What format is the video going to be in? I've actually seen a demo of the GBA playing a movie using DivX before, but it was really far too slow to be practical, so I doubt that's it. Maybe it might be possible with a hardware decoder built into the movie player, but it's hard to believe that that would fit into the tiny space in a GBA cartridge.
One problem I've never even heard adressed - won't it cost them quite a bit bandwidth-wise? We're talking sending the contents of multiple complete games over an internet connection to each user. With any substantial user base, that's going to require an almost ridiculous amount of bandwidth, barring some sort of file-swarming (which seems unlikely due to their stance on DRM - peer-to-peer and DRM just don't go together). Let's see, assuming:
10000 very hard-core users, at 650MB downloaded per user per day... 10000 * 650 * 30 = 195 terabytes of bandwidth each month!
That's just not feasible, and it's assuming a fairly small user base of ten thousand. Of course, games might be stored on that 80GB "storage device," but what happens when that device is filled? Does the user have to completely get rid of products he/she already payed for to get new material? And none of this even takes into account the amount of time it takes to download material... either this will lead to load times far worse than those of the early PSX games, or each game will be downloaded at once (likely taking an hour or two). I doubt ISPs will like this much, either - they already complain enough about traffic from P2P networks, and this new development would simply end with much slower overall speeds for all of an ISP's broadband users.
Sony's pretty much saturated the market - everyone who wanted to buy a PS2 has had ample opportunity to do so by now, so the attention is now starting to shift towards second consoles like the GCN and XBOX.
I can probably answer 1 and 3:
1) There's a reason for that border - scaling up the image would cause "fat pixels" that would look a bit odd on the TV, because the pixels can't just be doubled up (not high enough resolution).
3) Almost certainly, as I don't think the 'Cube can even boot from those hardware expansion slots.
I hate to say this, but I have seen far more adults make racial slurs than teenagers... unfortunately, even my own grandmother has been a culprit on occasion. Of course, I live in a bit of a sheltered area, and the teenagers make far more homosexual-bashing remarks than the adults, so that's to be taken with a grain of salt. Still, it's not the teenagers that went to Vietnam and called their enemies and comrades alike "gooks", nor did they live through World War II when the common word for a person of Japanese descent was "jap".
Check out the folks over at spiderweb software - Jeff Vogel and co. make the Avernum and Geneforge series of indie RPGs. The graphics and sound leave more than a bit to be desired, but the games have excellently balanced gameplay and very well-written, witty plots. Vogel himself is one of the more famous characters in the whole shareware scene - he's among the few that's actually made a solid living off of it.
This would only be fair if you're given the chance to sample the file you're downloading and decide whether or not you like its sound and quality (if it is indeed the file you actually wanted). This could be done with a "buying queue" of some sort - after a predetermined amount of time, you must pay for the files in said queue or have them deleted.
To be truly effective, this system would also have to keep track of which files you've already downloaded, so that users don't just download and "preview" songs whenever they want to hear them. It would also mean that the Kazaa folks would have to work to make sure that only one "official" copy (preferably high quality) of a song exists, because otherwise it would be easy for a user to just keep grabbing different rips of the same song and "previewing" them.
I rather liked Eternal Darkness for the GCN, which unfortunately got pushed aside because there simply aren't enough people in the installed userbase interested in such a game. It was quite innovative (the Magyk system - composing spells out of runes - worked very well) and had an extremely interesting story based around the stories of those such as Lovecraft and Poe (indeed, the game *begins* with a quote from Poe). It's also very interesting from an artistic perspective - the walls are covered in highly detailed murals, stained glass windows, etc. that you might almost expect to find in an art museum. Still, it's been demoted to the bargin-bin games... perhaps Silicon Knight's next game will be a bigger success, as it has an already established franchise (Metal Gear) behind it.
Actually, storing lossless movies might be one possible application for holographic memory (which is supposed to have a storage space of up to 400GB), and it could do it with current lossless compression technologies (the 3:1 compression you spoke of). Too bad that holographic memory seems farther and farther away from every seeing the light of day... I rarely hear about it anymore.
The PS2 is primarily a gaming machine. I can see why one might start to think of a PS2 as a full-fledged computer, though - with games like FFXI, it's starting to move more towards the components that a traditional computer would have (keyboard, mouse, hard drive, even an internet connection). Until there are general-purpose applications (y'know, word processors, net browsers, etc.) for the PS2, though, it shouldn't be considered a PC.
I am reminded of a certain scene in Ayn Rand's book "Anthem" - namely, when the council backed by the candle-makers refused to consider using or producing electric light sources, because it would destroy the already-established industry of candle-making.
Yes they will. The largest size carts available for the N64 were 64MB (such as Resident Evil 2), the same size as the flash memory used in the iQue player. Ogre Battle 64 itself was indeed one of the larger carts, though not 64MB; however, I would be more worried about the chip technology, because the cartridge included a special chip for decompressing sprites, which a flash card can't replicate.
