There is absolute NO reason to still be using C in _2007_. Use a subset of C++, and turn of that Exceptions, and RTTI garbage. You want to catch as many mistakes as possible at compile time. Use a better compiler (and better language.)
If you haven't experienced these _yourself_, you have valid NO FRAME of REFERENCE.
Does not the objective truth depend on the subjective experience?
-- HOW we treat the homeless is more important then WHY we have them in the first placce FOR that helps get to the crux of the issue in the first place.
> There is no correlation between the bible's description of creation and modern theories about what actually happened.
Exactly! Thats' why early church father Origen wrote:
"What man of sense will agree with the statement that the first, second and third days in which the evening is named and the morning, were without sun, moon and stars, and the first day without a heaven. What man is found such an idiot as to suppose that God planted trees in paradise in Eden, like a husbandman, and planted therein the tree of life, perceptible to the eyes and senses, which gave life to the eater thereof; and another tree which gave to the eater thereof a knowledge of good and evil? I believe that every man must hold these things for images, under which the hidden sense lies concealed." (Origen - Huet., Prigeniana, 167 Franck, p. 142)
> you can usually eliminate the blind spot just by adjusting your stock mirrors correctly
Agreed. I tried this a few years back just to see if it would work. It took a little bit of getting used to, but it was great being able to see cars adjacent to you without having to turn your head.By the time they were "off" the mirror, the front of their vehicle was directly across from your door.
I used this tactic to adjust my mirrors. (You need 2 lanes for this.)
- Track a car behind you in your rear view mirror. - If he's passing you on your right, you should be able to track him as he goes "off" the rear-view, and is "on" the left mirror. If you're adjust your right mirror, slow a little, so that they eventually pass you (technically this is illegal, but its only for a short time, and you're only doing it intentionally once to adjust your mirrors. Of course on the freeway this is easy to do;-) - They should always visible in at least 1 mirror, sometimes two. - As the front of their vehicle approaches your door, you should still be able to see a sliver of them. - When he finally falls "off", you should be able to turn your head 90-degrees and you should be looking straight dab at the front of the vehicle.
If he "falls" off your left mirror, push your mirror "out" a few degrees, and try again.
It feels awkward at first (like your driving a big truck), but knowing that you have eliminated 99% of the blind spot is such a nice feeling.
And of course, you should always be shoulder checking when changing lanes.
Tom Forsyth has posted about the lack of quality in nVidia cards this back in 2006
Title: VGA was good enough for my grandfather
I keep having this stupid conversation with people. It goes a little something like this:
Them: I need to get a new card - one with dual-DVI. Any ideas? Me: You really need dual DVI? Them: Yeah, VGA's shit. Me: VGA's actually pretty good you know - are you running at some sort of crazy res? Them: Yeah - 1600x1200 - it's a blurry mess. Me: That's not crazy at all. It's well within VGA's capabilities. Them: No, analogue is crap for anything like that. You have to go digital. Especially if you're reading text. Me: Dude, at home I run an Iiyama 21-inch CRT at 1600x1200 at 85Hz on a VGA cable. I can write code all day with black text on white backgrounds. At work I run my second Samsung 213T off a VGA cable as well, and that's the screen I use for email - black on white again. They're both crystal-sharp. Them: Rubbish. I just tried it myself - it's an unreadable blurry mess at even 60Hz. Me: Are you by any chance... using an nVidia graphics card? Them: Sure, but what's that go to do with it? Have you got some ninja bastard card? Me: An elderly and perfectly standard Radeon 9700. Them: I've got a 7800 GT - it should kick the shit out of that. Me: Yes, at shuffling pixels. But it's got an nVidia RAMDAC. Which is a large steaming pile of poo.
Seriously - what the hell is up with nVidia and their RAMDACs? They've been shit right from day one in the NV1, they were shit when I worked at 3Dlabs and the $50 Permedia2 had an infinitely superior display quality to their top-end GeForce2s, and they've continued that grand tradition right up to current cards. That was acceptable when a RivaTNT cost $50, but now they're asking $1000 for an SLI rig. My boss was trying to get two monitors hooked up to a fancy nVidia card that only had one DVI port on it, and whichever monitor he plugged into the VGA port was ghosting like crazy. Swap the card out for a cheap no-frills Radeon X300 and hey - lovely picture on both.
Now you're going to think I'm an ATI fanboi. And I am, because I like elegant orthogonal hardware. But I'm not syaing ATI RAMDACs are great - it's just that they don't suck. Matrox, 3Dlabs and Intel all have decent RAMDACs. Even the S3 and PowerVR zombies have better RAMDACs. Beaten by S3! That's absurd.
