"Here comes the "back in my day" part. I remember sitting in the computer lab in college in '93 or so, and seeing guys literally jump backwards and rip the headphones off their heads while playing Doom. I did it myself a time or two. That seems pretty immersive"
Yeah, I also remember back in the days, in 1895 exactly, when the Lumiere brothers showed the first movie ever made - a footage of a train pulling into a train station. Viewers were so shocked that they fled the theater. That's immersion.
If only current filmmakers had the same talent...
The problem with a totally free service is that there is no accountability. In other words, when there is a fee (even small), it makes it way harder for griefers and cheaters to hide behind anonymity.
A great feature of XBox Live is that user profile is unique accross all the games and hard to alter. Things turned sour on XBox Live when cheaters started using free 1 month trials to create disposable temporary accounts (and pretty much ruin Halo2 MP for everyone else).
I doubt that since, just like the consoles, the PC are turning to multicore designs to boost performance.
Developing good multithreaded/parallel code on a closed system like console may be hard, but doing the same thing on a open platform is even harder - your code would have to support any type of multicore PC architecture (tons of possible variation) and traditional CPUs as well.
And I can tell you that you don't understand the crucial difference between consoles and a PC of equivalent power:
Consoles are closed platforms, allowing for heavy code optimization.
E.g., try running DOOM3 on a 4 year old, $150 PC.
Actually, for the Final Fantasy movie, they took great care in making the skin very realistic (with defects,...). Aki's hand Aki's face Dr Sid
The problem was stiffness in the facial expressions.
Exactly, Asia writes for cheap the expensive software we buy in the US. And they build their own entire IT infrastructure on free software and new incompatible standards (see all that wireless stuff in China), so they won't even be a viable market for the last few standing US enterprises.
I heard indian engineers have a tough time finding a job in India. So many engineering schools opened in the last decade that the market is already flooded and the competition very intense.
I'm actually trying to implement a game that does just that.
For a fully destructible environment, you have to:
- detect contacts between thousands of objects. Most of the classic sorting structures like BSP are optimized for static world only.
- handle those contacts:
either impacts - easy to solve
either resting contacts - hard to solve
E.g it's easy to model a thousand pieces flying up in the air, the hard part is to have those pieces come to rest realistically on the ground as a big stack.
- when you have impact, figure if and how objects break. That's relatively easy.
- when you have resting contact, objects can still break due to static load. That's very hard to do in real time.
E.g., It's easy to model a bullet piercing a wall. But it's difficult to model a shelve that collapses because you've put a weight on it.
"Mercenaries" uses a mix of semi-realistic environment destruction (some buildings break into a few predefined pieces that fall realistically and come to rest on the ground) and fake destruction (some buildings break down using a realistic animation, but no physics is involved, very much like in MechAssault-LW).
Heh, I did read your comment twice. But since you quoted games that do use havok (HL2, PsyOps) I thought your "yes it does" meant that Halo2 does use Havok. I thought the rest (about the dev knowing what they code) was some twisted third degree sarcasm:P
some reviews mention halo2 has its own physics engine, some mention havok.
Again, go to www.havok.com (check http://www.havok.com/company/careers.php to see how much fun those guys seem to have), and show me where you see a reference to Halo2...
yeah I was surprised too, I'm pretty sure Halo2 (like DOOM3) use their own physics implementation. I checked the Havok website and nowhere do they mention Halo2.
"He believes in an open source approach to the task of programming life, modeled explicitly on the open source approach to programming computers, long popular at MIT."
How long before companies start getting patents for specific DNA sequences?
It seems to me that an *all* free software world would kind of hinder progress or at least prevent competition based on software (maybe that's the whole idea!).
Let's say company A is using a "free" CAD program to design ultra light chairs (the only CAD available since, in a perfect free world, all non-free softwares have disappeared) and thinks of a new way to improve it to attain a production increase and gain an advantage over its competition, company B (Note that the modification could just be fixing a complex and obscure bug).
Imagine that company A doesn't have the expertise to implement the software modification so it pays a freelance developer to modify the software under GPL (*). Now, what would prevent the developer from freely distributing the modification he was paid to make (since the original software was under GPL)... which would eventually end up in the hands of company B. So the situation is that company B is getting the improvement for free but company A had to pay for it. Company A would have been better off not modifying the software in the first place. With this scenario there isn't much drive for investment in software improvement and creativity.
