No it's not. All the concepts you can do in C++, you can do in C. C++ just makes the syntax SO much cleaner.
Perhaps you meant, its hard to learn to use it _correctly_, when you have multi-paradigm language support via: procedural, oop, & template programming. Which is why we have books like:
* Modern C++ Design * Effective C++, More Effective C++ * C++ Tip-of-the-Day * C++ Gems, More C++ Gems etc.
Cheers -- When is C++ going to step into the 21st century and * support literal binary constants, i.e. 0z11101011010 * support literals for +/-Inf, and NaN * support a _real_ null pointer, that doesn't call the func taking ints
void foop( int )
void foop( int * p ) * treat arrays of different sizes differently
void f3( char a[3] )
void f4( char a[4] ) * support type aliases that are the same type, and typedefs that are a _new_ type * proper macro support that is type safe
You know, I used to think that too -- he sucked. After UO, and then the SWG fiasco, one really has to wonder if he knows what the hell he is doing as a designer. But I've been reading his "Theory of Fun", and I'm starting to change my mind. Maybe mis-management was just as much part of the problem -- seen it happen in the games industry too many times.
Have to wait and see. The proof is in the pudding, or game play, as they say.
> There will be no way for the OS to know that there's new hardware unless it goes through the hardware detection and configuration stages of bootup, which is what takes most of the time.
1. There should be hardware support for this. One pin/line reserved for "New Hardware Here!"
2. Any OS that requires a reboot to reconize new hardware at any time, is sloppy.
Users should be to hot-swap audio, video, hard drives, cd-roms, mouse, keyboards, at ANY time, and the OS should keep working. Having to reboot is the lazy programmers way of saying "I don't want to solve this problem -- too bad for you!"
As a programmer, this would be a HUGE problem to solve, but it would make life for end users SO much easier. But isn't that typical of programming in the first place.
OS's and Programs really need to move into the 21st century -- it ALL about the user experience. Excuses such as "It's too hard" is bullshit.
I agree, that the the early 8-bit computers were much more "accessible". Power on, and you were ready to go. Even booting DOS 3.3 / ProDos on the Apple//ec's were much faster.
The -real- reason today's computers stink at boot time, is that there were also a LOT less periphals the older computers had to interact with. Scanners, hard drives, graphic cards, network cards, mouse, keyboard, flash memory, etc. All this boot-time querying brings the system to a stand still. i.e. Install Win98 without any sound. Install a sound card, and notice the performance drop, as it constantly has to load in sounds off the hard drive.
Just look at how bad Windows behaves when you want to browse a few thousand files on a network drive, or how the system comes to a crawl when your cd-rom has a read error.
The computer itself is fine -- its just all the extra periphals with crappy drivers, and/or driver models (network polling.)
No disrespect, but have you even done any console or graphics development??
The graphics pipeline is much more rigid and simple, compared to trying to best make use a multi-threaded architecture. Not all algorithms are parallelizable; most are serial. Sure you split the general execution of your game loop using N cores up into streaming, render, physics, audio, input, and AI, but each of the sub-components are still relatively single-threading without adding further complications about dealing with multi-threaded code! And with designers doing more coding these days, they sure as hell aren't going to want to touch MT.
The other problem you seem to completely ignore, is that each "GPU" core still needs access to the scene assets. i.e. Lighting data needs to be shared -- meaning that when changes happen, you need to propage them amongst all the cores. That's a lot of extra data pushing. Sure you could dedicate a core for landscape rendering, one for each character, one for static objects, one for dynamic objects, but how are you going to synchronize access to the framebuffer? Oh, and lets add multiplayer complexity on top of that.
I'm a PS2 dev -- the PS2 is already complicated enough, that getting optimal performance out of it, is all about balancing the various pipelines / processors. And you're going to tell me that some "magic lib" is going to make it easy on the PS3?! Riiiiiiiight.
The root problem is that we still deal with far too many algorithms are that only run in serial. There is a logical limit to how much parallelization we can break the game loop up into. My guess is that XBox 360 provides a good starting point to slowly wean PC programmers to start thinking about, and eventually coming up with solutions to good engine design. The PS3 just overly obfuscates an already complicated subject.
Cheers
-- When you're PS2 render guy wears an XBox shirt to work, you have to wonder why Sony can't provide take the time & money to provide dev tools as simple as Microsoft's.
You also forgot to take into account, all the time and money you'd wasting trying to track down iLife replacements on Windows. Out-of-the box, the bundled Apple software covers all the basics, something that the OSS community doesn't quite yet have the same consistency intergrating between apps.
