The cheats are nice so that games can actually be sold to people like the guy who wrote this article. Come on, Final Fantasy X? Personally, I think the end was worth any boss frustration, but that's just me. But still, he didn't specify when he hit the wall. Of the few ones I can think of, it took maybe a half hour or an hour running around a save point -- not backtracking at all, literally running in circles, triggering random encounters -- to build up the stats I needed. That may sound like a long time, but this is a GOOD game that I doubt can be reasonably beaten in less than 30 hours, and you could easily spend 60 or more -- so one hour of grind isn't bad at all.
Any others, chances are I just needed a different technique -- just remembering things like how attempting to heal a zombie damages them; you can actually kill a boss with just a couple of Pheonix Downs. Or going into a fight with every single Aeon in Overdrive -- some bosses (not spoiling it) can Banish your Aeons (one-hit them), but you always get one attack, so you can simply go through your Aeons, one by one, throwing their overdrives and watching them die the next turn. If it's a boss fight, chances are you'll have a save point shortly after that anyway (which fully heals your party, including Aeons).
By the end of the game, both times I've played it, and the time my roommate played, we ended up ridiculously overpowered for the final bosses. I never bothered with Omega, but my roommate one-hit him -- BY ACCIDENT, I was kind of annoyed at not actually seeing him attack...
I mean, I could offer an argument for why hard games are good -- certainly most games need a hard difficulty level -- but seriously, he's listed a Final Fantasy game which is entirely turn-based, and probably one of the easiest even if it was real time (FF7/8/X-2 style).
I get that a gentle slope is usually much better, but ultimately it comes out about the same -- a well-designed game will have you good enough to beat the final boss by the time you encounter him (or her, or it). A poorly-designed game simply means you'll hit a "wall" and spend an hour or two trying over and over again, getting practice each time, until eventually you beat it -- the only difference is, with a good game, you spend those hours actually progressing through the story, instead of playing the same level. But it's ultimately the same thing -- practice, and you get better. If it's possible, especially if it's a required part of the game, you should be able to do it.
If anything was hard about FFX, it was the Chocobo training, which is insanely difficult and also largely luck. It's not required, thankfully, because it took probably 3 or 4 hours of trying, pretty much nonstop, in the wee hours of the morning, before one of us -- my roommate, actually -- finally managed it. That's the kind of thing that would piss me off if it was required -- nothing else in the game took even close to that long to master.
Most of the wrong things you said have already been addressed by other comments, but where'd this piece of FUD come from:
Linux continues to flounder around and failing to offer a stable and viable platform for game developers to target.
Erm... what?
If this means "stable" as in, stable API, so that developers aren't always scrambling to keep up with the distro of the month, then I really don't get it. I can pop in my ut2004 cds and run the Linux installer on the disk on a brand new Ubuntu -- or Gentoo, or Debian Etch -- and it will work -- even a 64-bit Ubuntu. In fact, with the latest patch -- actually, I'm not sure how long they've had this, but my ut2004 is native 64-bit, which is more than I can say for XP.
I mean, you could say that the kernel isn't making it easy for binary blobs, like the nvidia drivers, and you'd probably be right -- and yet, even this is a no-brainer. It's been at least a year since I had any issues whatsoever -- I wish nVidia could open up their driver source, but short of that, they seem to be absolutely on top of their Linux drivers, even 64-bit -- which is more than you can say for their Vista effort.
If by "stable", you mean "not crashing", my Linux used to crash -- when my box was overclocked. It hasn't crashed since I turned off that overclocking -- months ago. And I'm running all kinds of experimental stuff -- Gentoo, Reiser4, my own custom kernel hacks -- and Linux has been at least as stable as XP when it comes to gaming, which is to say that I haven't seen either crash in longer than I can remember.
I'm really not sure what you mean by "viable" -- if you can make a Mac port, you can make a Linux port. If you mean that there aren't enough gamers on Linux, developers can easily rectify that -- do cross-platform development (which isn't hard at all, it can be as simple as recompiling) and market your Linux port. It really isn't that hard -- see ut2004. And after all, id software may be more generous than other shops (with their GPLing of old stuff), but they aren't stupid -- from what I can tell, they basically have one guy who's in charge of the Linux port, and that's really all it takes -- and now we have Doom 3 and Quake 4 for Linux.
The only way that statement makes sense is if you've drunk the DirectX 10 kool-aid, but at the moment, I bet my Linux performs better than Vista for the games I can play on it, so no one in their right mind (who doesn't already work for Microsoft) will make a dx10-only game.
I know you can run Wine on x86_64, but I don't think Wine actually supports Win64 yet. Wake me up when it does, though -- that's one of a very small number of things that keeps me booting Windows for games.
I'm starting to find all kinds of limitations with this box, but it's still worth mentioning. Built summer before last, it's a socket 747 or somesuch -- 1.8 ghz Athlon64 (stupidly bought because I can upgrade it to 2.7, was mostly stable at 2.4, but really only rock solid at 1.8), pair of 250 gig hard drives in RAID 0, 2 gigs of DDR 400, GeForce 6600.
There's some vibration now that I'm trying to kill, but before that, it was as quiet as any water-cooled rig. Got a nice cool, quiet power supply, and the video card is passively cooled (heatsink!) despite being a nice PCI Express. Stock cooling all around, a nice big ThermalTake case with all kinds of fans -- most of them fairly large.
All in all, it's still a nice, solid gaming rig, and I could probably build another one today with similar power consumption -- I believe the power supply is only some 400w. The trick is to stick just behind the curve, in the sweet spot, where things cost half as much (I'm not making that up!) for maybe 15% less performance, and where they've figured out how to make it cooler, quieter, and more efficient.
After all, we all remember the leafblower video cards, which took up a whole PCI slot just for exhaust. The absolute bleeding edge is pretty much always going to be less efficient, and also somewhat cobbled together. The sweet spot is where it's at.
Maybe. I do know there has to be OpenGL in there somewhere, as there is a Mac version -- so no reason not to include support for OpenGL on Windows, really.
Also, there is a counterargument beyond that: In Jak & Daxter, Jak never said a word, it was always Daxter making the odd comments and Jak making facial expressions mostly along the lines of "whatever". In Jak II, Daxter is pretty much the same, but Jak does speak, and his first words are not at all a disappointment.