What's wrong with this scenario? I'm sure I must be missing something within GPL. I also know RMS considers custom sofware as different from non-free software but I fail to see the difference. Aren't all the users of any software customers? If not, how do you make the difference - are users of an internet browser customers? Users of a spreadsheet program? Users of a mathematical suite? Wouldn't all free software eventually become custom software?
(*) I also assume most professional softwares can't be realistically created and delivered for free - development of product is long, difficult and never over (maintenance).
It's a well known fact that before video games, TV, Rock&Roll, Movies, and books were invented, people never did anything stupid and the world was crimeless.
It's all the fault of Gutenberg, the Lumiere brothers, the Beatles, Walter Cronkite and Rockstar Games!
Actually, a change in the earth's shape/composition can alter its orbital trajectory around the sun.
That's because of tidal effects: planets are soft and deform due to the gravitational forces they exert on eachother. Those plastic deformations result in friction, i.e. the gravitational energy is being converted into heat and orbits are modified.
For example, the distance between the moon and the earth is slowly decreasing (in a distant future we will no longer observe solar eclipses!), and a similar effect exists between the sun and the earth.
So a big change in the earth's tectonic plates could in theory affect tidal effects, hence the earth's orbit around the sun (but the effect is probably tiny).
A change in the earth's inner composition could also modify its magnetic field, but I don't think that would affect its orbit around the sun.
Actually, a change in the earth's shape/composition can alter its orbital trajectory around the sun.
That's because of tidal effects: planets are soft and deform due to the gravitational forces they exert on eachother. Those plastic deformations result in friction, i.e. the gravitational energy is being converted into heat and orbits are modified.
For example, the distance between the moon and the earth is slowly decreasing (in a distant future we will no longer observe solar eclipses!), and a similar effect exists between the sun and the earth.
So a big change in the earth's tectonic plates could in theory affect tidal effects, hence the earth's orbit around the sun (but the effect is probably tiny).
A change in the earth's inner composition could also modify its magnetic field, but I don't think that would affect its orbit around the sun.
Ah yeah, Do you even watch american media? The first page of the NYTimes for the last few days has been about the disaster. And guess what's the top headline on cnn.com, abcnews.com, msnbc.com...
Console advantages: - price ($100 to $300) - comfy to play in couch. Great to play with friends. Perfect also for getting in a game quickly (no booting, etc). - easy integration of gaming with home theater. Gamers who work usually already own a nice HDTV and Dolby surround system. - XBox live ease of use - no installation pain (hello Steam) - huge size of existing game library, with a lot of quality titles. - variety of genres: fighting, racing, rpgs, FPS, platform, action/adventure - tends to be more originality on console (pikmin, steel battalion, viewtiful joe) - since the platform is fixed, console titles tend to get better with time, making console a better investement (as a gamer you get a lot of satisfaction from seeing your 3/4 year old console playing GTA-SA, MGS3, Ninja Gaiden or Halo2). It's the opposite with a PC - the newer the games, the older the PC, the worst is the performance. - not that far behind PC's bleeding edge anyway: Far Cry, DOOM3, HL2 all coming on current consoles. - gamepad: nice vibration feedback, analog movements and buttons, ubiquity (can be used to fight, drive a car, fly a plane, or shoot).
gamepads vs m/k, console gaming vs pc gaming
on
Halo 2 Goes Gold
·
· Score: 1
I smell another PC vs Console, resolution, m/k bullshit thread.
After playing PC games for many many years, I now prefer the latest generation console experience.
1)screen resolution.
If my TV set is good enough for watching DVDs, I don't see why it's not good enough for playing games.
I may be standing 5 inches from the monitor when I play on a PC (focusing on a 32*32 pixel area), but I'm sitting quite far enough (and on a comfy couch at that) from my Sony Trinitron HD ready TV so that I don't see the pixels. The color and texture are very crisp.
And at any rate, all the next gen consoles games are probably gonna support 1080i.
2) comfort
I'd rather play games in my home theater environment (nice HDTV screen, dolby surround, comfy couch) than at a desk.
3) gamepad vs m/k
I've played PC games since they were invented, and at some point ppl played FPS on PC *without* a mouse, just with the keyboard.
