When we developers don't have to wait a full hour for a full rebuild when we're compiling today's games. (If you think that's bad, the Windows 2k guys had to wait *12* hours for a full build.)
> but PS1 is only 33mhz. You might as well buy an old 386.
The graphics capability of a PSX (PS1) doing 320x240 is equivalent to a P100 doing 640x480 in software or at least that's the impression I got when I was doing PSX development back in 95/96.
> They do put software and freedom of using/modifying it above rights of a programmer.
What rights would the programmer had? If he wrote it, he can pick the license he wants. GPL'd code is a gift, with a string attached. No one MADE the programmer give the gift away.
Not physicaly possible to travel faster then light
on
Voyager Eulogy
·
· Score: 2
> On a side note, interestingly, in Popular Science they discussed how Warp drive IS theoretically possible.
No it's not. You need infinite energy to reach 'c' (speed of light.)
> For instance a free publication might say "only one per person". If you took 500 then this would be theft.
That's a good example, but then it's not 100% free, since it's freedom depends on a conditional.
> Perhaps you are not aware that the "free" in software is meant as in "liberty" rather than "for no cost".
Yes, I am quite aware of the difference. I just wanted you to clarify which meaning of free you were using.
> In many cases free software comes with restrictions designed to protect this freedom. Hence its quite possible to steal it if you deny these restrictions.
If something is truely "free", then you can't steal it. In this case you would just be breaking the license agreement, probably infringing the copyright.
> All these things I had been pondering before, but it's very hard to do a web search on "color depth" or "frame rates" and get useful results
Aye, you won't find the answers unless you knew what you were looking for, but if you knew what you were looking for, you wouldn't need to look. Or something like that;-)
> The human eye can only recognize a color depth of X, where X is less than current standard "true-color" depths. Yet we still have 32 bit color. Why?
Short anwer:
Where's the COLOR faq when you need it?:-)
Seriously,
Gamma ties into this, which I'll ignore, since it a different problem, but the short answer is: you want as many colors as possible when you need to interpolate between any given 2. e.g. a high gradient.
At 32 bit color, with 8 bits per channel (e.g. 3 channels = red, green, blue) that gives us 256 levels for primary gradients. (Less for non-primary colors.)
32 bit is still too low, though. Ideally we should have 16-bit per channel (i.e. 48 bit color) since our eye is more sensitive to greens, and 256 shades isn't quite enough.
So it's not about TOTAL colors, but about the NUMBER of color steps BETWEEN colors.
Blending, or "overlaying" transparent textures is another reason high bit depths matter. If you overlay 8 transparent objects in 16-bit color, you get [bad] artifacts. You can see this on the older Voodoo cards, when you had transparent smoke.
And finally, memory access if MUCH faster if memory is aligned on a power of 2. 24 is not a power of 2, while 32 is. Memory controllers are slower if they have to access memory on odd alignment. There was a paper few years ago paper showing you a "wierd" memory touching walk where instead of doing
for (int i = 0; i < 100000; i++ )
block[i] = c;
it would be faster to do
block[i+0] = c;
block[i+2] = c;
block[i+1] = c;
block[i+3] = c;
> will having our color depth set to 32bpp instead of 24 make a difference,
Aside from the major speed difference, visually no, because the last 8 bits in 32bit color are usually used for alpha (the level of opacity)
> So the question is, even though you can only see one third of those 210 frames per second, does that make your playing more enjoyable or better?
It's an expontential curve of decreasing returns.
i.e. double the frame rate from 10 to 20, is MUCH more noticable then the double jump from 30 to 60.
But there are a few reasons you want > 100 hz frame rates.
a) The more people that are on screen, the lower the frame-rate. You want a high frame rate so when the action gets "thick and heavy" your frame rate still is above 60.
b) I find a monitor with 100 hz to be rock solid and easy on the eyes. At lower frequence (like 60) Hz I get a head ache (probably because the way our body clock is tied to 60 hz)
> Similarly, does looking at a 48bpp image make you happier than looking at a 24bpp image,
You get less "Mach banding" with a higher bit depth.
Again, this is another example expontential curve of decreasing returns. 48 bpp is "very good". 24 bpp is "good enough"
> that nonsensical and illusory 'freedom'
You're right to life, and property is illusionary and nonsensical ?!
> promised by the Illuminati's Constitution is/way/ more important than keeping children's brains in their heads
That's a slippery slope argument.
You can make all the laws you want to stop people from from hurting and killing others, but it won't stop every "unbalanced" person.