For example, a colleague had a high-spec "desktop replacement" laptop with an nVidia chipset of some sort that he could never get to drive his cheap CRT with half-readable text. Naturally he blamed the monitor. He's recently replaced it with a new Dell 700m, and it drives the CRT wonderfully. This is a $5 Intel graphics chip in a laptop! It's totally worthless as a 3D card, but even it does orders of magnitude better than the nVidia cards at running a CRT.
The one time nVidia cards have decent RAMDACs is when it's by someone else. Some of their "multi media" cards with the fancy TV in/out stuff have a nice external RAMDAC made by someone else, and apparently (never tried them myself) they work just fine. I'm all for new tech, but we've all been bounced into switching to DVI has for such bogus reasons - monitor sizes just aren't growing that fast.
So if someone tells you that old steam-powered analogue VGA is totally obsolete because DVI quality is just sooooo much better, ask them if they've got an nVidia graphics card.
> and most objects in our lives are too complex to be handled reasonably well by a mathematical description.
Right now, yes. But at some point in the future no.
EVERYTHING in the universe is built by [upon] math. Everything from DNA to how photons interact -- The universe IS the computer simulation.
The main problem with re-constructing an universe is
1) the hierarchy is a DEEP one (atoms -> molecules -> cells -> organs -> body, etc), and
2) the Universe has time on its side. Everything starts from one state, and changes into another. If we could simulate in real-time the amount of time needed to change properties of objects, we effectively would have solved the problem. In essence we'd be (re) writing the 'programs of life' so to speak.
Let's say I want to procedurally generate an animal 5 years old. I can see the day where I start the simulation with a single cell along with properties of growth, and run it far enough where the animal is 5 years old. The question is, how small does the dataset need to be? Right now, it's smaller to simulate the "final" output via geometry, bones, and textures by paying artists to create it, then to let a computer "figure" out what should happen.
The only real disadvantage is that it's difficult to determine what 'operators' we need to use to generate our final output. It's much like layering or compositing a digital shot. The final scene looks complicated, but it can all be broken down into smaller detailed layers.
> but you cannot use them to e.g. model the interior of one house
I don't see why not? The interior of a house uses pretty standard components -- wood, metal, plastic, glass, etc.
> Also your "infinite details" bit seems more like a misconception to me, Ok, some clarification on what I was thinking.
Procedural textures, MAY have infinite detail. But an infinite detail texture, to me at least, seems it would REQUIRE a procedural (fractal) texture.
I could imagine the API for procedural textures to look something like this
Texture MakeTexture( SurfaceProperties )
What would be really cool, if computers were fast enough to generate procedural textures in real-time, every frame, so the API would be extended to...
Texture MakeTexture( SurfaceProperties, DistanceToCamera )
But this is a game world we're talking about -- it's all about providing an 'unique' experience. How does having a lower defect rate, and tighter tolerances help in a game setting?
Sure, there will always be some error in artist created geometry / textures, etc, but isn't the issue about:
- Quality - Quantity
It's easy to have a computer generate quantity, but the quality [of textures] is lacking. The hope is, that procedural textures, will allow us to approach that first domain.
> we will be tempted to include more and more content into our games. People don't appreciate (or understand) how complicated reality is, until trying to simulate it.
Content will always be the bottleneck. Whether it is audio, video, geometry, AI, or narrative, crafting a good game is always about trying assets to keep these in control.
- Loss of artist control. Currently, artists feel like they need control over as much as possible. I think the real issue is that it is just VERY difficult to adjust parameters to easily generate textures that the artist(s) want. I completely agree that we need better tools to map what the artist is thinking, to the actual output. ZBrush rocks definately rocks in this area.
- CPU overhead -- we just don't have the horsepower to generate "good" procedural textures in real-time. Basically why would I trade IO (loading) time (of premade textures) with CPU time (generating)??? As CPUs get this faster, then this balance will definitely shift to procedural textures.
What's really cool about procedural textures, is that we can have 'infinite' detail, or as much detail as we need, with next to zero increase in cost of time (artist or cpu.) I think this will 'win' out in the end.
> For years we've seen some companies stick stubbornly to building their own engines, a costly affair. Are you talking about PCs or Consoles?
Let me know when you have an engine that runs on PC, PS2 and Wii. Not everyone is doing next gen PS3 and XBox360 games only! I'm not even going to mention the 'mobile' market.
> It is like the car factory that insists hand-built is better, Hand-Built is better, the problem is that it doesn't scale (up.)