Yet, one big difference is that Half-Life 2 is an FPS -- first person. Your logic is fine, but I don't even make it that conscious -- the "not speaking" is rarely made an issue, and it's nice to pretend, at least for awhile, that if I were in those circumstances, I could do what Freeman did -- after all, how much of what we are is determined by circumstance? Of course, I'm out of shape and have never fired a real gun, so I'm kidding myself, but until I remind myself of that...
I guess I find it a lot easier for the main character to have a voice if they do it during a cinematic, and there's always the chance that during a cinematic, the character will do something I wouldn't -- or, for that matter, that the character will say something I wouldn't. So, it's not so much that I notice him not having a voice, it's that I don't notice him having a voice, and saying something stupid -- Duke Nukem is hilarious, but I'd never, EVER say "It's time to kick ass and chew bubble gum, and I'm all out of gum." Frankly, it's a lot easier to believe I could fire a weapon accurately -- even a "shrink ray" (and stomp on shrunken aliens) -- than to believe I'd say something so stupid.
There is another route, actually -- voice recognition. Maybe by Half-Life 3...
Half-Life 2: I'd move this much further down the list.... While it was undoubtedly fairly good in places, it lacked the atmosphere of Doom 3 and the scope of Far Cry.
Haven't played Far Cry, but Doom 3 for atmosphere? Maybe at first, but honestly, Doom 3 has the exact same atmosphere for the entire game. Whisperings, slowly going insane, hell always just around the corner... I mean, yeah, it's creepy, and yeah, the first hundred zombies jumping out of odd places in the wall scared the living shit out of me. The next five thousand were just boring.
Half-Life 2 may not have had as intense an atmosphere, but it was subtler, more pervasive, and actually changed as you progress through the game.
The one point I'll give Doom 3 (and Quake 4) is a pretty petty one -- good Linux support.
Plus, I found it kept breaking my suspension of disbelief with respect to the setting quite badly. Having a mute Gordon (the guy's supposed to be a PhD and a charismatic resistance leader for god's sake) was a particularly sloppy decision.
Have you played Half-Life?
Giving Gordon a voice may have helped you, but it would've been a much riskier move. Consider that just about any voice they gave him would've been a disappointment for anyone who played through Half-Life -- just as any face they put to Master Chief would disappoint Halo fans.
There's also the element of atmosphere it provides: If Gordon never talks, and you never leave the first-person perspective, you can go on believing that it's happening to you, not Gordon -- that you are Gordon Freeman. For a powerful example of this, go play through the beginning of Episode 1...
Being a PhD doesn't mean you have anything to say, either. And who says he's charismatic? He's a resistance leader because he's a living legend, because he can fight. If anyone's "charismatic", it's Alyx. Or maybe Breen...
Further demerits for Steam.
Anything in particular?
I always hear people complain about Steam, and I don't really get it. I mean, philosophically, yes -- it embeds IE, and it gives them too much control. But the fact that they do Steam and don't do any kind of CD-based copy protection helps a lot -- it means I don't have to hunt for the actual CD, or try to crack Steam. It means I can easily transfer games between one computer and another, even if I have a hard drive failure and lose every physical copy of the game -- I can just re-download them. For that matter, it natively supports burning a backup DVD, which last I checked, can be restored to any account that has those games.
The only things I see as actual concerns are: Your game patches whether you want it to or not; You may have difficulty playing without an Internet connection; and Valve could go out of business or deny you access to your own games. That last one doesn't bother me so much; I've certainly got more than my $50 worth out of Half-Life 2 (and Counter-Strike: Source), so if everything stops working tomorrow, I'm happy. The other two are simply vague concerns in the back of my mind -- for whatever reason, I have never hit any steam problems, whatsoever -- even when I was playing on Linux, Steam was the last thing likely to go wrong.
As for my own picks, I think we're missing some indie games -- things like Darwinia and Lugaru -- and maybe some casual games, things like the Sims, even if I don't particularly like it.
And as always, as tricky as it can be to put them on this list, I think mods deserve some mention, at least. There are only two games that I can play for 8 hours straight and not get bored. One is an MMO (Nexus TK), and one is a Half-Life (1) mod (Natural Selection).
(shooting from gameplay cell, to a "display/movie" cell...the attacking walkers while you are on top of a building).
Interesting... Not sure exactly what your complaint here is. Is it that you move from gameplay to watching the walkers attack? Lazy bastard, when I was on that building (if this is what I think it is), I grabbed a rocket launcher and took them down...
17) Unreal Tournament 2004 -- ships with a working Linux installer. My brother has found an insane number of mods for this game, and was up to some 20 gigs of space for just that game and its mods before we both migrated away from that Linux install -- me to another computer, him to a new hard drive and Windows. Surprisingly, when I installed and fully patched the Linux version last week, it has a native 64-bit binary.
15) Neverwinter Nights -- Never played the game, but it does seem to have a native Linux version, and a Portage ebuild.
09) Doom 3 and Quake 4 both have decent Linux ports. They are also the only two id games to date that have not released full source code -- and, in fact, there is at least one decent mod for Quake 3 which is completely free now that they can compile the engine themselves and distribute the mod without requiring one to buy Quake 3 first.
And some guessing -- I think these will work under Wine:
10) Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos 01) World of Warcraft
Blizzard uses Linux to run the WoW servers, and WoW is OpenGL. I imagine this isn't a recent development, so it seems likely that Warcraft III would also use OpenGL -- and most OpenGL games work out of the box, even on vanilla Wine (without Cedega). I do know Starcraft works very well under Wine, and has for years.
There are also a couple of games I imagine do not work well at all:
19) Halo: Combat Evolved -- simply because it has always been a DirectX game and a Microsoft game. Kind of a shame, really -- I hear Bungie had planned Linux and OS X ports before Microsoft bought them.
02) Half-Life 2 -- I know this one kind of sucks. Basically, fonts look bad, even on the HUD. The game itself mostly looks OK, but runs slower, and the embedded ActiveX crap mostly does not work. This is one reason I keep an XP partition around. It's amazing how clean you can keep a Windows when you only boot it a couple of times a month for a LAN party. It's also worth noting that the original Half-Life engine works well under Wine, and Steam is tolerable, but I figure I may as well stick to one copy of Steam.
So, not great... On the other hand, it is forcing me to discover all kinds of great indie games -- Lugaru, Uplink, Darwinia, Nexus TK... Also, Wine does generally run older programs better, as they really can't program entirely by-the-spec, and so both the wine hackers and wine config tweakers have to work from real programs -- which means the older a program is, the more likely it is to be figured out -- thus, I'm discovering all kinds of great games that I missed.
