> When buying hardware, trying to future proof is dumb. You could try to "future proof" now and buy a $1500 system. In 3 years it'll be shit though.
That's total nonsense.
a) The gaming rig I built in 2001 lasted until 2008 -- upgrading the video card from a GeForce 2 to GeForce 4 to GeForce 6600GT kept it alive much, much longer.
b) I just priced out a complete gaming rig for a friend based on what I have. For $1300 you can build a gaming rig that WILL be perfectly fine for gaming in 3 years. By that time, you can upgrade the video card and it will play all the latest games.
You _do_ know that MOST games are GPU bound at 1920x1080, not CPU bound right?
So go ahead, and blow $500 on that latest i7-2600K -- meanwhile us budget AMD guys will be putting money that we saved on buying the cheap 4-core system towards a high end GPU like the 6970, because you are forgetting one tiny, but important fact. Almost ALL the big PC games are designed to run on the 5 year old console hardware -- the PS3 and XBox 360 only have ~6 core and ~2 cores respectively, which means modern CPU's are NOT the bottleneck -- the GPU's are.
Re:silicon-on-insulator (SOI)
on
The Transistor Wars
·
· Score: 4, Informative
You are not going to address Moore's Law with silicon -- the problem with silicon is that it has an effective 4 to 5 GHz barrier -- which is its dirty little secret that no one wants to talk about. The army had 100 GHz chips 20 years ago -- guess what, they weren't using silicon, but a germanium compound.
The only "real" solution is to start looking at other materials.
> Gaming does not glue users to Windows as much as some windows fan boys think it does. If someone is not interested in consoles where can I play BF3, BF:BC2, Borderlands, Diablo 2, Dragon Age, GTA IV, Guild Wars, Mass Effect, Sniper: Ghost Warrior, Titan Quest, Rainbow Six, Torchlight, etc. with a real controller such as Keyboard+Mouse?
Steam (L4D, TF2, Portal) just _recently_ came to OS X (with shitty performance to boot) but at least we are getting _some_ options.
> That's because most gamers are male adolescent or teenagers, You don't play much MMO's do you? Methinks you want to check those WoW, EQ, UO, figures again...
The _average_ gaming is ~28.
> Most of them have moved to GameBox, XBox or PS2 for their gaming. I'm pretty sure most have moved on past the GameCube to Wii, XBox 360, and PS3.
Why thank you for that obviously constructive, elegant, and insightful dialogue. I'm sure the rest of/. are all enlightened with what you added to the topic. Which is basically FUCK ALL.
Where can I sign up for your fine art of dialogue since you are a such a master of it.
Are you sure you aren't one of my lost-long gaming brothers? =) Excellent analysis.
I don't think you're getting grumpy in your old age -- you have wisdom gained from experience. Basically you're tired of 14 yrs that have twitch skill but serious lack any deep strategy or tactics.
Having "grown" up playing an exorbitant amount of FPS such as the _original_ "virtual football FPS" games aka Capture The Flag (Quake), ThunderWalker, Team Fortress, MegaTF, Quake 2, Quake 3, I've witnessed the fast gameplay that made CTF great slowly become slower and slower. CoD is the pendulum swinging back the other way on fast-paced action such as Doom, and Quake 3 pioneered.
I played the original BF: 1942 and absolutely loved the 32 player maps. One of the things that made it great was the environment was more immersive. Who didn't want to drive tanks, drive ATVs, or fly planes !? The conquest mode at the time was a brilliant game design addition.
I think you're spot on with the original Call of Duty aka Medal of Honor. That was a fine, fine single player game. Multiplayer was fun, but not deep like BF: 1942
I stayed away from the other CoD games, but I played CoD4:MW and have to agree with you -- it was a dam good game. Everything was polished and executed well. But the first thing I noticed was that it was as very "arcadey" and "twitchy" with almost no deep strategy. The fact that 14 yrs were drawn to it like flies to shit didn't help -- but you can't blame the community -- the game just isn't designed to promote deep team play like other games.
You say FPS are being dumbed down, (especially the later series of CoD), but I would call it "arcadeness" / "consolization." Deep strategy is slowly being removed for ADD twitch action.
I've played quite a bit of BF:BC2 and while it was extremely difficult for the first few levels (because you can't actually _help_ your team, you are more a hinderance/liability then an asset) it wasn't until I leveled up to around 8 that things took off and I was leveling like crazy up to about level 30. The fact that you help your team win by playing your role is what makes BF:BC2 (and by proxy) BF3 such great games.
I was skeptical of TF2 (due to the rendering style), but Valve has done an excellent job of retaining the TF Spirit. It is dam near perfect.