The Egyptians had them first, in the "Egyptian Book of the Dead", Spell 125 1. BotD 2. BotD
> Is pretty clear to me. Although apparently it wasn't to Christianity.
The exact Hebrew in Ex 20:13 for "murder" is "lo tirtzach" (It is derived from H#7523 ratzach / ratsach.) Dr. Reuben Alcalay's (modern Hebrew Scholar) Complete Hebrew/English Dictionary says that the word tirtzach, especially in classical Hebrew usage, refers to "any kind of killing," and not necessarily the murder of a human being.
Aside: If God is a God of Love, why isn't he contradictory and a hypocrite for commanding to kill every man, woman, and child in Ex 32:27 or 1. Sam 15:2?
-- What did Paul hear, that he was not allowed to tell others when he had his OBE in 2 Cor 12:4
Actually, I'm playing Guardian Heroes on the Sega Saturn. which has a nice mix of Action, RPG, and story.
I agree with one of the first posters... the '90's called, they want their fun games back.
My uncle asked me a good question, "Why are the games from the 90's so much more fun?" Probably because they didn't get sucked into trying to make a 3D world that has low density, they concentrated on the things that mattered.
> #4 That $599 Mac Mini is looking pretty good despite my previous Anti-Apple rants of the past decade.
You wouldn't happen to have a summmary?
The reason I ask, is because I used to hate Macs in the past too. After falling in love with OSX as programmer, it gives me the best of 3 worlds: OSX, Win32, and Unix. I'd love to see what other reasons people have/had for not switching. Not worrying about having to run Adaware every month is worth it -- more so for the non-geeks.
Cheers -- Why I hate Windows Explorer... try renaming a file/directory to start with - a period. i.e. ".config" - a space, so it shows up first when sorted. i.e. " Shortcuts"
I hear ya! Just like plasma (displays) when they first came out. Had to wait a while for the price to drop from $50k to hit below $5k, but it was worth it.
It's interesting that in "graphics", resolution is being pursued first, instead of the bit-depth issue, when the later is just as important.
Since "true" HDR consumera camera's don't exist (anyone know?), it can be faked, quite convincingly, I might add. i.e. "It's a feature in Photoshop CS2 or Photomatix or FDRTools."
Even black and white can be support HDR. This is a great B&W example of why 8-bit greyscale just doesn't cut it.
-- "The difference between Religion and Philosophy, is that one is put into practise"
> Second, ability to run the program, but not see the source code. Case in point, Google.... > All of it GPLed and none of the code available for you to see, > despite the fact that Google allow you to use all these services online, you'll never see a line of the modified code.
> Both these cases violate not the letter of the GPLv2 licence, but the spirit of it.
That's an really interesting point.
Technically, google is only allowing people to modify the input. Since they are not distributing the binary, they are not under an obligation to release the source. Is that against the spirit? If we treat software as firmware, then yes. If we treat it as a semi-private tool, then no.
What does the GPL v3 do to "clean" up the ambiguities?
This is why I bought an ED Plasma TH42PWD5UY. DVDs are only 720x480. The Plasma's native resolution is 852x480, which means no vertical scaling (perfect 1:1 scaling), and DVDs look fantastic on it.
> This post is but one of dozens here in support of the "superior" sound quality of vinyl that are complete hogwash and reveal through their descriptions of digital recording that they have no technical knowledge.
Spoken like someone who has never listened to vinyl on speakers costing more then $10k.
1. Come back when you can quote the _efficiency_ of your speaker's drivers.
2. Do a Double Blind A-B test on REAL Horn speakers, and you'll HEAR the difference, and realize that CD stands for Crap Digital, cold, and totally lacking emotion.
3. All your theory means nothing, if the experience says otherwise. Now go do your own test.
Slashdot Mirror
> Looks like the Creative fanboys have mod-points today
:-)
No kidding! Maybe some of the mods will actually _read_ the link, and see the _facts_ for themselves.
Thx for including the link -- was too lazy to include it
Cheers
> C++ is a bitch to learn
No it's not. All the concepts you can do in C++, you can do in C. C++ just makes the syntax SO much cleaner.
Perhaps you meant, its hard to learn to use it _correctly_, when you have multi-paradigm language support via: procedural, oop, & template programming. Which is why we have books like:
* Modern C++ Design
* Effective C++, More Effective C++
* C++ Tip-of-the-Day
* C++ Gems, More C++ Gems
etc.