As for Microsoft screwing OpenGL on Vista, is that still an issue? My first impression was that ultimately, driver vendors would be able to provide good or bad OpenGL support at their own discretion -- and that it would not be a good PR move if QuakeWars plays better on XP than Vista. But really, I don't think this was ever an issue -- the PS3 will always be hard to port to, and DirectX made it easy to port to the Xbox and the 360, and people weren't nearly as concerned with Mac and Linux ports as they were with a particular dev kit, and if that kit supported the consoles people want.
As for Win2K, of course. I doubt many games require XP -- in fact, I imagine most of them work in Win98, some better there than Vista due to the whole UAC thing (and maybe OpenGL).
They use the exact same web interface as GoDaddy, once you get into managing your site, and charge about the same. I don't know about the terms...
To be honest, the only reason I went with them was the fact that you can do a manual PayPal transaction. That is, I can just send them $9 and a note saying what I want them to do with it, rather than with GoDaddy, where I'm required to sign a contract giving them unrestricted access to my PayPal account until I cancel.
What would happen if someone built a very similar program and grabbed the copyright.
First, that's not copyright, that's patent. Please keep these straight; there are VERY important differences between the kinds of "intellectual property" law.
Second, if they did, so what? There's this little thing called "prior art". Your legal claim is you produced the software -- if someone else beat you to the patent, but you already have the software, you win. If someone else beat you to actually developing the product, you lose no matter who gets the patent first.
However, if no one files for patents, there don't have to be any lawsuits -- everyone just develops the best software they can, and sells it -- or gives it away, or whatever.
Interesting about your drivers and games and all, but nothing you said indicates that anything YOU experienced proves that the original XP key won't work anymore.
True enough, but I hadn't tried. This copy of XP is my only legit copy, and I'd rather stay legit, especially when 64-bit didn't work.
You say you know people who can't (legally) go back, but not that you know anyone who is prevented in any technical way from going back anyway.
I don't suppose I asked, but she did complain about many of the same issues I had -- and she couldn't go back. I don't know if she actually tried, or just read the license.
Does it matter whether it's a legal issue (spelled out VERY clearly on the website, not in the EULA, but in BIG BOLD LETTERS) or a technical (DRM) issue?
You claimed current eReaders have no significant drawbacks compared to books.
Actually, I didn't. I jumped in kind of late in this discussion.
Needing to find a power-outlet to recharge while underway is a significant drawback compared to books.
I suppose. I've found that I frequently need a laptop for about the same amount of time, books or otherwise, so it's not a big deal to me.
Books, however, have the ability to include high-resolution full-colour pictures without increasing in size. Not all books need or benefit from this. But some do.
I've also seen some relatively long graphic novels contained in a few tens of megabytes, so one gigabyte could be sufficient. Now, e-ink may provide for closer to true book resolution, which would make the file size larger, and you're right, they aren't there yet.
However, given the choice between a Gutenberg book and a printed version of the same thing, I prefer the electronic copy.
"should fix this" doesn't help when my argument was that *CURRENT* reader-devices suck.
I haven't been paying attention, but I thought there was one on the market already? Guess not.
You know, I have this old HP Jornada 720 (handheld) with Linux and a wireless card. Anywhere there's an access point, I can use it to connect to my VPN and get my email that way. If I felt like waiting for it, I could probably even run Thunderbird.
I bet if there was really a huge demand for this, we could create something just as good, if not better. I'm not sure if it's there yet, though.
So you get two batteries. I don't know about you, but I don't sit around reading the same book for 10 hours straight.
Small storage (less than a few GB)
If you're storing books in BloatyDRM or PDF format, sure, that's a problem. If they're just text, though, shouldn't matter -- check out Gutenberg for some fairly small files, and keep in mind that English text generally compresses by about an order of magnitude without even trying.
Poor readability in brigth ligth (such as in a sunlit park)
E-Ink should fix this. (Or whatever they're calling it now.)
Proprietary one-off file-formats rather than good support for standard ones (html, pdf)
I solve these by sticking to text, and/or putting Linux on them.
Tiny screen... Miniscule resolution...
Ah, true. E-Ink may help with these, but it was never really a concern for me. Frankly, the only reason I'd want a bigger screen is to be able to read with my glasses off, which probably isn't healthy anyway.
Ok, so maybe these don't matter to you, and are all trumped by bookmarks.
Bookmarks
Searchability
Organization
Backups
I could probably think of more, but that should be enough for now. Thing is, I never lose data, but I can easily lose physical things. I've never actually lost a laptop, but I have lost books (and found them years later).
I seem to see a couple of comments around here that say that an XP->Vista doesn't invalidate the XP key. If so, this would be an improvement.
You see, you can get a free XP 64-bit upgrade for your XP Pro. I have a 64-bit processor, and I have a free (but legit!) copy of XP Pro, so at first it seemed like a win-win, but I was cautious -- I pirated it first, to test it out. Turns out that XP 64-bit broke half my games (the reason I have Windows in the first place) and half my drivers, and the other half ran better than before. I decided it wasn't worth it.
Had I not pirated, I'd have been stuck, and in fact, I know people who are in that situation. Drivers were available for XP, but not 64-bit, and it's kind of hard to know how it will work till you try it -- but once you try it, even though you can install XP 64-bit without having XP Pro already on the disk, your XP Pro key is still invalid, and you can't (legally) go back.
So, I don't really know how Vista will operate here, but I imagine it'll be similar. One thing to love about Linux: If Edgy didn't work, nobody's stopping me from reinstalling Dapper.
I use Thunderbird to access my email at work, and I'm assuming that's on an Exchange server. Sunbird can do calendar sharing, just not with Exchange (and I haven't tried with Evolution lately) -- plus, there are web-based solutions. So, the email itself is a known and solved problem, if we have decent IMAP support. The calendar/scheduling stuff may require a different infrastructure -- but keep in mind, this is a lot like having the open office suite (which took a LOT of work) -- Microsoft hasn't given us any specs, therefore we can't really do this. And we'd much rather do it in a better way anyway.
Also, what do you mean by "Push email" and "mobile operators"?
There have been various kinds of approximations... The one I remember the most was Prince of Persia: Sands of Time. There was so little water in the game that the water they did have was very, very cool -- you could walk around in it, your footsteps would send out ripples... While those ripples may have technically been a flat plane, they did properly refract what was under them.