The game's description so far sounds like it borrows quite a bit from System Shock 2 (notably, on the pacing of the encounters and the bit about the PDA as a device to advance the storyline). Also, I must say that the physics engine tech demo described in the article simply doesn't sound as impressive as the tech demo for Half-Life 2 - stacks of boxes that collapse don't really match up to a "working" engine that reacts realistically.
... RTFA, the article is on *GameSpot*, not GameSpy. Besides which, there are only so many major video game news websites left out there, and only a few of those (*cough* IGN) are still mostly open to non-subscribers.
What is your stance on high fantasy versus the more modern fantasy, the sort that you've depicted intruding on everyday life? I have noticed that many of your current fantasy novels (Good Omens, Neverwhere, American Gods) fall under the latter category, and I was wondering if you would ever be interested in creating a completely fictional universe as a setting for a novel or series?
If hosting straight downloads of the video for all their archived shows is too much of a drain (and of course it would be - video is huge) perhaps they ought to make use of something like BitTorrent instead - then they'd just have to host the torrent files and maybe keep a seed or two going for the less popular shows.
Penny-Arcade said that the Cube and XBox versions looked identical, though the XBox won out slightly in the sound department thanks to 5.1 surround (as opposed to Pro Logic II for the Cube); both versions looked and sounded better than the PS2 version, however.
Methinks it would be interesting if someday they made a variety of Soul Calibur II allowing you to pit the three "exclusive" characters against each other - it might make for a most interesting competition at a big gaming show, like E3.
It seems a bit incomplete in the sense that it's lacking two of the four more modern consoles (at least, he only mentions a PlayStation 2 and a Dreamcast). There are definitely games worthy of collecting on both the XBox and the GameCube. Also, as a collector, has he ever actually played all of the games that he owns? I imagine that that would be pretty much a full time job, though if he can afford all of those gaming devices, he's probably independently wealthy.
For anyone who's interested in Indy developing, here's a good tool to start with - Blitz 3D . It's a programming language that's been around since the good old Amiga days, and it provides a very stable and fast 3D engine, coupled with support for just about every sound/image format imaginable. Compared to most commercial engines, it's quite affordable, and it provides the "whole package", not just the graphics engine. This being Slashdot, I should note that it is currently Windows-only, but there is a multiplatform, OpenGL based version in the pipeline.
From what they've revealed so far, it does at least make me wonder what the main character would be on death row for. Of course, any character in the GTA games would probably go straight to death row if caught (or just life in prison, depending on the state's position on capital punishment), so it's not too hard to imagine. The whole premise of the game sounds a bit shaky, though - I'm not involved in the legal system, but I seriously doubt that there would be any way to "fake" a lethal injection.
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What format is the video going to be in? I've actually seen a demo of the GBA playing a movie using DivX before, but it was really far too slow to be practical, so I doubt that's it. Maybe it might be possible with a hardware decoder built into the movie player, but it's hard to believe that that would fit into the tiny space in a GBA cartridge.
10000 very hard-core users, at 650MB downloaded per user per day... 10000 * 650 * 30 = 195 terabytes of bandwidth each month!
That's just not feasible, and it's assuming a fairly small user base of ten thousand. Of course, games might be stored on that 80GB "storage device," but what happens when that device is filled? Does the user have to completely get rid of products he/she already payed for to get new material? And none of this even takes into account the amount of time it takes to download material... either this will lead to load times far worse than those of the early PSX games, or each game will be downloaded at once (likely taking an hour or two). I doubt ISPs will like this much, either - they already complain enough about traffic from P2P networks, and this new development would simply end with much slower overall speeds for all of an ISP's broadband users.
Actually, Nintendo kept the rights to Donkey Kong and company, so Rare will have little or nothing to do with any future Donkey Kong games.
Sony's pretty much saturated the market - everyone who wanted to buy a PS2 has had ample opportunity to do so by now, so the attention is now starting to shift towards second consoles like the GCN and XBOX.
a) CD audio is bloated and takes up a lot of space that could otherwise be used for game content
b) CD audio is easily pirated/copied, unlike audio buried within a compressed, encrypted file (as with the Blizzard games).
Still, I remember finding it pretty cool that I could stick my Worms 2 disk in my CD player and listen to the music from it...
I can probably answer 1 and 3: 1) There's a reason for that border - scaling up the image would cause "fat pixels" that would look a bit odd on the TV, because the pixels can't just be doubled up (not high enough resolution). 3) Almost certainly, as I don't think the 'Cube can even boot from those hardware expansion slots.
I hate to say this, but I have seen far more adults make racial slurs than teenagers... unfortunately, even my own grandmother has been a culprit on occasion. Of course, I live in a bit of a sheltered area, and the teenagers make far more homosexual-bashing remarks than the adults, so that's to be taken with a grain of salt. Still, it's not the teenagers that went to Vietnam and called their enemies and comrades alike "gooks", nor did they live through World War II when the common word for a person of Japanese descent was "jap".
Check out the folks over at spiderweb software - Jeff Vogel and co. make the Avernum and Geneforge series of indie RPGs. The graphics and sound leave more than a bit to be desired, but the games have excellently balanced gameplay and very well-written, witty plots. Vogel himself is one of the more famous characters in the whole shareware scene - he's among the few that's actually made a solid living off of it.