Ok gamepads don't offer pixel precision aiming (you'd be surprised though how good some console players are), but so what? Ultra-precise aiming is just one skill it takes to be good at *some* FPS (I used to play Quake3 and UT a lot). But other skills like strategy have little to do with the control scheme.
And FPS are about shooting and I want to get some sort of feeling that I'm shooting a gun. So, yes, I do love the fact that with a gamepad, I press a freaking trigger to shoot (like the real thing), and I get some kick back when I shoot (like the real thing)... two things I don't get when I slide a mouse on a table top.
It's true it takes time to learn a new style of control, and some ppl just can't learn new things. Oh well.
Another advantage of gamepad over m/k is that the directional move is controlled by an analog stick, on m/k it's a key which isn't analog - so movement (front/back, straffing) can be controlled way more acurately on a gamepad(very fluid). Also keyboard keys are designed for typing and don't "feel" great and require quite a significant pressure to register a press.
It's because of that control limitation that PC FPS games don't do anything interesting with movement, but it's not the case on consoles (e.g. in Splinter cell on XBox you can control the character's speed very intuitively, while on PC, you have to use a clumsy combination of keys and mouse wheel).
Also note that on a XBox controller, the ABXY buttons themselves are analog (pressure sensitive).
BTW, once you're comfortable with a gamepad, you can also play all sorts of games with it - racing, fighting, flight, stealth (with fine intuitive analog speed control). Go try that with a mouse and keyboard (it's a huge pain to store separately a PC wheel, a PC joystick and a PC gamepad... btw PC gamepad will always suck since PC games aren't design for them).
Also, many current FPS games have vehicles in them, and a gamepad is *way* more adapted to control a wide range of vehicles:
The right analog stick is just perfect for flying planes (d'oh!). It's also a breeze to control a car with a gamepad, where good direction and speed control is important (using analog triggers for acceleration and breaking).
The alternative on a PC would be to switch from m/k to steering wheel and joystick whenever you board vehicles:P
An advantage of k/m is that... you can type!
But since all XBox live games are designed around voice communication, the unability to type with a gamepad is really a no issue.
So, yes, a gamepad offers less accurate aiming than a mouse, but all its advantages - analog and intuitive control of movement and speed, analog buttons, seamless and intuitive vehicles control, the fact that it feels like a real gun (pressing a trigger to shoot and vibration feedback), the fact that you use a gamepad sitting back without the need for a table - make for a *very* fun gaming experience.
More and more game developpers realize that it's just not enough to "port" a PC game to a console, they now design around the advantages a gamepad offers (Halo and great vehicle control, Splinter Cell and stealth movement, Riddick and fist fighting, UC2 Liandri Conflict and melee combat,...).
Consoles are like wine...
on
Halo 2 Goes Gold
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
... they tend to get better with time. Even if it's 3 year old underspec'ed piece of shit, talented devs now know the platform so well they structure the game engine around it and manage to squeeze every bit of perfomance out of it (without worrying about compatibility). With PCs you gotta aim at the average PC specs, cause there is no incentive coding features that only a minority are gonna enjoy now (the only benefit you get from wasting $2000 on a top of the line PC is a slightly higher framerate and higher resolution... how exciting). By the time the current top of the line PC hardware becomes the standard, the target will have moved already.
And once the next gen consoles come out, PC will have "fall behind" once again. But as every true gamer knows, what really matters is how fun the games are.
1) doing a lot of chores around the house and being extra nice (croissant breakfast) with her may earn you a few extra credits that you can spend playing "honey, I've cleaned the damn house and fixed the dinner! Gimme a break and let me rest playing my games for a while"
2) using gaming as an excuse for doing research... works best if you do have a real interest in graphics programming. Hey, my wife is in the garment industry, and she does pretend that her shopping is research.
3) play at night while she's asleep (works best on friday and saturday nights). It works only if, the next day, you can get up at the same time as she does and be awake enough to give her the attention she deserves.
4) "would you rather have me going out with pals having beers and hanging out in strip clubs?!"
5) offer her a surprise plane ticket so she can go alone spend some time with her distant close relatives on long weekends and holidays.
Slashdot Mirror
someone pirates your music, repackages it to make it look legit, then tries to sell it to your customer base? Like bootlegs and knock-off from Asia.
