If online, legal distribution of media (i.e., movies, video games, et cetera) ever catches on in a big way this "Wal-Mart Effect" will be become increasingly less relevant. With millions of people still accustomed to traditional forms of commerce, however, I suppose Wal-Mart doesn't have to worry just yet.
Sony Pictures Home Entertainment (SPHE) (with MGM Home Entertainment) has announced 20 initial titles, including The Fifth Element, Bram Stoker's Dracula, Desperado, For a Few Dollars More, The Guns of Navarone, Hitch, House of Flying Daggers, A Knight's Tale, Kung Fu Hustle, The Last Waltz, Legends of the Fall, Resident Evil Apocalypse, RoboCop, Sense and Sensibility, Stealth, Species, SWAT and XXX. Black Hawk Down and The Bridge on the River Kwai will also be available on 50 GB, dual-layer Blu-ray Discs Summer 2006.
At Blu-ray Disc launch, Paramount Pictures Home Entertainment will release Four Brothers, Sahara, Aeon Flux, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, The Italian Job, Tomb Raider, U2: Rattle and Hum, Sleepy Hollow, We Were Soldiers and The Manchurian Candidate. Paramount will continue its roll out of Blu-ray titles throughout 2006 and beyond, including the highly anticipated release of Mission: Impossible: III alongside Mission: Impossible and Mission: Impossible 2. These titles will also be available for HD DVD, the format competing with Blu-ray, which the studio supports as well.
...
Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment's initial titles include Fantastic Four, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Behind Enemy Lines, Kiss of the Dragon and Ice Age along with others that will bring Fox's total number of first wave releases to 20 titles.
Liongate will add to the mix 10 titles, including Lord of War, The Punisher, The Devil's Rejects, Saw, T2: Judgment Day, Reservoir Dogs, Total Recall, Dune and Rambo: First Blood. The line-up will also include the upcoming feature film See No Evil.
The article is misleading; the effect of HDR is accomplished by manipulating colour values within a 16-bit or 32-bit domain to yield perceived changes to local contrast. The colour values are assigned into an 8-bit range for display but this is not accomplished via linear mapping/scaling. I wrote a short article about HDR, from a developer's perspective, over at http://www.hinjang.com/gfx/gfx08.html.
>> If Cell is so almighty, why does Sony uses NVidia GPU instead of using more Cells for graphic prosessing?
the "best" hardware in the world is next to useless if you don't have the software to fully exploit the silicon. nVidia will provide much more than just a bunch of engineers to (co)design the GPU. nVidia is also providing the whole development platform that will be available to the anyone developing games for the PS3.
Upon graduation in early 2000, my career path steered me away from everything remotely associated with the project. As the years went on I really wanted to revisit my thesis at the Masters level and do things properly. The undergrad thesis was more of a hack really but we did learn, from a hands-on approach, how to tackle some network communication issues which I'm sure online games of 2005 already have addressed.
Our heartbeat was fixed at 20Hz (i.e., twenty times a second, a host would essentially broadcast "hi, i'm okay" to every other node in the cluster). Every host would be fully aware of the health status of everyone else in the network at all times. If a node dropped out of the cluster for whatever reason a randomly chosen online host would say "hey, someone is not around anymore, let me take over the load". This would happen automatically and seemlessly. The integrity of the game world is maintained and both players and all observers (ideally) wouldn't notice anything wrong.
Along with the heartbeat we only broadcast two other pieces of information: 1) the displacement vector of the local paddle, and 2) the displacement vector of the ball after it struck a surface. With these six floating point values, each host in the node would independently do the rendering and trajectory predictions. The network traffic was rather light because we only had to communicate "where is the ball" at the very moment it made physical contact with something.
These predictive calculations in a game like Pong are very simple but we realised, in the general case, the worldview on a given host may become out-of-sync with reality. To counteract this "drifting", regardles of why or by whom, the host that was responsible for that part of the world where the sphere last struck a surface would broadcast a "snapshot" of what really is happening in the game world. Recipients of this snapshot would have their own worldview refreshed. The frequency at which these snapshots would be sent out was configurable but I think we set it at once every second or so. Do realise in the game of Pong there's only three dynamic entities (the two paddles and the ball) so there's wasn't too much drifting going on. We could easily predict the path of the ball because our arena was a fixed-sized cube without any funky gravity/friction anomolies. The only potential source of drifting was if a player was moving his/her paddle in an erratic fashion constantly.