Completely agree with you that Resistance is totally under-rated. Unfortunately critical mass seems hard to acquire with so much over-blown hype & media exposure on the "few big ones", that the other great games tend to get ignored without a great deal of momentum.
Have you played "Sniper: Ghost Warrior" ? At times it was a great single-player experience, when the dam A.I. wasn't cheating.
> I'm sick of the being asked which two of the same collection of over-exposed "real world" guns I want to carry.
That is the only nitpick in your analysis. You are ignoring Sid Meier's fundamental game design principle: Give the player interesting choices! You are not a game designer, so your lack of foresight can be forgiven.
> Pharaoh's Curse games Montezuma's Revenge was better =) Ironically, as an Apple ][ fan, I still have a soft spot for C64 Pharaoh's Curse =) http://symlink.dk/nostalgia/c64/montezuma/
> Well, you brought up two points, so, for one, the legislation for the FairTax eliminates the 16th amendment - that's the amendment to our constitution that makes income taxes possible.
Methinks you need to study your history (again)...
"The Sixteenth Amendment conferred no new power of taxation but simply prohibited the previous complete and plenary power of income taxation possessed by Congress from the beginning from being taken out of the category of indirect taxation to which it inherently belonged.'' Reference: Stanton v. Baltic Mining Co., 240 U.S. 103, 112 (1916).
Finally, you'll get your dam personal proof in ~2030, and the we can stop arguing about these nonsense questions and get to the real questions -- "What is your view on Religion? Politics? Economics? Math?".. and the most important one "Why the fuck do you look like humans?"
> However ATi recovered very well with the Radeon 4000 and 5000 series. The 4000 series were extremely competitive cards. Good prices, good performance, low power usage, etc. Then the 5000 series were the first DX11 cards on the market by a number of months, and also great performers.
Yup. What's "ironic" is that the 6970 is significantly _slower_ then the 5970 *, since the 6000 series was even more about low power usage.
It will be interesting to see if the 7000 series focuses more on power or efficiency....
> I haven't looked into the situation at all, so take this with a grain of salt, but I think the issue is probably trying to keep the key mappings consistent across all platforms. You could definitely make those key mappings work under gvim, but they won't work from the terminal for instance. I've already been looking at the source off & on for the past month. I just want the GUI versions to recognize ALL KEYS across Windows, OSX, and Linux. (I couldn't give a shit about "1970's" terminals, but sadly the way Vim is coded forces this crap to be dealt with.)
> For all I know there may already be a patch somewhere (remapping CAPS to do what ESC does would seem to be a popular thing to want to do). Already tried that. The problem is that I use _BOTH_ ESC and CAPS in gaming (Windows + OSX). Changing CAPS to be ESC is just that, a hack.
> If you made a patch for gvim that did what you want, I think others would also use it. Most definitely there would be interest -- since this thread comes up every few years about why (g)Vim [still] sucks.
One of these days I'll get annoyed enough and just fix the dam thing.
> And everyone knows plenty of lawyers who are evil and corrupt. Does that mean all lawyers should be disqualified from politics? Of course not.
You know that old joke:
Q: What do you call 5000 dead lawyers at the bottom of the ocean? A: A good start!
If you need a lawyer to understand the law, then the law is TOO complicated. e.g. The Tax Code. Want to eliminate all the loop-holes? Make it a simple: Anytime an item (valued over $1) is sold, then the government is to be paid 10% of the original cost.
Yup, its not like an engineer could do _worse_ then a lawyer. Bureaucracy has only one goal: to keep the status quo so that it survives. At least an engineer is more willing to look at the practicality rather the rhetoric and "cute" sound bites that don't actually address the root of the problem.
We need to remove _all_ financial motives from [introducing] Laws.
Every donation should be pooled, and at the end of every month, it should be split evenly to ALL the parties, to give ALL voices a chance to have their say.
Agreed that we need to get over this "Us vs Them" mentality. An even more radical step would be to remove ALL parties and focus on the ISSUE, not the SIDE that supports/doesn't support X.
I love gVim (use it everyday at work) but god, some of it _still_ sucks.
- Can't map Ctrl-1,... Ctrl-0 to custom mappings - Can't distinguish between Ctrl-Char, Ctrl-Shift-Char, and Ctrl-Alt-Shift-Char - Can't distinguish between TAB and CTRL-I - Can't (re)map CAPS (I use CAPS in my games, remapping it to ESC is NOT an option) - no way to "unbind" ALL keys
WHY is it so hard to find an editor that lets me use ALL the keys??
Vim would be perfect if it fixed the custom keybindings.