And this was in a PS2 game. We could probably be doing much better already, if people cared that much.
There was also a game called Lugaru, which was the farthest thing from "real" fluid dynamics -- yet, slash someone with a knife, and the wound would bleed a bit (leaving a trail of blood down the character's chest). Kill them with a knife, and your knife would likely drip blood, and the corpse would lie in a growing pool of its own blood. Technically less impressive -- this game can play on pretty much anything that can play Counter-Strike (the original, I'd guess) -- but all it really takes is an attention to detail.
Kind of like -- remember how we all approximated shadows? You know, you'd have a spinning fan and a fixed light source, so you'd generate a spinning-fan-shadow texture and apply it to the wall behind the fan? Eventually, of course, we got machines powerful enough and someone clever enough that we can basically just do shadows any way we want (Doom 3, Quake 4), but until that happened, there were all kinds of cheap hacks we used to make it look as good as it could at the time.
So, this is a long way from being done in games, but depending on how much attention you pay to those kinds of details, you should be able to make a game today which can look much better with respect to water -- just look at Prince of Persia.
One final thing: It won't be applied everywhere. Just look at physics -- not every game is Red Faction, and including Havok (or ODE) doesn't automatically make your game a physics sandbox. Consider that both Half-Life 2 and Doom 3 use the same physics engine. Consider that in Doom 3, you can find an invincible 3-ring binder, which you can unload your entire arsenal of unholy weapons on, burn, explode, and chainsaw it till it's pitch-black, then wait around, and the black will fade into white, and it'll be good as new.
So, you may have a little pond, or a bit of blood, which is approximated about right, but there will be exceptions -- it won't apply to the ocean, and it won't apply to every little dust particle...
NVIDIA's drivers are amongst the lowest-quality binary-only drivers I have ever had the displeasure of experiencing.
Whose are better?
NVIDIA has a long way to go before their hardware even comes close to the stability and performance of Intel's hardware (esp. the 3D interfaces).
Does Intel provide binary blobs? Off their website, I see links to open source projects for their video drivers.
Xorg is one platform- the one used by the unixes you mention.
That's for the video. We were also talking about kernels -- certainly, changes were needed to support xorg on the three unixes...
or to force everyone to use the same platform.
Microsoft loves you.
I think they love you, for not reading:
I realize that's both unfair and unrealistic -- when a sufficiently large group of people "standardize" on an OS, they standardize on Windows.
Note: Both unfair and unrealistic. I would never force everyone onto the same platform. But sometimes I wonder if that's the only way to make things like driver development sane.
The thing you and the other poster missed was: I realize that's not practical, and that it's not a good idea even if it was. If I had to choose one platform (which would make driver standardization possible), I'd choose Linux at the moment. But let me quote myself: "that's both unfair and unrealistic."
My biggest complaint here is that the only critics of each OS were the same people who were pushing that OS. So, you really got absolutely no responses to the effect of "My Tiger can already do everything Vista does, and Leopard will be better." A few subtle comments -- "Viruses have never been successful on Linux," not "Viruses don't exist on ANY OS with a decent amount of security, and MS has never cared about security."
I guess I'm kind of disappointed that it wasn't a bit more of a flamewar^Wdebate...
ReadyBoost may also be able to use spare RAM on other networked Vista PCs in a future release.
Sounds like it could be cool, except for a few things:
First, I'm just a bit addicted to Linux's concept of "everything is a file", especially with loop devices. Were this feature implemented in Linux, we'd already support networked PCs, removable hard drives, network drives, local RAMdisks for testing, etc etc etc... What, exactly, is stopping them from having all of this already? Is it that they don't have a GUI for it?
Second, it just seems like a BAD idea. I imagine it's possible you could get a speedup over normal ethernet, but you'd really want Gigabit -- and in any case, it seems like on an even slightly larger network, it'd be a problem. And also, what about security?
I admit it could be done right, but you've got to admit that MS has a pretty bad track record there -- and users won't be helping things at all. Yeah, just borrow some RAM from my box, and watch as I slip spyware onto your box through your disk cache...
On average, a RANDOM 4K read from flash is about 10x faster than from HDD.
How often do we actually do random reads? Especially with a decently defragmented disk?
Seems to me the primary use here would be a cache for the swapfile, which actually does kind of make sense. This is also the first real feature of Vista for me -- every single other feature is either pointless eye candy or has already been implemented for years in other OSes -- or both.
According to NVIDIA, some 90-95% of their driver code is identical across all their platforms -- and they support an impressive number of platforms.
Unfortunately, I just pulled that number out of my ass, and can't find anything to back it up. But you have to figure it's got to be true, somewhat, otherwise they'd never be able to support all the OSes they do -- Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, with 32-bit and 64-bit support on Linux and (for most cards) Solaris. I dislike binary blobs as much as the next guy, especially in kernel space, but this is some impressive engineering.
It's worth mentioning that some of the other responses are absolutely right: The only way to even have a stable cross-platform driver API, at the moment, would be to either kill performance (think FUSE for cross-platform filesystems) or to force everyone to use the same platform. As much as I'd like to see everyone forced to use Linux for a kernel, I realize that's both unfair and unrealistic -- when a sufficiently large group of people "standardize" on an OS, they standardize on Windows. Just look at Korea.
This has been talked about on and off for awhile now. Basically, any kind of "thin client" can't possibly be cheaper than, say, some random Dell. Get your random Dell to boot off the network, have all storage be on the network, but use AGGRESSIVE local caching -- figure the standard-ish 40-80 gig drives for a local cache -- and it should be almost as fast as if you had the box to yourself. Local disk also means you have some swap.
We talk about "hibernating", too -- and the concept of, say, having your session stay open on the server while you switch to another thin client. But, there have been multiple specs for years now for how programs should save a session. Think about when your desktop computer hibernates -- it basically flushes all RAM out to disk, then restores from disk->RAM when you boot back up. A lot of RAM is junk, though -- imagine programs handling this automatically. Instead of saving OO.Org's entire RAM image, just tell it "we're shutting down" and have it save some basic geometry, save the open documents to a temporary file, and shut down.
This kind of thing has generally been handled by one or two things -- for instance, GNOME supports "saving your session", but so far, only Nautilus seems to pay attention.
So, that particular approach may not allow what we want now, but if apps were written with this in mind, you could "save your session" from your "diskless" machine, then switch to another box and "restore", and very quickly have exactly what you were working on back.