This is what, the 4th paradigm shift of game development? 1) The move from 8-bit to 16-bit and to 32-bit 2) The move from 2D to 3D was pretty big (i.e. we can now blend any animations at run-time.) 3) Streamed data 4) Coming up with better ways to create large content creation is probably the next big shift.
Cheers
-- 'Cuz Wii, had a better sound to it then Gamecube 1.5:-)
Agreed. This Tat for Tat proves that the guys has stooped down to the level of the pirate, instead of being a better man and focusing on providing a solution that more people would likely want.
> The only way to be secure against terror is to destroy it at its roots -- and that means seriously debilitating the governments that are paying for it.
Yeah, just like the war on drugs... oh wait.
Some problems can't be solved just by throwing enough money at them.
How do you teach an intolerant person tolerance?
-- How do you win a "war on terror" when you're the one creating it??
> There has to be a bunch of gloating Sony execs at their headquarters right now.
For now.
You don't know any PS3 game devs, do you. I don't know any that are praising the system. Gee, wouldn't want it _easier_ for the devs now, would we!
Sony has really alienated its PS2 game devs -- that the guys you want to IMPRESS, not dissuade from the hardware. As much as I love developing for the PS2, one really has to wonder what the crack the Sony Engineers were smoking.
Slashdot Mirror
> C++ ? Out of the question. Too many hidden operations make development a nightmare.
What do you think Embedded C++ is for?
There is absolute NO reason to still be using C in _2007_. Use a subset of C++, and turn of that Exceptions, and RTTI garbage. You want to catch as many mistakes as possible at compile time. Use a better compiler (and better language.)
> Cite some.
- N.D.E.
- O.B.E.
- Somnambulistic past-life regression hypnosis
If you haven't experienced these _yourself_, you have valid NO FRAME of REFERENCE.
Does not the objective truth depend on the subjective experience?
--
HOW we treat the homeless is more important then
WHY we have them in the first placce
FOR that helps get to the crux of the issue in the first place.
loosen up already, most people don't care about grammar (or spelling) nazis who are that anal pedantic over an inconsistent language...
No more ST:TNG episodes for you!
> it's all fake and made up.
NASA begs to differ...
and so do these government and military witnesses
Google for:
- Evidence: The Case For NASA UFO's
- The Disclosure Project
--
Why does C++ still suck with this 'short', 'long long', and 'double' garbage??
> There is no correlation between the bible's description of creation and modern theories about what actually happened.
Exactly! Thats' why early church father Origen wrote:
"What man of sense will agree with the statement that the first, second and third days in which the evening is named and the morning, were without sun, moon and stars, and the first day without a heaven. What man is found such an idiot as to suppose that God planted trees in paradise in Eden, like a husbandman, and planted therein the tree of life, perceptible to the eyes and senses, which gave life to the eater thereof; and another tree which gave to the eater thereof a knowledge of good and evil? I believe that every man must hold these things for images, under which the hidden sense lies concealed." (Origen - Huet., Prigeniana, 167 Franck, p. 142)
> you can usually eliminate the blind spot just by adjusting your stock mirrors correctly
;-)
Agreed. I tried this a few years back just to see if it would work. It took a little bit of getting used to, but it was great being able to see cars adjacent to you without having to turn your head.By the time they were "off" the mirror, the front of their vehicle was directly across from your door.
I used this tactic to adjust my mirrors. (You need 2 lanes for this.)
- Track a car behind you in your rear view mirror.
- If he's passing you on your right, you should be able to track him as he goes "off" the rear-view, and is "on" the left mirror. If you're adjust your right mirror, slow a little, so that they eventually pass you (technically this is illegal, but its only for a short time, and you're only doing it intentionally once to adjust your mirrors. Of course on the freeway this is easy to do
- They should always visible in at least 1 mirror, sometimes two.
- As the front of their vehicle approaches your door, you should still be able to see a sliver of them.
- When he finally falls "off", you should be able to turn your head 90-degrees and you should be looking straight dab at the front of the vehicle.
If he "falls" off your left mirror, push your mirror "out" a few degrees, and try again.
It feels awkward at first (like your driving a big truck), but knowing that you have eliminated 99% of the blind spot is such a nice feeling.
And of course, you should always be shoulder checking when changing lanes.
FINALLY, I can check which names are taken BEFORE creating my character!
Being able to look at other people's gear is just a bonus.
> But the real question is, What is it that you need a +4GB laptop for?
Because some datasets are 3+ Gigs. Video, geometry, weather, game-state-enumeration, etc...
I've actually got a similiar problem -- one of my datasets is ~3.5 gigs, and I'm wondering how to manage it on Win32...