Like the previous poster said: " No law, passed at any level of government, will ever be able to prevent kids going postal"
Ben Franklin said it best: "Those who would sacrifice essential liberties for a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
> Richard Bartle is credited with characterizing RPG players into 4 categories: Explorer, Socializer, Achiever, and Killer.
Ah the landmark, Hearts, Clubs, Spades, Diamonds paper. The Journal of MUD Research has been renamed "Journal of Virtual Environments"
i.e.
http://www.pennmush.org/~jomr/v1n1jove.html
> Killers can go hostile and attack anyone
This is the BIGGEST problem I have with Diablo 2. I *don't* want to PvP, yet some jerk goes hostile in town, then finds me outside of town and attack me *without* my consent! WTF? Why don't *BOTH* people have to agree to a duel??!!
That and "character classes" turned me off. (Diablo 2 is a stripped down EQ, and I *can* see the fun in that) but I'd rather have a skill-based-profession style of game play.
> Enjoy D2 if that's your bag
I agree: "Play whatever floats your boat.";-)
I'll probably pick up the expansion just to check it out, but I don't see myself spending hours and hours fighting monsters just to get that "phat l00t"
> In terms of realism, the old way didn't really take long enough (you try unstrapping a shield from your arm and drawing a longsword and see how long it takes)
Speaking as a game programmer, most games are meant to be FUN first. Realism comes SECOND (Hard-code simulations have the order swapped, obviously.) Rarely do you achieve both simultanously.
The term usually applies to movies, where specific scenes have a commercial product (pepsi, coke, m&m) with the camera implicitly focused on the product.
The effect is the same in this case. Specific placement of commercial products in hopes that the viewers buy the product.
> At the worst point in the crisis, Britannia's monetary system virtually collapsed, and players all over the kingdom were reduced to bartering.
No they weren't. Money was (and is) still used for buying. I have never seen (or heard) of anyone bartering goods. (This isn't Diablo 2, where people refuse to take money for items, strangely enough.)
I was there in Apr 98, and the economy never "collapsed." (A good friend of mine played from Beta to Gold) Is the economy screwed, yes. Money grows on trees in UO. Prices of things have just steadly increased (aka hyper-inflation.) Hint to wanna-be-game designers: Don't put gold on EVERY monster in an RPG.
> Britannia has suffered a wave of extinctions, paralyzing hoarding, and a crime problem so intractable that at one point the game was forced to, in effect, split itself in half.
No kidding about the "PK problem." Gee, maybe because:
a) there was NO way to track down the murderers. (You would get gang-banged by 5 PKs, they take your stuff, and recall out. All in a matter of minutes.)
b) An expercienced PK could take on DOZENS of inexpercienced warriors and win.
I lost a lot of friends who quit UO because getting PK'd was NOT FUN, and they had no choice to abstain from it, unless they quit the game. Guess what a lot of people did.
> Early on, more experienced players figured out how to identify new characters, or, as they are called, "newbies."
They are called "noobs" cuz they tend to ask a lot of annoying questions (Can you give me money, Can you give me a item, etc.) and are ignorant about the game mechanics.
Noobs are dead easy to identity. If they don't have magic armor/clothing, or GM made equipment, they are newbies.
> In addition to being unfamiliar with the landscape, newbies cannot defend themselves against older characters who have had more time to collect skill points.
That USED to be true before mid 2000. ALL new characters start in "Trammel", a "mirror" of the world where you can't engage in PvP (Player vs Player) combat, unless you are in a guild, or factions.
> Players can they can have pets and train them to do tricks;
Tricks?! "Stay" does NOT count as a trick.
>.. and they tend to use a combination of pseudo Middle English and computerese, slipping from "thee" and "thou" to...
Hahah. Yeah right. Old English is dead in UO. I have seen a FEW characters who were role-playing, but this is a RARE sight.
> "You have to realize that the world is what you make of it."
Sort of. Player's really can't shape the world. Trees CAN NOT be cut down, you can't destroy an enemies house, you can mine but can't make the caves any deeper, People walking do NOT leave well-worn trails, You can NOT place a house over landscape that has trees, etc.
> Now the game is programmed so that the servers continually add more ore and sheep and wolves to the landscape.
This is called "respawning". Ore, Wood, and other resources spawn every 15 mins. Daily rares only spawn once a day at server startup.
A good article. Would be better if it was accurate and told more of the background, though.
> You upgrade when you cant stand your old machine anymore and the new one you buy will be at least 4 times faster.