I think this is a lot more sustainable than a true thinclient solution for a few reasons. It may be cheaper -- you need far less bandwidth, and the "main server" can simply be a fileserver -- which also makes it very easy to backup/replicate in case you have a disk failure or something. It could certainly feel faster to the end-user -- network issues only affect files, and most of your files will be cached locally, making it as fast as a standalone workstation. You get all the admin advantages, with the additional bonus that you aren't bound to any one company's idea of a "thin client" -- just grab any computer with roughly the same architecture, plug it in, and go.
And there's the laptop issue. Chances are, a solution like this would be much easier to integrate with someone's laptop. In fact, you could even let it think it's "netbooting" if the filesystem used supported full disconnected operation.
Only one problem: Most of the software just isn't there yet. Apps don't know about saving sessions. There's also been almost no improvement in the filesystems for quite some time now: InterMezzo is pretty much dead, and Lustre costs money. So, probably your best bet is Coda or AFS, and each have plenty of their own limitations.
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The cheats are nice so that games can actually be sold to people like the guy who wrote this article. Come on, Final Fantasy X? Personally, I think the end was worth any boss frustration, but that's just me. But still, he didn't specify when he hit the wall. Of the few ones I can think of, it took maybe a half hour or an hour running around a save point -- not backtracking at all, literally running in circles, triggering random encounters -- to build up the stats I needed. That may sound like a long time, but this is a GOOD game that I doubt can be reasonably beaten in less than 30 hours, and you could easily spend 60 or more -- so one hour of grind isn't bad at all.
Any others, chances are I just needed a different technique -- just remembering things like how attempting to heal a zombie damages them; you can actually kill a boss with just a couple of Pheonix Downs. Or going into a fight with every single Aeon in Overdrive -- some bosses (not spoiling it) can Banish your Aeons (one-hit them), but you always get one attack, so you can simply go through your Aeons, one by one, throwing their overdrives and watching them die the next turn. If it's a boss fight, chances are you'll have a save point shortly after that anyway (which fully heals your party, including Aeons).
By the end of the game, both times I've played it, and the time my roommate played, we ended up ridiculously overpowered for the final bosses. I never bothered with Omega, but my roommate one-hit him -- BY ACCIDENT, I was kind of annoyed at not actually seeing him attack...
I mean, I could offer an argument for why hard games are good -- certainly most games need a hard difficulty level -- but seriously, he's listed a Final Fantasy game which is entirely turn-based, and probably one of the easiest even if it was real time (FF7/8/X-2 style).
I get that a gentle slope is usually much better, but ultimately it comes out about the same -- a well-designed game will have you good enough to beat the final boss by the time you encounter him (or her, or it). A poorly-designed game simply means you'll hit a "wall" and spend an hour or two trying over and over again, getting practice each time, until eventually you beat it -- the only difference is, with a good game, you spend those hours actually progressing through the story, instead of playing the same level. But it's ultimately the same thing -- practice, and you get better. If it's possible, especially if it's a required part of the game, you should be able to do it.
If anything was hard about FFX, it was the Chocobo training, which is insanely difficult and also largely luck. It's not required, thankfully, because it took probably 3 or 4 hours of trying, pretty much nonstop, in the wee hours of the morning, before one of us -- my roommate, actually -- finally managed it. That's the kind of thing that would piss me off if it was required -- nothing else in the game took even close to that long to master.
Most of the wrong things you said have already been addressed by other comments, but where'd this piece of FUD come from:
Erm... what?
If this means "stable" as in, stable API, so that developers aren't always scrambling to keep up with the distro of the month, then I really don't get it. I can pop in my ut2004 cds and run the Linux installer on the disk on a brand new Ubuntu -- or Gentoo, or Debian Etch -- and it will work -- even a 64-bit Ubuntu. In fact, with the latest patch -- actually, I'm not sure how long they've had this, but my ut2004 is native 64-bit, which is more than I can say for XP.
I mean, you could say that the kernel isn't making it easy for binary blobs, like the nvidia drivers, and you'd probably be right -- and yet, even this is a no-brainer. It's been at least a year since I had any issues whatsoever -- I wish nVidia could open up their driver source, but short of that, they seem to be absolutely on top of their Linux drivers, even 64-bit -- which is more than you can say for their Vista effort.
If by "stable", you mean "not crashing", my Linux used to crash -- when my box was overclocked. It hasn't crashed since I turned off that overclocking -- months ago. And I'm running all kinds of experimental stuff -- Gentoo, Reiser4, my own custom kernel hacks -- and Linux has been at least as stable as XP when it comes to gaming, which is to say that I haven't seen either crash in longer than I can remember.
I'm really not sure what you mean by "viable" -- if you can make a Mac port, you can make a Linux port. If you mean that there aren't enough gamers on Linux, developers can easily rectify that -- do cross-platform development (which isn't hard at all, it can be as simple as recompiling) and market your Linux port. It really isn't that hard -- see ut2004. And after all, id software may be more generous than other shops (with their GPLing of old stuff), but they aren't stupid -- from what I can tell, they basically have one guy who's in charge of the Linux port, and that's really all it takes -- and now we have Doom 3 and Quake 4 for Linux.
The only way that statement makes sense is if you've drunk the DirectX 10 kool-aid, but at the moment, I bet my Linux performs better than Vista for the games I can play on it, so no one in their right mind (who doesn't already work for Microsoft) will make a dx10-only game.
I know you can run Wine on x86_64, but I don't think Wine actually supports Win64 yet. Wake me up when it does, though -- that's one of a very small number of things that keeps me booting Windows for games.
I'm starting to find all kinds of limitations with this box, but it's still worth mentioning. Built summer before last, it's a socket 747 or somesuch -- 1.8 ghz Athlon64 (stupidly bought because I can upgrade it to 2.7, was mostly stable at 2.4, but really only rock solid at 1.8), pair of 250 gig hard drives in RAID 0, 2 gigs of DDR 400, GeForce 6600.
There's some vibration now that I'm trying to kill, but before that, it was as quiet as any water-cooled rig. Got a nice cool, quiet power supply, and the video card is passively cooled (heatsink!) despite being a nice PCI Express. Stock cooling all around, a nice big ThermalTake case with all kinds of fans -- most of them fairly large.
All in all, it's still a nice, solid gaming rig, and I could probably build another one today with similar power consumption -- I believe the power supply is only some 400w. The trick is to stick just behind the curve, in the sweet spot, where things cost half as much (I'm not making that up!) for maybe 15% less performance, and where they've figured out how to make it cooler, quieter, and more efficient.
