'd spend $3000+ on a legit copy of AutoCAD is near zero, so implying that I cause any loss to Autodesk by drawing a plan of my garden in an illicit copy, is simply bullshit.
This case is entirely different though: the buyers were paying money for software they believed legit. The money would go to authors of the software, but instead they went to that guy. In this case the loss of profit is not potential, assumed and unlikely, but definite and a fact.
It's like a difference between charges of causing risk of life or injury and a first degree murder.
Agreed - games suffer all of the current illnesses of the movies, plus a handful of their own. The only really crappy scenes in Lord Of The Rings - the movie - were the ones inserted by Jackson. Wherever he kept to Tolkien's script, the movie was good.
That's the problem: Games could be art. And games that would be art, would likely be good games (unless you screw up the gameplay/interface part). But unfortunately: 170 pages describing cinematic moments, and 1,200 pages detailing interactive events - this is not art. This is craft, and a low craft. Industry. Production. Manufacturing.
Yeah, the "entertainment industry" is just that. Industry. Recent discussion about Episode 1 commentary was just about that - good plot well blending with the gameplay and the gameplay not breaking immersion into the plotline. Most of game plots are crafted, not created, projected, not inspired. It's bad, boring writing, broken even worse for making some "fun" gameplay elements possible. "The player may feel tired with combat by now so we introduce a physics puzzle arena here" and the player feels "oh god, another puzzle arena" instead of getting interested with how it influences or is influenced by the world events. Who, why built this nonsensical contraption, what for? The answer is one: developers, to keep the player occupied. The rebels wouldn't have time, condition and need to build this - it would take them a week to make, and you can't spend two minutes without being shot at. It's not their security device, it's a physics puzzle. Immersion broken. Or the player is to follow Mankar Camoran to the Paradise. So despite the fact that according to the game he's supposed to be your worst enemy, and should be killed at all cost, if using all your creativity you managed to smuggle your super-poison, super-dagger and all kinds of useful spells into the shrine, then you manage to stab him with the poisoned dagger before he makes it to his portal, he falls to the floor, you get a message saying he's unconscious (a quest character - cannot be killed) then he stands up and departs through the portal. The game simply cheats on you because the plotline dictates you're not supposed to kill him there. Horrible, horrible breaking of immersion. Craft, not art.
Most of essential pieces of HL1 weren't directly scripted. They depended on game physics, enemy AI and player wits. I could sneak VERY slowly with the crossbow and shoot the assassin's kneee as soon as I saw it sticking from behind a corner, without them seeing me. I could drop a grenade down some pipe then see dead headcrabs on the bottom. Lots of it vanished in HL2. I run into a building and lob a grenade into a tiny locker. 20 seconds later I get ambushed by two grunts walking out of that very locker. If I run into it, I see them materializing from thin air, ready to fight. Trigger, scripted ambush sequence, no amount of player wits can overcome the cheating engine.
Back in HL1 days the triggers were new and were used relatively sparsely. They were meaningful and believable or logically predictable. HL2 definitely abuses them. They are predictable due to player knowing the "game vocabulary" - jump down without a way back means a boss fight, right? Slow-moving device means "hold your ground" style battle. A crate of rockets? Watch out for gunships! Things no longer come as a surprise.
Guilty as charged.
You got it all wrong. It's all about industrial espionage. She's not there to break Mozilla. She's to spy and learn their security practices and features to implement them in Windows!
Please reword or apply parenthesis. This sentence is way too ambigious.
sanctimonially ignorant game critiques:
- critiques of sanctimonial and ignorant game
- sanctimonial and ignorant critiques of game
- sanctimonial critiques of ignorant game
especially considering how sanctimonial the commentary track is, and pieces of real ignorance show through. (Alyx, with her piss-poor AI, leading the player through half the game and nagging him to hurry up continuously?!)
A well-scheduled plot twist here, a stat-driven character building dungeon there... all thought about down to the moment, all heavily planned, and all relying upon a simple batch of techniques that the devleopment team picked up over the years.