My undergrad thesis with a colleague of mine, back in 1999, was essentially a very, very simple realisation of persistent worlds. We created a three-dimensional version of Pong where all activity in one-half of the arena (in our case it was a cube) was handled by one machine. The other half was, obviously, processed on the second machine. The communication between hosts only consisted of periodic heartbeats and the movement deltas of the paddles. Rendering, I/O, physics and the predictive calculations were all done locally (i.e., the machine on which the person was controlling his/her paddle). When we took one machine offline, the user on the still-active machine was notified but was permitted to simply bounce the sphere against the interior of the cube until he/she got bored.
Our game was written in C using Mesa (a 3D graphics library with an API which is very similar to that of OpenGL). Our development machines were IBM boxes running RedHat Linux 5.x. We got the rendering code all working on Solaris machines too. For networking we used UDP and referred to the Stevens book alot.
The ultimate goal of our humble project was to split our arena into octants. Once all eight (8) machines were online we would remove N < 8 machines from the cluster and see how the remaining machines handled the loss of nodes. Because the network is no longer receiving heartbeats from a given machine, another machine would take responsibility and inherit all the process duties thereafter. Ideally, this transfer of duties is totally transparent to all who are watching and/or playing the game.
What drove our desire investigate persistent worlds back in 1999 was my interest in Quake 2 CTF and deathmatch. To hop from one server to the next the user had to explicity exit the server and reconnect to another. I would have preferred if I could seemlessly "walk through a doorway in the game world" and find myself in a different environment. In the background, of course, all network traffic came from a totally different host running a Quake 2 CTF / deathmatch server.
Slashdot Mirror
If online, legal distribution of media (i.e., movies, video games, et cetera) ever catches on in a big way this "Wal-Mart Effect" will be become increasingly less relevant. With millions of people still accustomed to traditional forms of commerce, however, I suppose Wal-Mart doesn't have to worry just yet.
Sony Pictures Home Entertainment (SPHE) (with MGM Home Entertainment) has announced 20 initial titles, including The Fifth Element, Bram Stoker's Dracula, Desperado, For a Few Dollars More, The Guns of Navarone, Hitch, House of Flying Daggers, A Knight's Tale, Kung Fu Hustle, The Last Waltz, Legends of the Fall, Resident Evil Apocalypse, RoboCop, Sense and Sensibility, Stealth, Species, SWAT and XXX. Black Hawk Down and The Bridge on the River Kwai will also be available on 50 GB, dual-layer Blu-ray Discs Summer 2006.
At Blu-ray Disc launch, Paramount Pictures Home Entertainment will release Four Brothers, Sahara, Aeon Flux, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, The Italian Job, Tomb Raider, U2: Rattle and Hum, Sleepy Hollow, We Were Soldiers and The Manchurian Candidate. Paramount will continue its roll out of Blu-ray titles throughout 2006 and beyond, including the highly anticipated release of Mission: Impossible: III alongside Mission: Impossible and Mission: Impossible 2. These titles will also be available for HD DVD, the format competing with Blu-ray, which the studio supports as well.
Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment's initial titles include Fantastic Four, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Behind Enemy Lines, Kiss of the Dragon and Ice Age along with others that will bring Fox's total number of first wave releases to 20 titles.
Liongate will add to the mix 10 titles, including Lord of War, The Punisher, The Devil's Rejects, Saw, T2: Judgment Day, Reservoir Dogs, Total Recall, Dune and Rambo: First Blood. The line-up will also include the upcoming feature film See No Evil.
The article is misleading; the effect of HDR is accomplished by manipulating colour values within a 16-bit or 32-bit domain to yield perceived changes to local contrast. The colour values are assigned into an 8-bit range for display but this is not accomplished via linear mapping/scaling. I wrote a short article about HDR, from a developer's perspective, over at http://www.hinjang.com/gfx/gfx08.html.