Yeah, I also remember back in the days, in 1895 exactly, when the Lumiere brothers showed the first movie ever made - a footage of a train pulling into a train station. Viewers were so shocked that they fled the theater. That's immersion. If only current filmmakers had the same talent...
The problem with a totally free service is that there is no accountability.
In other words, when there is a fee (even small), it makes it way harder for griefers and cheaters to hide behind anonymity.
A great feature of XBox Live is that user profile is unique accross all the games and hard to alter.
Things turned sour on XBox Live when cheaters started using free 1 month trials to create disposable temporary accounts (and pretty much ruin Halo2 MP for everyone else).
"new era of PC superiority"
I doubt that since, just like the consoles, the PC are turning to multicore designs to boost performance.
Developing good multithreaded/parallel code on a closed system like console may be hard, but doing the same thing on a open platform is even harder - your code would have to support any type of multicore PC architecture (tons of possible variation) and traditional CPUs as well.
And I can tell you that you don't understand the crucial difference between consoles and a PC of equivalent power:
Consoles are closed platforms, allowing for heavy code optimization.
E.g., try running DOOM3 on a 4 year old, $150 PC.
Actually, for the Final Fantasy movie, they took great care in making the skin very realistic (with defects, ...).
Aki's hand
Aki's face
Dr Sid
The problem was stiffness in the facial expressions.
"The tech demos they showed off were incredibly impressive"
not exactly, most of them were pre-rendered CGI (killzone2, tekken, DMC4,...).
Exactly, Asia writes for cheap the expensive software we buy in the US.
And they build their own entire IT infrastructure on free software and new incompatible standards (see all that wireless stuff in China), so they won't even be a viable market for the last few standing US enterprises.
We're double screwed.
I heard indian engineers have a tough time finding a job in India.
So many engineering schools opened in the last decade that the market is already flooded and the competition very intense.
I'm actually trying to implement a game that does just that.
For a fully destructible environment, you have to:
- detect contacts between thousands of objects.
Most of the classic sorting structures like BSP are optimized for static world only.
- handle those contacts:
either impacts - easy to solve
either resting contacts - hard to solve
E.g it's easy to model a thousand pieces flying up in the air, the hard part is to have those pieces come to rest realistically on the ground as a big stack.
- when you have impact, figure if and how objects break. That's relatively easy.
- when you have resting contact, objects can still break due to static load. That's very hard to do in real time.
E.g., It's easy to model a bullet piercing a wall. But it's difficult to model a shelve that collapses because you've put a weight on it.
"Mercenaries" uses a mix of semi-realistic environment destruction (some buildings break into a few predefined pieces that fall realistically and come to rest on the ground) and fake destruction (some buildings break down using a realistic animation, but no physics is involved, very much like in MechAssault-LW).
Heh, I did read your comment twice. :P
But since you quoted games that do use havok (HL2, PsyOps) I thought your "yes it does" meant that Halo2 does use Havok.
I thought the rest (about the dev knowing what they code) was some twisted third degree sarcasm
some reviews mention halo2 has its own physics engine, some mention havok.
Again, go to www.havok.com (check http://www.havok.com/company/careers.php to see how much fun those guys seem to have), and show me where you see a reference to Halo2...
yeah I was surprised too, I'm pretty sure Halo2 (like DOOM3) use their own physics implementation.
I checked the Havok website and nowhere do they mention Halo2.
"He believes in an open source approach to the task of programming life, modeled explicitly on the open source approach to programming computers, long popular at MIT."
How long before companies start getting patents for specific DNA sequences?
It seems to me that an *all* free software world would kind of hinder progress or at least prevent competition based on software (maybe that's the whole idea!).
Let's say company A is using a "free" CAD program to design ultra light chairs (the only CAD available since, in a perfect free world, all non-free softwares have disappeared) and thinks of a new way to improve it to attain a production increase and gain an advantage over its competition, company B (Note that the modification could just be fixing a complex and obscure bug).
Imagine that company A doesn't have the expertise to implement the software modification so it pays a freelance developer to modify the software under GPL (*).
Now, what would prevent the developer from freely distributing the modification he was paid to make (since the original software was under GPL)... which would eventually end up in the hands of company B.
So the situation is that company B is getting the improvement for free but company A had to pay for it.