True, but mip-mapping doesn't play nice with procedural textures.
Note: I -love- my GeForce 6600GT
... using an nVidia graphics card?
Tom Forsyth has posted about the lack of quality in nVidia cards this back in 2006
Title: VGA was good enough for my grandfather
I keep having this stupid conversation with people. It goes a little something like this:
Them: I need to get a new card - one with dual-DVI. Any ideas?
Me: You really need dual DVI?
Them: Yeah, VGA's shit.
Me: VGA's actually pretty good you know - are you running at some sort of crazy res?
Them: Yeah - 1600x1200 - it's a blurry mess.
Me: That's not crazy at all. It's well within VGA's capabilities.
Them: No, analogue is crap for anything like that. You have to go digital. Especially if you're reading text.
Me: Dude, at home I run an Iiyama 21-inch CRT at 1600x1200 at 85Hz on a VGA cable. I can write code all day with black text on white backgrounds. At work I run my second Samsung 213T off a VGA cable as well, and that's the screen I use for email - black on white again. They're both crystal-sharp.
Them: Rubbish. I just tried it myself - it's an unreadable blurry mess at even 60Hz.
Me: Are you by any chance
Them: Sure, but what's that go to do with it? Have you got some ninja bastard card?
Me: An elderly and perfectly standard Radeon 9700.
Them: I've got a 7800 GT - it should kick the shit out of that.
Me: Yes, at shuffling pixels. But it's got an nVidia RAMDAC. Which is a large steaming pile of poo.
Seriously - what the hell is up with nVidia and their RAMDACs? They've been shit right from day one in the NV1, they were shit when I worked at 3Dlabs and the $50 Permedia2 had an infinitely superior display quality to their top-end GeForce2s, and they've continued that grand tradition right up to current cards. That was acceptable when a RivaTNT cost $50, but now they're asking $1000 for an SLI rig. My boss was trying to get two monitors hooked up to a fancy nVidia card that only had one DVI port on it, and whichever monitor he plugged into the VGA port was ghosting like crazy. Swap the card out for a cheap no-frills Radeon X300 and hey - lovely picture on both.
Now you're going to think I'm an ATI fanboi. And I am, because I like elegant orthogonal hardware. But I'm not syaing ATI RAMDACs are great - it's just that they don't suck. Matrox, 3Dlabs and Intel all have decent RAMDACs. Even the S3 and PowerVR zombies have better RAMDACs. Beaten by S3! That's absurd.
For example, a colleague had a high-spec "desktop replacement" laptop with an nVidia chipset of some sort that he could never get to drive his cheap CRT with half-readable text. Naturally he blamed the monitor. He's recently replaced it with a new Dell 700m, and it drives the CRT wonderfully. This is a $5 Intel graphics chip in a laptop! It's totally worthless as a 3D card, but even it does orders of magnitude better than the nVidia cards at running a CRT.
The one time nVidia cards have decent RAMDACs is when it's by someone else. Some of their "multi media" cards with the fancy TV in/out stuff have a nice external RAMDAC made by someone else, and apparently (never tried them myself) they work just fine. I'm all for new tech, but we've all been bounced into switching to DVI has for such bogus reasons - monitor sizes just aren't growing that fast.
So if someone tells you that old steam-powered analogue VGA is totally obsolete because DVI quality is just sooooo much better, ask them if they've got an nVidia graphics card.
> and most objects in our lives are too complex to be handled reasonably well by a mathematical description.
Right now, yes. But at some point in the future no.
EVERYTHING in the universe is built by [upon] math. Everything from DNA to how photons interact -- The universe IS the computer simulation.
The main problem with re-constructing an universe is
1) the hierarchy is a DEEP one (atoms -> molecules -> cells -> organs -> body, etc), and
2) the Universe has time on its side. Everything starts from one state, and changes into another. If we could simulate in real-time the amount of time needed to change properties of objects, we effectively would have solved the problem. In essence we'd be (re) writing the 'programs of life' so to speak.
Let's say I want to procedurally generate an animal 5 years old. I can see the day where I start the simulation with a single cell along with properties of growth, and run it far enough where the animal is 5 years old. The question is, how small does the dataset need to be? Right now, it's smaller to simulate the "final" output via geometry, bones, and textures by paying artists to create it, then to let a computer "figure" out what should happen.
The only real disadvantage is that it's difficult to determine what 'operators' we need to use to generate our final output. It's much like layering or compositing a digital shot. The final scene looks complicated, but it can all be broken down into smaller detailed layers.
> but you cannot use them to e.g. model the interior of one house
I don't see why not? The interior of a house uses pretty standard components -- wood, metal, plastic, glass, etc.