> 2. Bigger numbers. Used to have limits like 32767 all over the place on game scores, spread sheet cell numbers, and such. And there was the infamous Y2K bug. Now use of 32bit integers is standard, and 64bit integers are common. Doubles or quadruples the number of bytes needed for math.
While I generally agree with you, that's not quite true... games on the Apple ][ regularly used ~ 7 digits encoded in BCD format. i.e. 9,999,999, as it was faster to "print" them. e.g. GameLoop:
:
JSR DrawScoreBCD
:
JMP GameLoop
It is actually worse now since everything is vectorized we use 128-bit for numbers. i.e. 4x32-bit floats
But yes, your comments about bloated instruction sets, GUI's, and security is spot on. The consumer migration to 64-bit was held back for years due to crappy "code density" of RISC.
I'm surprised they are using a point cloud and not a mesh for the tracking? That would explain why the physics seems a little unstable / jumpy when the ball floats around on the book.
Cool prototype -- will be real interesting to see what kind of applications get developed once this tech is cheap enough where every home has one.
Slashdot Mirror
> When buying hardware, trying to future proof is dumb. You could try to "future proof" now and buy a $1500 system. In 3 years it'll be shit though.
That's total nonsense.
a) The gaming rig I built in 2001 lasted until 2008 -- upgrading the video card from a GeForce 2 to GeForce 4 to GeForce 6600GT kept it alive much, much longer.
b) I just priced out a complete gaming rig for a friend based on what I have. For $1300 you can build a gaming rig that WILL be perfectly fine for gaming in 3 years. By that time, you can upgrade the video card and it will play all the latest games.
You _do_ know that MOST games are GPU bound at 1920x1080, not CPU bound right?
Here are the benchmarks to back that claim up:
Sabertooth 990 FX
http://www.guru3d.com/article/asus-sabertooth-990fx-review/17
And proof that GPU's are the bottlenecks in the latest games ...
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/battlefield-3-graphics-performance,3063.html
I could go on, but there would be little point.
So go ahead, and blow $500 on that latest i7-2600K -- meanwhile us budget AMD guys will be putting money that we saved on buying the cheap 4-core system towards a high end GPU like the 6970, because you are forgetting one tiny, but important fact. Almost ALL the big PC games are designed to run on the 5 year old console hardware -- the PS3 and XBox 360 only have ~6 core and ~2 cores respectively, which means modern CPU's are NOT the bottleneck -- the GPU's are.
That's "Lick/Kiss Me"
i.e. Mozart used that in one of his titles ... "Lick me in the ass"
Canon in 6 parts in B flat major ("Leck mich im Arsch"), K. 231 (K. 382c)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lick_Me_in_the_Ass
http://www.amazon.com/Mozart-Time-Karl-Ditters-Dittersdorf/dp/B00000E6S8
The word you are looking for is "Xenophobic"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenophobia
You are not going to address Moore's Law with silicon -- the problem with silicon is that it has an effective 4 to 5 GHz barrier -- which is its dirty little secret that no one wants to talk about. The army had 100 GHz chips 20 years ago -- guess what, they weren't using silicon, but a germanium compound.
The only "real" solution is to start looking at other materials.
> Gaming does not glue users to Windows as much as some windows fan boys think it does.
If someone is not interested in consoles where can I play BF3, BF:BC2, Borderlands, Diablo 2, Dragon Age, GTA IV, Guild Wars, Mass Effect, Sniper: Ghost Warrior, Titan Quest, Rainbow Six, Torchlight, etc. with a real controller such as Keyboard+Mouse?
Steam (L4D, TF2, Portal) just _recently_ came to OS X (with shitty performance to boot) but at least we are getting _some_ options.
> That's because most gamers are male adolescent or teenagers, ...
You don't play much MMO's do you? Methinks you want to check those WoW, EQ, UO, figures again
The _average_ gaming is ~28.
> Most of them have moved to GameBox, XBox or PS2 for their gaming.
I'm pretty sure most have moved on past the GameCube to Wii, XBox 360, and PS3.
Another "me too": Thank you! Some great articles there
e.g.
This one reveals some interesting history between True Type -- Apple licensed TrueType FREE to Microsoft!?
http://www.mondaynote.com/2010/04/11/the-adobe-apple-flame-war/
Yup, Aztec is another personal favorite!
The bugs definitely made it fun. So sad, but funny because it is true -- one of the few games that actually works.
That's a great bug list! Should almost start a FAQ for it =)
Why thank you for that obviously constructive, elegant, and insightful dialogue. I'm sure the rest of /. are all enlightened with what you added to the topic. Which is basically FUCK ALL.
Where can I sign up for your fine art of dialogue since you are a such a master of it.