After all, we all remember the leafblower video cards, which took up a whole PCI slot just for exhaust. The absolute bleeding edge is pretty much always going to be less efficient, and also somewhat cobbled together. The sweet spot is where it's at.
Maybe. I do know there has to be OpenGL in there somewhere, as there is a Mac version -- so no reason not to include support for OpenGL on Windows, really.
I love your signature...
Also, there is a counterargument beyond that: In Jak & Daxter, Jak never said a word, it was always Daxter making the odd comments and Jak making facial expressions mostly along the lines of "whatever". In Jak II, Daxter is pretty much the same, but Jak does speak, and his first words are not at all a disappointment.
Yet, one big difference is that Half-Life 2 is an FPS -- first person. Your logic is fine, but I don't even make it that conscious -- the "not speaking" is rarely made an issue, and it's nice to pretend, at least for awhile, that if I were in those circumstances, I could do what Freeman did -- after all, how much of what we are is determined by circumstance? Of course, I'm out of shape and have never fired a real gun, so I'm kidding myself, but until I remind myself of that...
I guess I find it a lot easier for the main character to have a voice if they do it during a cinematic, and there's always the chance that during a cinematic, the character will do something I wouldn't -- or, for that matter, that the character will say something I wouldn't. So, it's not so much that I notice him not having a voice, it's that I don't notice him having a voice, and saying something stupid -- Duke Nukem is hilarious, but I'd never, EVER say "It's time to kick ass and chew bubble gum, and I'm all out of gum." Frankly, it's a lot easier to believe I could fire a weapon accurately -- even a "shrink ray" (and stomp on shrunken aliens) -- than to believe I'd say something so stupid.
There is another route, actually -- voice recognition. Maybe by Half-Life 3...
I agree with what you said about Doom 3, but:
Haven't played Far Cry, but Doom 3 for atmosphere? Maybe at first, but honestly, Doom 3 has the exact same atmosphere for the entire game. Whisperings, slowly going insane, hell always just around the corner... I mean, yeah, it's creepy, and yeah, the first hundred zombies jumping out of odd places in the wall scared the living shit out of me. The next five thousand were just boring.
Half-Life 2 may not have had as intense an atmosphere, but it was subtler, more pervasive, and actually changed as you progress through the game.
The one point I'll give Doom 3 (and Quake 4) is a pretty petty one -- good Linux support.
Have you played Half-Life?
Giving Gordon a voice may have helped you, but it would've been a much riskier move. Consider that just about any voice they gave him would've been a disappointment for anyone who played through Half-Life -- just as any face they put to Master Chief would disappoint Halo fans.
There's also the element of atmosphere it provides: If Gordon never talks, and you never leave the first-person perspective, you can go on believing that it's happening to you, not Gordon -- that you are Gordon Freeman. For a powerful example of this, go play through the beginning of Episode 1...
Being a PhD doesn't mean you have anything to say, either. And who says he's charismatic? He's a resistance leader because he's a living legend, because he can fight. If anyone's "charismatic", it's Alyx. Or maybe Breen...
Anything in particular?
I always hear people complain about Steam, and I don't really get it. I mean, philosophically, yes -- it embeds IE, and it gives them too much control. But the fact that they do Steam and don't do any kind of CD-based copy protection helps a lot -- it means I don't have to hunt for the actual CD, or try to crack Steam. It means I can easily transfer games between one computer and another, even if I have a hard drive failure and lose every physical copy of the game -- I can just re-download them. For that matter, it natively supports burning a backup DVD, which last I checked, can be restored to any account that has those games.
The only things I see as actual concerns are: Your game patches whether you want it to or not; You may have difficulty playing without an Internet connection; and Valve could go out of business or deny you access to your own games. That last one doesn't bother me so much; I've certainly got more than my $50 worth out of Half-Life 2 (and Counter-Strike: Source), so if everything stops working tomorrow, I'm happy. The other two are simply vague concerns in the back of my mind -- for whatever reason, I have never hit any steam problems, whatsoever -- even when I was playing on Linux, Steam was the last thing likely to go wrong.
As for my own picks, I think we're missing some indie games -- things like Darwinia and Lugaru -- and maybe some casual games, things like the Sims, even if I don't particularly like it.
And as always, as tricky as it can be to put them on this list, I think mods deserve some mention, at least. There are only two games that I can play for 8 hours straight and not get bored. One is an MMO (Nexus TK), and one is a Half-Life (1) mod (Natural Selection).
Interesting... Not sure exactly what your complaint here is. Is it that you move from gameplay to watching the walkers attack? Lazy bastard, when I was on that building (if this is what I think it is), I grabbed a rocket launcher and took them down...
Also: Episode 1 is awesome.
These are the ones I know:
17) Unreal Tournament 2004 -- ships with a working Linux installer. My brother has found an insane number of mods for this game, and was up to some 20 gigs of space for just that game and its mods before we both migrated away from that Linux install -- me to another computer, him to a new hard drive and Windows. Surprisingly, when I installed and fully patched the Linux version last week, it has a native 64-bit binary.
15) Neverwinter Nights -- Never played the game, but it does seem to have a native Linux version, and a Portage ebuild.
09) Doom 3 and Quake 4 both have decent Linux ports. They are also the only two id games to date that have not released full source code -- and, in fact, there is at least one decent mod for Quake 3 which is completely free now that they can compile the engine themselves and distribute the mod without requiring one to buy Quake 3 first.
And some guessing -- I think these will work under Wine:
10) Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos
01) World of Warcraft
Blizzard uses Linux to run the WoW servers, and WoW is OpenGL. I imagine this isn't a recent development, so it seems likely that Warcraft III would also use OpenGL -- and most OpenGL games work out of the box, even on vanilla Wine (without Cedega). I do know Starcraft works very well under Wine, and has for years.
There are also a couple of games I imagine do not work well at all:
19) Halo: Combat Evolved -- simply because it has always been a DirectX game and a Microsoft game. Kind of a shame, really -- I hear Bungie had planned Linux and OS X ports before Microsoft bought them.
02) Half-Life 2 -- I know this one kind of sucks. Basically, fonts look bad, even on the HUD. The game itself mostly looks OK, but runs slower, and the embedded ActiveX crap mostly does not work. This is one reason I keep an XP partition around. It's amazing how clean you can keep a Windows when you only boot it a couple of times a month for a LAN party. It's also worth noting that the original Half-Life engine works well under Wine, and Steam is tolerable, but I figure I may as well stick to one copy of Steam.