> Also your "infinite details" bit seems more like a misconception to me,
Ok, some clarification on what I was thinking.
Procedural textures, MAY have infinite detail.
But an infinite detail texture, to me at least, seems it would REQUIRE a procedural (fractal) texture.
I could imagine the API for procedural textures to look something like this
Texture MakeTexture( SurfaceProperties )
What would be really cool, if computers were fast enough to generate procedural textures in real-time, every frame, so the API would be extended to...
Texture MakeTexture( SurfaceProperties, DistanceToCamera )
Cheers
But this is a game world we're talking about -- it's all about providing an 'unique' experience.
How does having a lower defect rate, and tighter tolerances help in a game setting?
Sure, there will always be some error in artist created geometry / textures, etc, but isn't the issue about:
- Quality
- Quantity
It's easy to have a computer generate quantity, but the quality [of textures] is lacking. The hope is, that procedural textures, will allow us to approach that first domain.
Doh! Previewed and still didn't close the anchor tag.
*sigh*
> we will be tempted to include more and more content into our games.
.kkrieger - chapter I (Quake/Doom quality in 96K!) I certainly hope so! The main drawbacks so far, are
:-)
People don't appreciate (or understand) how complicated reality is, until trying to simulate it.
Content will always be the bottleneck. Whether it is audio, video, geometry, AI, or narrative, crafting a good game is always about trying assets to keep these in control.
> I have believed, and still believe, that procedural content is the answer.
After seeing demos such as
- Loss of artist control. Currently, artists feel like they need control over as much as possible. I think the real issue is that it is just VERY difficult to adjust parameters to easily generate textures that the artist(s) want. I completely agree that we need better tools to map what the artist is thinking, to the actual output. ZBrush rocks definately rocks in this area.
- CPU overhead -- we just don't have the horsepower to generate "good" procedural textures in real-time. Basically why would I trade IO (loading) time (of premade textures) with CPU time (generating)??? As CPUs get this faster, then this balance will definitely shift to procedural textures.
What's really cool about procedural textures, is that we can have 'infinite' detail, or as much detail as we need, with next to zero increase in cost of time (artist or cpu.) I think this will 'win' out in the end.
> For years we've seen some companies stick stubbornly to building their own engines, a costly affair.
Are you talking about PCs or Consoles?
Let me know when you have an engine that runs on PC, PS2 and Wii. Not everyone is doing next gen PS3 and XBox360 games only! I'm not even going to mention the 'mobile' market.
> It is like the car factory that insists hand-built is better,
Hand-Built is better, the problem is that it doesn't scale (up.)
This is what, the 4th paradigm shift of game development?
1) The move from 8-bit to 16-bit and to 32-bit
2) The move from 2D to 3D was pretty big (i.e. we can now blend any animations at run-time.)
3) Streamed data
4) Coming up with better ways to create large content creation is probably the next big shift.
Cheers
--
'Cuz Wii, had a better sound to it then Gamecube 1.5
Guess the wiki still needs to be updated
--
"I want to work in Theory -- everything works in Theory!" -- John Cash, id
> Face it, European culture is currently the most advanced.
Only an arrogant caucasian would assume technology == advanced.
> The Americas were DISCOVERED
RE-Discovered.
Yup -- a program is never done. Always one more feature to add :)
Agreed. This Tat for Tat proves that the guys has stooped down to the level of the pirate, instead of being a better man and focusing on providing a solution that more people would likely want.
Thats the thing this industry still has yet to learn...
Ship a bad game on time and no one cares.
Ship a good game late, and people won't remember how late it was.
Hardly anyone has such faith in their products anymore...
Easy...
One is short term, the other long term.
MS will collapse on their own, eventually anyways -- I'd rather have better solution for the long term.
> The only way to be secure against terror is to destroy it at its roots -- and that means seriously debilitating the governments that are paying for it.
Yeah, just like the war on drugs... oh wait.
Some problems can't be solved just by throwing enough money at them.
How do you teach an intolerant person tolerance?
--
How do you win a "war on terror" when you're the one creating it??
Let's talk when you've actually shipped a PS2 or PS3 title.
Basketball...
> There has to be a bunch of gloating Sony execs at their headquarters right now.
For now.
You don't know any PS3 game devs, do you. I don't know any that are praising the system. Gee, wouldn't want it _easier_ for the devs now, would we!
Sony has really alienated its PS2 game devs -- that the guys you want to IMPRESS, not dissuade from the hardware. As much as I love developing for the PS2, one really has to wonder what the crack the Sony Engineers were smoking.