Stupid git.
Are you sure you aren't one of my lost-long gaming brothers? =) Excellent analysis.
I don't think you're getting grumpy in your old age -- you have wisdom gained from experience. Basically you're tired of 14 yrs that have twitch skill but serious lack any deep strategy or tactics.
Having "grown" up playing an exorbitant amount of FPS such as the _original_ "virtual football FPS" games aka Capture The Flag (Quake), ThunderWalker, Team Fortress, MegaTF, Quake 2, Quake 3, I've witnessed the fast gameplay that made CTF great slowly become slower and slower. CoD is the pendulum swinging back the other way on fast-paced action such as Doom, and Quake 3 pioneered.
I played the original BF: 1942 and absolutely loved the 32 player maps. One of the things that made it great was the environment was more immersive. Who didn't want to drive tanks, drive ATVs, or fly planes !? The conquest mode at the time was a brilliant game design addition.
I think you're spot on with the original Call of Duty aka Medal of Honor. That was a fine, fine single player game. Multiplayer was fun, but not deep like BF: 1942
I stayed away from the other CoD games, but I played CoD4:MW and have to agree with you -- it was a dam good game. Everything was polished and executed well. But the first thing I noticed was that it was as very "arcadey" and "twitchy" with almost no deep strategy. The fact that 14 yrs were drawn to it like flies to shit didn't help -- but you can't blame the community -- the game just isn't designed to promote deep team play like other games.
You say FPS are being dumbed down, (especially the later series of CoD), but I would call it "arcadeness" / "consolization." Deep strategy is slowly being removed for ADD twitch action.
I've played quite a bit of BF:BC2 and while it was extremely difficult for the first few levels (because you can't actually _help_ your team, you are more a hinderance/liability then an asset) it wasn't until I leveled up to around 8 that things took off and I was leveling like crazy up to about level 30. The fact that you help your team win by playing your role is what makes BF:BC2 (and by proxy) BF3 such great games.
I was skeptical of TF2 (due to the rendering style), but Valve has done an excellent job of retaining the TF Spirit. It is dam near perfect.
Completely agree with you that Resistance is totally under-rated. Unfortunately critical mass seems hard to acquire with so much over-blown hype & media exposure on the "few big ones", that the other great games tend to get ignored without a great deal of momentum.
Have you played "Sniper: Ghost Warrior" ? At times it was a great single-player experience, when the dam A.I. wasn't cheating.
> I'm sick of the being asked which two of the same collection of over-exposed "real world" guns I want to carry.
That is the only nitpick in your analysis. You are ignoring Sid Meier's fundamental game design principle: Give the player interesting choices! You are not a game designer, so your lack of foresight can be forgiven.
> Pharaoh's Curse games
Montezuma's Revenge was better =) Ironically, as an Apple ][ fan, I still have a soft spot for C64 Pharaoh's Curse =)
http://symlink.dk/nostalgia/c64/montezuma/
Faux News a shill ?
* Who's That Hiding In My Fox 5 News Logo?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSAOQuLxSdY
* Murdoch smacks down Fox News anchor for mentioning hacking scandal
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0nN_snrOtk
* You don't say ...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies
> Well, you brought up two points, so, for one, the legislation for the FairTax eliminates the 16th amendment - that's the amendment to our constitution that makes income taxes possible.
Methinks you need to study your history (again) ...
"The Sixteenth Amendment conferred no new power of taxation but
simply prohibited the previous complete and plenary power of income
taxation possessed by Congress from the beginning from being taken out
of the category of indirect taxation to which it inherently
belonged.''
Reference: Stanton v. Baltic Mining Co., 240 U.S. 103, 112 (1916).
That's a total bullshit argument.
NASA would beg to differ...
Evidence: The Case For NASA UFO's - Part 2
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8524267568796529301
As would these 500 men ...
http://www.disclosureproject.org/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkswXVmG4xM
Finally, you'll get your dam personal proof in ~2030, and the we can stop arguing about these nonsense questions and get to the real questions -- "What is your view on Religion? Politics? Economics? Math?" .. and the most important one "Why the fuck do you look like humans?"
Going to get modded down ... but you know the really old joke ...
American
On-line
Losers
How people could actually _pay_ to use that crap is beyond me ...
> However ATi recovered very well with the Radeon 4000 and 5000 series. The 4000 series were extremely competitive cards. Good prices, good performance, low power usage, etc. Then the 5000 series were the first DX11 cards on the market by a number of months, and also great performers.
Yup. What's "ironic" is that the 6970 is significantly _slower_ then the 5970 *, since the 6000 series was even more about low power usage.