>> If Cell is so almighty, why does Sony uses NVidia GPU instead of using more Cells for graphic prosessing?
the "best" hardware in the world is next to useless if you don't have the software to fully exploit the silicon. nVidia will provide much more than just a bunch of engineers to (co)design the GPU. nVidia is also providing the whole development platform that will be available to the anyone developing games for the PS3.
Upon graduation in early 2000, my career path steered me away from everything remotely associated with the project. As the years went on I really wanted to revisit my thesis at the Masters level and do things properly. The undergrad thesis was more of a hack really but we did learn, from a hands-on approach, how to tackle some network communication issues which I'm sure online games of 2005 already have addressed.
Our heartbeat was fixed at 20Hz (i.e., twenty times a second, a host would essentially broadcast "hi, i'm okay" to every other node in the cluster). Every host would be fully aware of the health status of everyone else in the network at all times. If a node dropped out of the cluster for whatever reason a randomly chosen online host would say "hey, someone is not around anymore, let me take over the load". This would happen automatically and seemlessly. The integrity of the game world is maintained and both players and all observers (ideally) wouldn't notice anything wrong.
Along with the heartbeat we only broadcast two other pieces of information: 1) the displacement vector of the local paddle, and 2) the displacement vector of the ball after it struck a surface. With these six floating point values, each host in the node would independently do the rendering and trajectory predictions. The network traffic was rather light because we only had to communicate "where is the ball" at the very moment it made physical contact with something.
These predictive calculations in a game like Pong are very simple but we realised, in the general case, the worldview on a given host may become out-of-sync with reality. To counteract this "drifting", regardles of why or by whom, the host that was responsible for that part of the world where the sphere last struck a surface would broadcast a "snapshot" of what really is happening in the game world. Recipients of this snapshot would have their own worldview refreshed. The frequency at which these snapshots would be sent out was configurable but I think we set it at once every second or so. Do realise in the game of Pong there's only three dynamic entities (the two paddles and the ball) so there's wasn't too much drifting going on. We could easily predict the path of the ball because our arena was a fixed-sized cube without any funky gravity/friction anomolies. The only potential source of drifting was if a player was moving his/her paddle in an erratic fashion constantly.
My undergrad thesis with a colleague of mine, back in 1999, was essentially a very, very simple realisation of persistent worlds. We created a three-dimensional version of Pong where all activity in one-half of the arena (in our case it was a cube) was handled by one machine. The other half was, obviously, processed on the second machine. The communication between hosts only consisted of periodic heartbeats and the movement deltas of the paddles. Rendering, I/O, physics and the predictive calculations were all done locally (i.e., the machine on which the person was controlling his/her paddle). When we took one machine offline, the user on the still-active machine was notified but was permitted to simply bounce the sphere against the interior of the cube until he/she got bored.
Our game was written in C using Mesa (a 3D graphics library with an API which is very similar to that of OpenGL). Our development machines were IBM boxes running RedHat Linux 5.x. We got the rendering code all working on Solaris machines too. For networking we used UDP and referred to the Stevens book alot.
The ultimate goal of our humble project was to split our arena into octants. Once all eight (8) machines were online we would remove N < 8 machines from the cluster and see how the remaining machines handled the loss of nodes. Because the network is no longer receiving heartbeats from a given machine, another machine would take responsibility and inherit all the process duties thereafter. Ideally, this transfer of duties is totally transparent to all who are watching and/or playing the game.
What drove our desire investigate persistent worlds back in 1999 was my interest in Quake 2 CTF and deathmatch. To hop from one server to the next the user had to explicity exit the server and reconnect to another. I would have preferred if I could seemlessly "walk through a doorway in the game world" and find myself in a different environment. In the background, of course, all network traffic came from a totally different host running a Quake 2 CTF / deathmatch server.
include a wget type mirror tools (plugin?)
for Mozilla 1.x, i think 'Down Them All' might be what you are looking for -- although it's an extension and not a plugin.