So, not great... On the other hand, it is forcing me to discover all kinds of great indie games -- Lugaru, Uplink, Darwinia, Nexus TK... Also, Wine does generally run older programs better, as they really can't program entirely by-the-spec, and so both the wine hackers and wine config tweakers have to work from real programs -- which means the older a program is, the more likely it is to be figured out -- thus, I'm discovering all kinds of great games that I missed.
As for Microsoft screwing OpenGL on Vista, is that still an issue? My first impression was that ultimately, driver vendors would be able to provide good or bad OpenGL support at their own discretion -- and that it would not be a good PR move if QuakeWars plays better on XP than Vista. But really, I don't think this was ever an issue -- the PS3 will always be hard to port to, and DirectX made it easy to port to the Xbox and the 360, and people weren't nearly as concerned with Mac and Linux ports as they were with a particular dev kit, and if that kit supported the consoles people want.
As for Win2K, of course. I doubt many games require XP -- in fact, I imagine most of them work in Win98, some better there than Vista due to the whole UAC thing (and maybe OpenGL).
They use the exact same web interface as GoDaddy, once you get into managing your site, and charge about the same. I don't know about the terms...
To be honest, the only reason I went with them was the fact that you can do a manual PayPal transaction. That is, I can just send them $9 and a note saying what I want them to do with it, rather than with GoDaddy, where I'm required to sign a contract giving them unrestricted access to my PayPal account until I cancel.
First, that's not copyright, that's patent. Please keep these straight; there are VERY important differences between the kinds of "intellectual property" law.
Second, if they did, so what? There's this little thing called "prior art". Your legal claim is you produced the software -- if someone else beat you to the patent, but you already have the software, you win. If someone else beat you to actually developing the product, you lose no matter who gets the patent first.
However, if no one files for patents, there don't have to be any lawsuits -- everyone just develops the best software they can, and sells it -- or gives it away, or whatever.
True enough, but I hadn't tried. This copy of XP is my only legit copy, and I'd rather stay legit, especially when 64-bit didn't work.
I don't suppose I asked, but she did complain about many of the same issues I had -- and she couldn't go back. I don't know if she actually tried, or just read the license.
Does it matter whether it's a legal issue (spelled out VERY clearly on the website, not in the EULA, but in BIG BOLD LETTERS) or a technical (DRM) issue?
Actually, I didn't. I jumped in kind of late in this discussion.
I suppose. I've found that I frequently need a laptop for about the same amount of time, books or otherwise, so it's not a big deal to me.
I've also seen some relatively long graphic novels contained in a few tens of megabytes, so one gigabyte could be sufficient. Now, e-ink may provide for closer to true book resolution, which would make the file size larger, and you're right, they aren't there yet.
However, given the choice between a Gutenberg book and a printed version of the same thing, I prefer the electronic copy.
I haven't been paying attention, but I thought there was one on the market already? Guess not.
Or you could run Ubuntu Server and ask it for a LAMP-out-of-the-box.
Hmm, that's interesting...
You know, I have this old HP Jornada 720 (handheld) with Linux and a wireless card. Anywhere there's an access point, I can use it to connect to my VPN and get my email that way. If I felt like waiting for it, I could probably even run Thunderbird.
I bet if there was really a huge demand for this, we could create something just as good, if not better. I'm not sure if it's there yet, though.
So you get two batteries. I don't know about you, but I don't sit around reading the same book for 10 hours straight.
If you're storing books in BloatyDRM or PDF format, sure, that's a problem. If they're just text, though, shouldn't matter -- check out Gutenberg for some fairly small files, and keep in mind that English text generally compresses by about an order of magnitude without even trying.
E-Ink should fix this. (Or whatever they're calling it now.)
I solve these by sticking to text, and/or putting Linux on them.
Ah, true. E-Ink may help with these, but it was never really a concern for me. Frankly, the only reason I'd want a bigger screen is to be able to read with my glasses off, which probably isn't healthy anyway.
I could probably think of more, but that should be enough for now. Thing is, I never lose data, but I can easily lose physical things. I've never actually lost a laptop, but I have lost books (and found them years later).
I seem to see a couple of comments around here that say that an XP->Vista doesn't invalidate the XP key. If so, this would be an improvement.
You see, you can get a free XP 64-bit upgrade for your XP Pro. I have a 64-bit processor, and I have a free (but legit!) copy of XP Pro, so at first it seemed like a win-win, but I was cautious -- I pirated it first, to test it out. Turns out that XP 64-bit broke half my games (the reason I have Windows in the first place) and half my drivers, and the other half ran better than before. I decided it wasn't worth it.
Had I not pirated, I'd have been stuck, and in fact, I know people who are in that situation. Drivers were available for XP, but not 64-bit, and it's kind of hard to know how it will work till you try it -- but once you try it, even though you can install XP 64-bit without having XP Pro already on the disk, your XP Pro key is still invalid, and you can't (legally) go back.
So, I don't really know how Vista will operate here, but I imagine it'll be similar. One thing to love about Linux: If Edgy didn't work, nobody's stopping me from reinstalling Dapper.
I use Thunderbird to access my email at work, and I'm assuming that's on an Exchange server. Sunbird can do calendar sharing, just not with Exchange (and I haven't tried with Evolution lately) -- plus, there are web-based solutions. So, the email itself is a known and solved problem, if we have decent IMAP support. The calendar/scheduling stuff may require a different infrastructure -- but keep in mind, this is a lot like having the open office suite (which took a LOT of work) -- Microsoft hasn't given us any specs, therefore we can't really do this. And we'd much rather do it in a better way anyway.
Also, what do you mean by "Push email" and "mobile operators"?
There have been various kinds of approximations... The one I remember the most was Prince of Persia: Sands of Time. There was so little water in the game that the water they did have was very, very cool -- you could walk around in it, your footsteps would send out ripples... While those ripples may have technically been a flat plane, they did properly refract what was under them.
And this was in a PS2 game. We could probably be doing much better already, if people cared that much.
There was also a game called Lugaru, which was the farthest thing from "real" fluid dynamics -- yet, slash someone with a knife, and the wound would bleed a bit (leaving a trail of blood down the character's chest). Kill them with a knife, and your knife would likely drip blood, and the corpse would lie in a growing pool of its own blood. Technically less impressive -- this game can play on pretty much anything that can play Counter-Strike (the original, I'd guess) -- but all it really takes is an attention to detail.