When you write a book or a story, you may lay out the plot schedule on paper, plan every piece of action and interaction, apply plot devices at strategical points, then wear it nicely in words and you most likely get a horrible, boring, unreadable pulp. Or you write as you feel the action would progress, try to feel what the characters would feel at different points, make smart decisions for both sides of the conflict, set up traps then let the characters foresee and avoid them instead of pushing them into them, and you get some great reading.
The golden rule of GOOD books is: Know the genre conventions, then BREAK them in original and interesting manner. Same is true about good games: make the player used to certain idea then turn everything upside down. If you just follow the old tools of the trade, the result is boring.
Stop complaining about diskspace of the commentary track. It's relatively small and definitely a feature. Instead look into the "sound" folder and replay all the sounds that are there.
Developers sure didn't care to remove development, testing and obsolete files.
There's LOTS of quite lengthy sequences including at least two versions of every single sentence said by most major characters, including something that was scrapped from the game (secret shrine with Breen's busts collection anyone?), plethora of random sentences to be said by your squad (you get a squad of 1 or 2 for a really short piece of the game), and lots of other sounds you're never going to hear.
I really wonder if the situation is similar with the rest of the game data. Seems likely.
The idea is nice but it reveals some of the internals which are NOT pleasant. What do I mean? "Player gets rewarded by the view of...", "Here we get an opportunity to display some Alex's emotions, making her more believable", "we tried [some horrible, really dumb idea] but we got reports from betatesters that they didn't like it, so we changed it." "It is important to reward the player with praises from Alex"
The story is not a result of a talent. Talent makes the story feel real, be believable because it feels like "if it ever happened, it would happen just like this". But both HL2 and EP1 felt simply fake - engineered, where characters follow script and play emotions, where events happen from script, because you entered a trigger area, not because they should happen about then. When you enter the car you -know- the crane will fail. When you enter the house and see the lift down and a button by it, it's like it was labelled "call lift and zombies". Places, devices, locations, layouts that make no sense but play well as puzzles. (HL1 is guilty of this heavily too).
The underlying script - the concept - is good. But when it left hands of the writer, it wasn't implemented with the game written around it. It got in hands of game designers and they hammered it into the concept of a game, mangling it beyond recognition. Real world isn't split into physics puzzles, vistas, combat arenas and storytelling locations. The commentary track just makes it painfully obvious.
Pyramid Head from Silent Hill.
Would love seeing him vs Princess Peach.
I bet no amount of white hat education will help. What we need is a nice black-hat break-in, stealing all the collected data from EA and publishing it somewhere online. Users would learn it sucks, and EA would learn privacy violation lawsuits are costly.
Wonder when they start broadcasting "live shows" from users' webcams.
>To really test WGA you need to do something like get a known
>pirate key or take a non-volume copy of XP and install it on more
>systems than you are allowed to.
Nope. That's what you need to trigger it.
To test it, you take most obscure cases of license violation plus most convoluted cases of legal use.
And then as result the test shows WGA is hopelessly broken.
I'm not sure, aut AFAIR their price was... scary. I mean, like $100 more than identical Windows boxen.
I want the best tool for the job that's the easiest/quickest route to completeing that job.
Most CEOs use the best text editors there are. The best text editor enter over 200wpm per minute using voice recognition, corrects your spelling and grammar, can enter a good template matching your intentions then fill it in according to general guidelines, has good legs and firm breasts and makes you coffee or gives blowjob when you ask.
Similar with gfx, if you want the job done easiest, quickest and best, hire a professional. It will work much better than you yourself playing with Photoshop or any super-duper program.
On the other hand, if you want to take costs into account, you might want to install Photoshop instead. Or thinking more about the costs, maybe GIMP?
Actually, if you buy a Dell, it goes cheaper if you buy windows (and dump it down the drain the moment you exit the shop) than if you don't. Computers with no OS preinstalled cost more than ones with Windows.
Of course if you "roll your own"...
Waiting till harddrives in shops come with windows preinstalled, cheaper than the blank ones.
$80 may be low in the US, but in countries like Poland it's still ridiculously expensive. Firms, companies etc may buy Photoshop. Home users install pirated. That's the reality. If photoshop is not essential in a firm and the boss wants to play it safe, you get GIMP instead.