Four times? I tend to get a cpu twice as fast as my old one (on Mhz and Benchmarks.)
> Seems to be around a 3 year cycle.
Yeah, that's about right.
My upgrade schedule was:
Apple, 1 Mhz
XT, 4 Mhz
286, 12 Mhz
386sx, 16 Mhz
Pentium, 100 Mhz
Pentium Pro, (180 o/c to 200:)
Dual Cel 550s (366 o/c to 550:)
Athlon 1.2 Ghz (not o/c as I prefer 100% stable)
My upgrade schedule has been around every 2 to 3 years as well.
Currently, I'm not upgrading for another 2 years when 2+ Ghz machines are out (Just upgraded back in Feb. Probably will upgrade the GeForce 2 first though next year.)
> and Im not very easily impressed by gee-whiz-gotta-have-that hardware anymore.
I hear ya. As you get older, computers just don't have the same "magic" or "pizzaz". (I grew up with an 8-bit 1 Mhz Apple ][ w/ 64k. Now we have video cards with 64 Megs of ram. Times sure change:)
i.e. P4 1.5 Ghz. Yeah, so. It's not THAT MUCH faster then an Athlon 1.2.:)
Don't get me wrong, I still want faster hardware, but it just doesn't phase me the same way when I got my 386sx-16.
e.g.
Cant' wait for 3D graphics to look just as good as 2D. I want a real 3D MMPRG to make Quake 3 look like Donkey Kong.
* Can't waiting for the GeForce 3 to become "bottom end" / ubiqiutous:) *
Cheers
Actually, old soundscards DO make a difference
on
Star Wars Galaxies
·
· Score: 4
I had an old ISA SB16 in my dual celerons 2 years ago. I upgrade to the PCI SB Live and my framerate jumped 2x ! Why? Because the PCI bus runs at 33 Mhz compared to 8 Mhz ISA. (SB Live was using just a fraction of the CPU)
So while the orginal poster is incorrect about ping = frame rate, older hardware using less efficient protocols vs new hardware can make a difference.
Slashdot Mirror
> All the more reason to buy a DVD player that lets you change its region code an infinite number of times
d /page0.htm
I know you mentioned DVD players, but unfortunately all the new DVD-Rom drives are RPC-2 (meaning user & vendor are locked after 5 region changes)
Fortunately, you can flash the firmware in your DVD-Rom drive:
http://perso.club-internet.fr/farzeno/firmware/
You can see the region lockout status for different drives here:
http://perso.club-internet.fr/farzeno/firmware/dv
*now to find out who the oem is on my no-name brand dvd-rom player...*
> When will this obsession with speed end ?
When we developers don't have to wait a full hour for a full rebuild when we're compiling today's games. (If you think that's bad, the Windows 2k guys had to wait *12* hours for a full build.)
Hardware is SLOW SLOW SLOW.
It took less then a minute to download too! Nice con !
Mod the parent up for helping out the community !
I refuse to use RealPlayer, as probably others do too.
> Can a Canadian shed some light on the technological literacy in their nation?
Everything from kernel development to the illiterate.
If you're asking for a national average, then web surfing, and using application software (i.e. Photoshop) would be there.
Cheers
> but PS1 is only 33mhz. You might as well buy an old 386.
The graphics capability of a PSX (PS1) doing 320x240 is equivalent to a P100 doing 640x480 in software or at least that's the impression I got when I was doing PSX development back in 95/96.
> Why would anyone but a CRIMINAL have his playstation modded to play CDR copies of games?
It is FAIR USE for a legal customer to backup their cd's and use the backups to play.
Guess you never have kids in your house that destroy CD's.
Stop making the assumption, copying = pirating dumbass.
> Have you seen what ideals the kathlolik church has? Priests as an example sacrifice their sexuality for their ideals.
Those idiots can't even read what they are teaching: http://rpchurch.cc/Bible/1Timothy/003.html
2 A bishop then must be blameless, the husband of one wife, vigilant, sober, of good behaviour, given to hospitality, apt to teach;
and again
12 Let the deacons be the husbands of one wife, ruling their children and their own houses well.
> I guess people aren't meant to be idealists to that extend.
< sarcasm on >
Yes! We should toss out idealism because a few people can't do it right. Way to go McFly.
< sarcasm off >
> They do put software and freedom of using/modifying it above rights of a programmer.
What rights would the programmer had? If he wrote it, he can pick the license he wants. GPL'd code is a gift, with a string attached. No one MADE the programmer give the gift away.