To be truly effective, this system would also have to keep track of which files you've already downloaded, so that users don't just download and "preview" songs whenever they want to hear them. It would also mean that the Kazaa folks would have to work to make sure that only one "official" copy (preferably high quality) of a song exists, because otherwise it would be easy for a user to just keep grabbing different rips of the same song and "previewing" them.
I rather liked Eternal Darkness for the GCN, which unfortunately got pushed aside because there simply aren't enough people in the installed userbase interested in such a game. It was quite innovative (the Magyk system - composing spells out of runes - worked very well) and had an extremely interesting story based around the stories of those such as Lovecraft and Poe (indeed, the game *begins* with a quote from Poe). It's also very interesting from an artistic perspective - the walls are covered in highly detailed murals, stained glass windows, etc. that you might almost expect to find in an art museum. Still, it's been demoted to the bargin-bin games... perhaps Silicon Knight's next game will be a bigger success, as it has an already established franchise (Metal Gear) behind it.
Actually, storing lossless movies might be one possible application for holographic memory (which is supposed to have a storage space of up to 400GB), and it could do it with current lossless compression technologies (the 3:1 compression you spoke of). Too bad that holographic memory seems farther and farther away from every seeing the light of day... I rarely hear about it anymore.
The PS2 is primarily a gaming machine. I can see why one might start to think of a PS2 as a full-fledged computer, though - with games like FFXI, it's starting to move more towards the components that a traditional computer would have (keyboard, mouse, hard drive, even an internet connection). Until there are general-purpose applications (y'know, word processors, net browsers, etc.) for the PS2, though, it shouldn't be considered a PC.
I am reminded of a certain scene in Ayn Rand's book "Anthem" - namely, when the council backed by the candle-makers refused to consider using or producing electric light sources, because it would destroy the already-established industry of candle-making.
Yes they will. The largest size carts available for the N64 were 64MB (such as Resident Evil 2), the same size as the flash memory used in the iQue player. Ogre Battle 64 itself was indeed one of the larger carts, though not 64MB; however, I would be more worried about the chip technology, because the cartridge included a special chip for decompressing sprites, which a flash card can't replicate.
The game's description so far sounds like it borrows quite a bit from System Shock 2 (notably, on the pacing of the encounters and the bit about the PDA as a device to advance the storyline). Also, I must say that the physics engine tech demo described in the article simply doesn't sound as impressive as the tech demo for Half-Life 2 - stacks of boxes that collapse don't really match up to a "working" engine that reacts realistically.
... RTFA, the article is on *GameSpot*, not GameSpy. Besides which, there are only so many major video game news websites left out there, and only a few of those (*cough* IGN) are still mostly open to non-subscribers.
What is your stance on high fantasy versus the more modern fantasy, the sort that you've depicted intruding on everyday life? I have noticed that many of your current fantasy novels (Good Omens, Neverwhere, American Gods) fall under the latter category, and I was wondering if you would ever be interested in creating a completely fictional universe as a setting for a novel or series?
Actually, the effect you're seeing with the textures on the N64 is bilinear filtering, not AA.
If hosting straight downloads of the video for all their archived shows is too much of a drain (and of course it would be - video is huge) perhaps they ought to make use of something like BitTorrent instead - then they'd just have to host the torrent files and maybe keep a seed or two going for the less popular shows.
Penny-Arcade said that the Cube and XBox versions looked identical, though the XBox won out slightly in the sound department thanks to 5.1 surround (as opposed to Pro Logic II for the Cube); both versions looked and sounded better than the PS2 version, however.
Methinks it would be interesting if someday they made a variety of Soul Calibur II allowing you to pit the three "exclusive" characters against each other - it might make for a most interesting competition at a big gaming show, like E3.
The idiots they give licenses to these days... *grumble grumble*
It seems a bit incomplete in the sense that it's lacking two of the four more modern consoles (at least, he only mentions a PlayStation 2 and a Dreamcast). There are definitely games worthy of collecting on both the XBox and the GameCube. Also, as a collector, has he ever actually played all of the games that he owns? I imagine that that would be pretty much a full time job, though if he can afford all of those gaming devices, he's probably independently wealthy.
For anyone who's interested in Indy developing, here's a good tool to start with - Blitz 3D . It's a programming language that's been around since the good old Amiga days, and it provides a very stable and fast 3D engine, coupled with support for just about every sound/image format imaginable. Compared to most commercial engines, it's quite affordable, and it provides the "whole package", not just the graphics engine. This being Slashdot, I should note that it is currently Windows-only, but there is a multiplatform, OpenGL based version in the pipeline.
From what they've revealed so far, it does at least make me wonder what the main character would be on death row for. Of course, any character in the GTA games would probably go straight to death row if caught (or just life in prison, depending on the state's position on capital punishment), so it's not too hard to imagine. The whole premise of the game sounds a bit shaky, though - I'm not involved in the legal system, but I seriously doubt that there would be any way to "fake" a lethal injection.