Kind of like -- remember how we all approximated shadows? You know, you'd have a spinning fan and a fixed light source, so you'd generate a spinning-fan-shadow texture and apply it to the wall behind the fan? Eventually, of course, we got machines powerful enough and someone clever enough that we can basically just do shadows any way we want (Doom 3, Quake 4), but until that happened, there were all kinds of cheap hacks we used to make it look as good as it could at the time.
So, this is a long way from being done in games, but depending on how much attention you pay to those kinds of details, you should be able to make a game today which can look much better with respect to water -- just look at Prince of Persia.
One final thing: It won't be applied everywhere. Just look at physics -- not every game is Red Faction, and including Havok (or ODE) doesn't automatically make your game a physics sandbox. Consider that both Half-Life 2 and Doom 3 use the same physics engine. Consider that in Doom 3, you can find an invincible 3-ring binder, which you can unload your entire arsenal of unholy weapons on, burn, explode, and chainsaw it till it's pitch-black, then wait around, and the black will fade into white, and it'll be good as new.
So, you may have a little pond, or a bit of blood, which is approximated about right, but there will be exceptions -- it won't apply to the ocean, and it won't apply to every little dust particle...
Whose are better?
Does Intel provide binary blobs? Off their website, I see links to open source projects for their video drivers.
That's for the video. We were also talking about kernels -- certainly, changes were needed to support xorg on the three unixes...
I think they love you, for not reading:
Note: Both unfair and unrealistic. I would never force everyone onto the same platform. But sometimes I wonder if that's the only way to make things like driver development sane.
The thing you and the other poster missed was: I realize that's not practical, and that it's not a good idea even if it was. If I had to choose one platform (which would make driver standardization possible), I'd choose Linux at the moment. But let me quote myself: "that's both unfair and unrealistic."
My biggest complaint here is that the only critics of each OS were the same people who were pushing that OS. So, you really got absolutely no responses to the effect of "My Tiger can already do everything Vista does, and Leopard will be better." A few subtle comments -- "Viruses have never been successful on Linux," not "Viruses don't exist on ANY OS with a decent amount of security, and MS has never cared about security."
I guess I'm kind of disappointed that it wasn't a bit more of a flamewar^Wdebate...
Sounds like it could be cool, except for a few things:
First, I'm just a bit addicted to Linux's concept of "everything is a file", especially with loop devices. Were this feature implemented in Linux, we'd already support networked PCs, removable hard drives, network drives, local RAMdisks for testing, etc etc etc... What, exactly, is stopping them from having all of this already? Is it that they don't have a GUI for it?
Second, it just seems like a BAD idea. I imagine it's possible you could get a speedup over normal ethernet, but you'd really want Gigabit -- and in any case, it seems like on an even slightly larger network, it'd be a problem. And also, what about security?
I admit it could be done right, but you've got to admit that MS has a pretty bad track record there -- and users won't be helping things at all. Yeah, just borrow some RAM from my box, and watch as I slip spyware onto your box through your disk cache...
How often do we actually do random reads? Especially with a decently defragmented disk?
Seems to me the primary use here would be a cache for the swapfile, which actually does kind of make sense. This is also the first real feature of Vista for me -- every single other feature is either pointless eye candy or has already been implemented for years in other OSes -- or both.
According to NVIDIA, some 90-95% of their driver code is identical across all their platforms -- and they support an impressive number of platforms.
Unfortunately, I just pulled that number out of my ass, and can't find anything to back it up. But you have to figure it's got to be true, somewhat, otherwise they'd never be able to support all the OSes they do -- Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, with 32-bit and 64-bit support on Linux and (for most cards) Solaris. I dislike binary blobs as much as the next guy, especially in kernel space, but this is some impressive engineering.
It's worth mentioning that some of the other responses are absolutely right: The only way to even have a stable cross-platform driver API, at the moment, would be to either kill performance (think FUSE for cross-platform filesystems) or to force everyone to use the same platform. As much as I'd like to see everyone forced to use Linux for a kernel, I realize that's both unfair and unrealistic -- when a sufficiently large group of people "standardize" on an OS, they standardize on Windows. Just look at Korea.
This has been talked about on and off for awhile now. Basically, any kind of "thin client" can't possibly be cheaper than, say, some random Dell. Get your random Dell to boot off the network, have all storage be on the network, but use AGGRESSIVE local caching -- figure the standard-ish 40-80 gig drives for a local cache -- and it should be almost as fast as if you had the box to yourself. Local disk also means you have some swap.
We talk about "hibernating", too -- and the concept of, say, having your session stay open on the server while you switch to another thin client. But, there have been multiple specs for years now for how programs should save a session. Think about when your desktop computer hibernates -- it basically flushes all RAM out to disk, then restores from disk->RAM when you boot back up. A lot of RAM is junk, though -- imagine programs handling this automatically. Instead of saving OO.Org's entire RAM image, just tell it "we're shutting down" and have it save some basic geometry, save the open documents to a temporary file, and shut down.
This kind of thing has generally been handled by one or two things -- for instance, GNOME supports "saving your session", but so far, only Nautilus seems to pay attention.
So, that particular approach may not allow what we want now, but if apps were written with this in mind, you could "save your session" from your "diskless" machine, then switch to another box and "restore", and very quickly have exactly what you were working on back.
I think this is a lot more sustainable than a true thinclient solution for a few reasons. It may be cheaper -- you need far less bandwidth, and the "main server" can simply be a fileserver -- which also makes it very easy to backup/replicate in case you have a disk failure or something. It could certainly feel faster to the end-user -- network issues only affect files, and most of your files will be cached locally, making it as fast as a standalone workstation. You get all the admin advantages, with the additional bonus that you aren't bound to any one company's idea of a "thin client" -- just grab any computer with roughly the same architecture, plug it in, and go.
And there's the laptop issue. Chances are, a solution like this would be much easier to integrate with someone's laptop. In fact, you could even let it think it's "netbooting" if the filesystem used supported full disconnected operation.
Only one problem: Most of the software just isn't there yet. Apps don't know about saving sessions. There's also been almost no improvement in the filesystems for quite some time now: InterMezzo is pretty much dead, and Lustre costs money. So, probably your best bet is Coda or AFS, and each have plenty of their own limitations.