It will be interesting to see if the 7000 series focuses more on power or efficiency ....
The 5770 is an amazing bang/buck card.
* "Tom's Hardware : Review battlefield-3 graphics performance"
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/battlefield-3-graphics-performance,3063-8.html
> I haven't looked into the situation at all, so take this with a grain of salt, but I think the issue is probably trying to keep the key mappings consistent across all platforms. You could definitely make those key mappings work under gvim, but they won't work from the terminal for instance.
I've already been looking at the source off & on for the past month. I just want the GUI versions to recognize ALL KEYS across Windows, OSX, and Linux. (I couldn't give a shit about "1970's" terminals, but sadly the way Vim is coded forces this crap to be dealt with.)
> For all I know there may already be a patch somewhere (remapping CAPS to do what ESC does would seem to be a popular thing to want to do).
Already tried that. The problem is that I use _BOTH_ ESC and CAPS in gaming (Windows + OSX). Changing CAPS to be ESC is just that, a hack.
> If you made a patch for gvim that did what you want, I think others would also use it.
Most definitely there would be interest -- since this thread comes up every few years about why (g)Vim [still] sucks.
One of these days I'll get annoyed enough and just fix the dam thing.
So why not buy 3 drives for $210, or 4 drives for $280 and RAID them, that way you don't have to worry about when a drive goes down??
> And everyone knows plenty of lawyers who are evil and corrupt. Does that mean all lawyers should be disqualified from politics? Of course not.
You know that old joke:
Q: What do you call 5000 dead lawyers at the bottom of the ocean?
A: A good start!
If you need a lawyer to understand the law, then the law is TOO complicated. e.g. The Tax Code. Want to eliminate all the loop-holes? Make it a simple: Anytime an item (valued over $1) is sold, then the government is to be paid 10% of the original cost.
Yup, its not like an engineer could do _worse_ then a lawyer. Bureaucracy has only one goal: to keep the status quo so that it survives. At least an engineer is more willing to look at the practicality rather the rhetoric and "cute" sound bites that don't actually address the root of the problem.
We need to remove _all_ financial motives from [introducing] Laws.
Every donation should be pooled, and at the end of every month, it should be split evenly to ALL the parties, to give ALL voices a chance to have their say.
Agreed that we need to get over this "Us vs Them" mentality. An even more radical step would be to remove ALL parties and focus on the ISSUE, not the SIDE that supports/doesn't support X.
I love gVim (use it everyday at work) but god, some of it _still_ sucks.
- Can't map Ctrl-1, ... Ctrl-0 to custom mappings
- Can't distinguish between Ctrl-Char, Ctrl-Shift-Char, and Ctrl-Alt-Shift-Char
- Can't distinguish between TAB and CTRL-I
- Can't (re)map CAPS (I use CAPS in my games, remapping it to ESC is NOT an option)
- no way to "unbind" ALL keys
WHY is it so hard to find an editor that lets me use ALL the keys??
Vim would be perfect if it fixed the custom keybindings.
transcendent -> non-physical or meta-physical
aka, Numbers, Ideas, etc, unless _you_ believe numbers are purely physical ??
Please mod parent up, because this succinctly summarizes software patent issues.
Well, at least the OpenBSD guys admit on their _own_ homepage the last time they were vulnerable. What other OS manufacturer does that at _all_ ??
I appreciate the honesty and public disclosure -- not trying to sweep it under the rug like almost every OS does.
> 2. Bigger numbers. Used to have limits like 32767 all over the place on game scores, spread sheet cell numbers, and such. And there was the infamous Y2K bug. Now use of 32bit integers is standard, and 64bit integers are common. Doubles or quadruples the number of bytes needed for math.
While I generally agree with you, that's not quite true ... games on the Apple ][ regularly used ~ 7 digits encoded in BCD format. i.e. 9,999,999, as it was faster to "print" them. e.g.
GameLoop:
:
JSR DrawScoreBCD
:
JMP GameLoop
DrawScoreBCD:
LDY #7
getDigit:
LDA ($score),Y
JSR DrawNumber
DEY
BNE getDigit
RTS
A perfect example would be Lode Runner, IIRC.
It is actually worse now since everything is vectorized we use 128-bit for numbers. i.e. 4x32-bit floats
But yes, your comments about bloated instruction sets, GUI's, and security is spot on. The consumer migration to 64-bit was held back for years due to crappy "code density" of RISC.
I'm surprised they are using a point cloud and not a mesh for the tracking? That would explain why the physics seems a little unstable / jumpy when the ball floats around on the book.
Cool prototype -- will be real interesting to see what kind of applications get developed once this tech is cheap enough where every home has one.