Company A would have been better off not modifying the software in the first place.
With this scenario there isn't much drive for investment in software improvement and creativity.
What's wrong with this scenario? I'm sure I must be missing something within GPL.
I also know RMS considers custom sofware as different from non-free software but I fail to see the difference. Aren't all the users of any software customers? If not, how do you make the difference - are users of an internet browser customers? Users of a spreadsheet program? Users of a mathematical suite? Wouldn't all free software eventually become custom software?
(*) I also assume most professional softwares can't be realistically created and delivered for free - development of product is long, difficult and never over (maintenance).
It's a well known fact that before video games, TV, Rock&Roll, Movies, and books were invented, people never did anything stupid and the world was crimeless.
It's all the fault of Gutenberg, the Lumiere brothers, the Beatles, Walter Cronkite and Rockstar Games!
Actually, a change in the earth's shape/composition can alter its orbital trajectory around the sun.
That's because of tidal effects: planets are soft and deform due to the gravitational forces they exert on eachother. Those plastic deformations result in friction, i.e. the gravitational energy is being converted into heat and orbits are modified.
For example, the distance between the moon and the earth is slowly decreasing (in a distant future we will no longer observe solar eclipses!), and a similar effect exists between the sun and the earth.
So a big change in the earth's tectonic plates could in theory affect tidal effects, hence the earth's orbit around the sun (but the effect is probably tiny).
A change in the earth's inner composition could also modify its magnetic field, but I don't think that would affect its orbit around the sun.
Actually, a change in the earth's shape/composition can alter its orbital trajectory around the sun.
That's because of tidal effects: planets are soft and deform due to the gravitational forces they exert on eachother. Those plastic deformations result in friction, i.e. the gravitational energy is being converted into heat and orbits are modified.
For example, the distance between the moon and the earth is slowly decreasing (in a distant future we will no longer observe solar eclipses!), and a similar effect exists between the sun and the earth.
So a big change in the earth's tectonic plates could in theory affect tidal effects, hence the earth's orbit around the sun (but the effect is probably tiny).
A change in the earth's inner composition could also modify its magnetic field, but I don't think that would affect its orbit around the sun.
Ah yeah,
Do you even watch american media?
The first page of the NYTimes for the last few days has been about the disaster.
And guess what's the top headline on cnn.com, abcnews.com, msnbc.com...
Amazing how some posters always manage to find some angle to blame the US. This thime "Americans don't give a shit!"
Yet, I saw on the BBC that the USA is the country that's giving the most money to help out with that disaster (way more than all EU). Go figure...
Console advantages:
- price ($100 to $300)
- comfy to play in couch. Great to play with friends. Perfect also for getting in a game quickly (no booting, etc).
- easy integration of gaming with home theater. Gamers who work usually already own a nice HDTV and Dolby surround system.
- XBox live ease of use
- no installation pain (hello Steam)
- huge size of existing game library, with a lot of quality titles.
- variety of genres: fighting, racing, rpgs, FPS, platform, action/adventure
- tends to be more originality on console (pikmin, steel battalion, viewtiful joe)
- since the platform is fixed, console titles tend to get better with time, making console a better investement (as a gamer you get a lot of satisfaction from seeing your 3/4 year old console playing GTA-SA, MGS3, Ninja Gaiden or Halo2). It's the opposite with a PC - the newer the games, the older the PC, the worst is the performance.
- not that far behind PC's bleeding edge anyway: Far Cry, DOOM3, HL2 all coming on current consoles.
- gamepad: nice vibration feedback, analog movements and buttons, ubiquity (can be used to fight, drive a car, fly a plane, or shoot).