Cheers
--
When is C++ going to step into the 21st century and
* support literal binary constants, i.e. 0z11101011010
* support literals for +/-Inf, and NaN
* support a _real_ null pointer, that doesn't call the func taking ints
void foop( int )
void foop( int * p )
* treat arrays of different sizes differently
void f3( char a[3] )
void f4( char a[4] )
* support type aliases that are the same type, and typedefs that are a _new_ type
* proper macro support that is type safe
Fuck Creative after they pulled that Patent-crap with John Carmack when he _co-invents_ Carmack's Reverse
Good luck suing the government!
This is similiar to:
You _can not_ sue the police for them failing to protect you.
Without accountability, the point of government disappears.
You know, I used to think that too -- he sucked. After UO, and then the SWG fiasco, one really has to wonder if he knows what the hell he is doing as a designer. But I've been reading his "Theory of Fun", and I'm starting to change my mind. Maybe mis-management was just as much part of the problem -- seen it happen in the games industry too many times.
Have to wait and see. The proof is in the pudding, or game play, as they say.
> There will be no way for the OS to know that there's new hardware unless it goes through the hardware detection and configuration stages of bootup, which is what takes most of the time.
1. There should be hardware support for this. One pin/line reserved for "New Hardware Here!"
2. Any OS that requires a reboot to reconize new hardware at any time, is sloppy.
Users should be to hot-swap audio, video, hard drives, cd-roms, mouse, keyboards, at ANY time, and the OS should keep working. Having to reboot is the lazy programmers way of saying "I don't want to solve this problem -- too bad for you!"
As a programmer, this would be a HUGE problem to solve, but it would make life for end users SO much easier. But isn't that typical of programming in the first place.
OS's and Programs really need to move into the 21st century -- it ALL about the user experience. Excuses such as "It's too hard" is bullshit.
Cheers
I agree, that the the early 8-bit computers were much more "accessible". Power on, and you were ready to go. Even booting DOS 3.3 / ProDos on the Apple //ec's were much faster.
The -real- reason today's computers stink at boot time, is that there were also a LOT less periphals the older computers had to interact with. Scanners, hard drives, graphic cards, network cards, mouse, keyboard, flash memory, etc. All this boot-time querying brings the system to a stand still. i.e. Install Win98 without any sound. Install a sound card, and notice the performance drop, as it constantly has to load in sounds off the hard drive.
Just look at how bad Windows behaves when you want to browse a few thousand files on a network drive, or how the system comes to a crawl when your cd-rom has a read error.
The computer itself is fine -- its just all the extra periphals with crappy drivers, and/or driver models (network polling.)
Cheers
No disrespect, but have you even done any console or graphics development??
The graphics pipeline is much more rigid and simple, compared to trying to best make use a multi-threaded architecture. Not all algorithms are parallelizable; most are serial. Sure you split the general execution of your game loop using N cores up into streaming, render, physics, audio, input, and AI, but each of the sub-components are still relatively single-threading without adding further complications about dealing with multi-threaded code! And with designers doing more coding these days, they sure as hell aren't going to want to touch MT.
The other problem you seem to completely ignore, is that each "GPU" core still needs access to the scene assets. i.e. Lighting data needs to be shared -- meaning that when changes happen, you need to propage them amongst all the cores. That's a lot of extra data pushing. Sure you could dedicate a core for landscape rendering, one for each character, one for static objects, one for dynamic objects, but how are you going to synchronize access to the framebuffer? Oh, and lets add multiplayer complexity on top of that.
I'm a PS2 dev -- the PS2 is already complicated enough, that getting optimal performance out of it, is all about balancing the various pipelines / processors. And you're going to tell me that some "magic lib" is going to make it easy on the PS3?! Riiiiiiiight.
The root problem is that we still deal with far too many algorithms are that only run in serial. There is a logical limit to how much parallelization we can break the game loop up into. My guess is that XBox 360 provides a good starting point to slowly wean PC programmers to start thinking about, and eventually coming up with solutions to good engine design. The PS3 just overly obfuscates an already complicated subject.
Cheers
--
When you're PS2 render guy wears an XBox shirt to work, you have to wonder why Sony can't provide take the time & money to provide dev tools as simple as Microsoft's.
I agree. Take a look at the intro for SotC (Shadows of the Colussus) The swimming textures is almost enough to make me barf.
Thank God Sony went to nVidia for their GPU on the PS3...
Who died, and appointed you supreme dictator of the English language?
In other words, some of use could care less.
Before you can even begin to understand Genesis, you need to figure out why Day 2 isn't called good.
You also forgot to take into account, all the time and money you'd wasting trying to track down iLife replacements on Windows. Out-of-the box, the bundled Apple software covers all the basics, something that the OSS community doesn't quite yet have the same consistency intergrating between apps.
So what's a good alternative website for ordering gear from?
Also, I'm looking for GBA game dev "home-brew" related hardware. Any recommended sites?
Cheers
> Ten commandments?
The Egyptians had them first, in the "Egyptian Book of the Dead", Spell 125
1. BotD
2. BotD
> Is pretty clear to me. Although apparently it wasn't to Christianity.
The exact Hebrew in Ex 20:13 for "murder" is "lo tirtzach" (It is derived from H#7523 ratzach / ratsach.) Dr. Reuben Alcalay's (modern Hebrew Scholar) Complete Hebrew/English Dictionary says that the word tirtzach, especially in classical Hebrew usage, refers to "any kind of killing," and not necessarily the murder of a human being.
Aside: If God is a God of Love, why isn't he contradictory and a hypocrite for commanding to kill every man, woman, and child in Ex 32:27 or 1. Sam 15:2?
--
What did Paul hear, that he was not allowed to tell others when he had his OBE in 2 Cor 12:4
For those that missed it the first time...
WoW meets LotR
Actually, I'm playing Guardian Heroes on the Sega Saturn. which has a nice mix of Action, RPG, and story.
... the '90's called, they want their fun games back.
I agree with one of the first posters
My uncle asked me a good question, "Why are the games from the 90's so much more fun?" Probably because they didn't get sucked into trying to make a 3D world that has low density, they concentrated on the things that mattered.
> #4 That $599 Mac Mini is looking pretty good despite my previous Anti-Apple rants of the past decade.
You wouldn't happen to have a summmary?
The reason I ask, is because I used to hate Macs in the past too. After falling in love with OSX as programmer, it gives me the best of 3 worlds: OSX, Win32, and Unix. I'd love to see what other reasons people have/had for not switching. Not worrying about having to run Adaware every month is worth it -- more so for the non-geeks.
Cheers
--
Why I hate Windows Explorer... try renaming a file/directory to start with
- a period. i.e. ".config"
- a space, so it shows up first when sorted. i.e. " Shortcuts"
I hear ya! Just like plasma (displays) when they first came out. Had to wait a while for the price to drop from $50k to hit below $5k, but it was worth it.
It's interesting that in "graphics", resolution is being pursued first, instead of the bit-depth issue, when the later is just as important.
Cheers
Since "true" HDR consumera camera's don't exist (anyone know?), it can be faked, quite convincingly, I might add.
i.e.
"It's a feature in Photoshop CS2 or Photomatix or FDRTools."
Even black and white can be support HDR. This is a great B&W example of why 8-bit greyscale just doesn't cut it.
--
"The difference between Religion and Philosophy, is that one is put into practise"
I thought Bruce Campbell was responsible for "Groovy"? Didn't know Sam Raimi was the director/producer.
Sacrifice's engine was pretty good too. Continious LOD for Terrain. Too bad the editor was wouldn't always start.
> Second, ability to run the program, but not see the source code. Case in point, Google. ...
> All of it GPLed and none of the code available for you to see,
> despite the fact that Google allow you to use all these services online, you'll never see a line of the modified code.
> Both these cases violate not the letter of the GPLv2 licence, but the spirit of it.
That's an really interesting point.
Technically, google is only allowing people to modify the input. Since they are not distributing the binary, they are not under an obligation to release the source. Is that against the spirit? If we treat software as firmware, then yes. If we treat it as a semi-private tool, then no.
What does the GPL v3 do to "clean" up the ambiguities?
Cheers
> let go of their assumption that their turntable must sound better because they paid $10k for it.
I said *speakers*. Learn to read.
Damn straight.
This is why I bought an ED Plasma TH42PWD5UY. DVDs are only 720x480. The Plasma's native resolution is 852x480, which means no vertical scaling (perfect 1:1 scaling), and DVDs look fantastic on it.
> This post is but one of dozens here in support of the "superior" sound quality of vinyl that are complete hogwash and reveal through their descriptions of digital recording that they have no technical knowledge.
Spoken like someone who has never listened to vinyl on speakers costing more then $10k.
1. Come back when you can quote the _efficiency_ of your speaker's drivers.
2. Do a Double Blind A-B test on REAL Horn speakers, and you'll HEAR the difference, and realize that CD stands for Crap Digital, cold, and totally lacking emotion.
3. All your theory means nothing, if the experience says otherwise. Now go do your own test.