I smell another PC vs Console, resolution, m/k bullshit thread. After playing PC games for many many years, I now prefer the latest generation console experience. 1)screen resolution. If my TV set is good enough for watching DVDs, I don't see why it's not good enough for playing games. I may be standing 5 inches from the monitor when I play on a PC (focusing on a 32*32 pixel area), but I'm sitting quite far enough (and on a comfy couch at that) from my Sony Trinitron HD ready TV so that I don't see the pixels. The color and texture are very crisp. And at any rate, all the next gen consoles games are probably gonna support 1080i. 2) comfort I'd rather play games in my home theater environment (nice HDTV screen, dolby surround, comfy couch) than at a desk. 3) gamepad vs m/k I've played PC games since they were invented, and at some point ppl played FPS on PC *without* a mouse, just with the keyboard. Ok gamepads don't offer pixel precision aiming (you'd be surprised though how good some console players are), but so what? Ultra-precise aiming is just one skill it takes to be good at *some* FPS (I used to play Quake3 and UT a lot). But other skills like strategy have little to do with the control scheme. And FPS are about shooting and I want to get some sort of feeling that I'm shooting a gun. So, yes, I do love the fact that with a gamepad, I press a freaking trigger to shoot (like the real thing), and I get some kick back when I shoot (like the real thing)... two things I don't get when I slide a mouse on a table top. It's true it takes time to learn a new style of control, and some ppl just can't learn new things. Oh well. Another advantage of gamepad over m/k is that the directional move is controlled by an analog stick, on m/k it's a key which isn't analog - so movement (front/back, straffing) can be controlled way more acurately on a gamepad(very fluid). Also keyboard keys are designed for typing and don't "feel" great and require quite a significant pressure to register a press. It's because of that control limitation that PC FPS games don't do anything interesting with movement, but it's not the case on consoles (e.g. in Splinter cell on XBox you can control the character's speed very intuitively, while on PC, you have to use a clumsy combination of keys and mouse wheel). Also note that on a XBox controller, the ABXY buttons themselves are analog (pressure sensitive). BTW, once you're comfortable with a gamepad, you can also play all sorts of games with it - racing, fighting, flight, stealth (with fine intuitive analog speed control). Go try that with a mouse and keyboard (it's a huge pain to store separately a PC wheel, a PC joystick and a PC gamepad... btw PC gamepad will always suck since PC games aren't design for them). Also, many current FPS games have vehicles in them, and a gamepad is *way* more adapted to control a wide range of vehicles: The right analog stick is just perfect for flying planes (d'oh!). It's also a breeze to control a car with a gamepad, where good direction and speed control is important (using analog triggers for acceleration and breaking). The alternative on a PC would be to switch from m/k to steering wheel and joystick whenever you board vehicles :P
An advantage of k/m is that ... you can type!
But since all XBox live games are designed around voice communication, the unability to type with a gamepad is really a no issue.
So, yes, a gamepad offers less accurate aiming than a mouse, but all its advantages - analog and intuitive control of movement and speed, analog buttons, seamless and intuitive vehicles control, the fact that it feels like a real gun (pressing a trigger to shoot and vibration feedback), the fact that you use a gamepad sitting back without the need for a table - make for a *very* fun gaming experience.
More and more game developpers realize that it's just not enough to "port" a PC game to a console, they now design around the advantages a gamepad offers (Halo and great vehicle control, Splinter Cell and stealth movement, Riddick and fist fighting, UC2 Liandri Conflict and melee combat,...).
... they tend to get better with time.
Even if it's 3 year old underspec'ed piece of shit, talented devs now know the platform so well they structure the game engine around it and manage to squeeze every bit of perfomance out of it (without worrying about compatibility).
With PCs you gotta aim at the average PC specs, cause there is no incentive coding features that only a minority are gonna enjoy now (the only benefit you get from wasting $2000 on a top of the line PC is a slightly higher framerate and higher resolution... how exciting). By the time the current top of the line PC hardware becomes the standard, the target will have moved already.
And once the next gen consoles come out, PC will have "fall behind" once again.
But as every true gamer knows, what really matters is how fun the games are.
1) doing a lot of chores around the house and being extra nice (croissant breakfast) with her may earn you a few extra credits that you can spend playing
"honey, I've cleaned the damn house and fixed the dinner! Gimme a break and let me rest playing my games for a while"
2) using gaming as an excuse for doing research... works best if you do have a real interest in graphics programming.
Hey, my wife is in the garment industry, and she does pretend that her shopping is research.
3) play at night while she's asleep (works best on friday and saturday nights). It works only if, the next day, you can get up at the same time as she does and be awake enough to give her the attention she deserves.
4) "would you rather have me going out with pals having beers and hanging out in strip clubs?!"
5) offer her a surprise plane ticket so she can go alone spend some time with her distant close relatives on long weekends and holidays.
http://www.globalgadgetuk.com/