> On a side note, interestingly, in Popular Science they discussed how Warp drive IS theoretically possible.
r elativity/reltoc.html
No it's not. You need infinite energy to reach 'c' (speed of light.)
You can't physically travel faster then the speed of light. The equations of relativity contain: square root(1 - (v^2/c^2)) which you can see for yourself: http://www.glenbrook.k12.il.us/gbssci/phys/class/
At speeds above 'c', you have a square root of a negative number - something which doesnt' exist in the real world (aside from "phase" of a wave.)
> Require a permission to start up a company
What do you think a business license is?! (Permission to do business, granted by the government)
> For instance a free publication might say "only one per person". If you took 500 then this would be theft.
That's a good example, but then it's not 100% free, since it's freedom depends on a conditional.
> Perhaps you are not aware that the "free" in software is meant as in "liberty" rather than "for no cost".
Yes, I am quite aware of the difference. I just wanted you to clarify which meaning of free you were using.
> In many cases free software comes with restrictions designed to protect this freedom. Hence its quite possible to steal it if you deny these restrictions.
If something is truely "free", then you can't steal it. In this case you would just be breaking the license agreement, probably infringing the copyright.
> Thank you :)
:)
;-)
t ure04/Slide22.html
u rces/Shading/21.html
n gApplet.htm
You're welcome
> All these things I had been pondering before, but it's very hard to do a web search on "color depth" or "frame rates" and get useful results
Aye, you won't find the answers unless you knew what you were looking for, but if you knew what you were looking for, you wouldn't need to look. Or something like that
You can see an example of "Mach Banding" here
http://graphics.lcs.mit.edu/classes/6.837/F00/Lec
This page shows how our eye percieves Mach Banding
http://www.loria.fr/~holzschu/cours/HTML/ICG/Reso
And this applet lets you try it out:
http://www.cs.umb.edu/~ram/ArtAndVision/MachBandi
Cheers
> The human eye can only recognize a color depth of X, where X is less than current standard "true-color" depths. Yet we still have 32 bit color. Why?
:-)
Short anwer:
Where's the COLOR faq when you need it?
Seriously,
Gamma ties into this, which I'll ignore, since it a different problem, but the short answer is: you want as many colors as possible when you need to interpolate between any given 2. e.g. a high gradient.
At 32 bit color, with 8 bits per channel (e.g. 3 channels = red, green, blue) that gives us 256 levels for primary gradients. (Less for non-primary colors.)
32 bit is still too low, though. Ideally we should have 16-bit per channel (i.e. 48 bit color) since our eye is more sensitive to greens, and 256 shades isn't quite enough.
So it's not about TOTAL colors, but about the NUMBER of color steps BETWEEN colors.
Blending, or "overlaying" transparent textures is another reason high bit depths matter. If you overlay 8 transparent objects in 16-bit color, you get [bad] artifacts. You can see this on the older Voodoo cards, when you had transparent smoke.
And finally, memory access if MUCH faster if memory is aligned on a power of 2. 24 is not a power of 2, while 32 is. Memory controllers are slower if they have to access memory on odd alignment. There was a paper few years ago paper showing you a "wierd" memory touching walk where instead of doing
for (int i = 0; i < 100000; i++ )
block[i] = c;
it would be faster to do
block[i+0] = c;
block[i+2] = c;
block[i+1] = c;
block[i+3] = c;
> will having our color depth set to 32bpp instead of 24 make a difference,
Aside from the major speed difference, visually no, because the last 8 bits in 32bit color are usually used for alpha (the level of opacity)
> So the question is, even though you can only see one third of those 210 frames per second, does that make your playing more enjoyable or better?
It's an expontential curve of decreasing returns.
i.e. double the frame rate from 10 to 20, is MUCH more noticable then the double jump from 30 to 60.
But there are a few reasons you want > 100 hz frame rates.
a) The more people that are on screen, the lower the frame-rate. You want a high frame rate so when the action gets "thick and heavy" your frame rate still is above 60.
b) I find a monitor with 100 hz to be rock solid and easy on the eyes. At lower frequence (like 60) Hz I get a head ache (probably because the way our body clock is tied to 60 hz)
> Similarly, does looking at a 48bpp image make you happier than looking at a 24bpp image,
You get less "Mach banding" with a higher bit depth.
Again, this is another example expontential curve of decreasing returns. 48 bpp is "very good". 24 bpp is "good enough"
Hope this helps.
Why didn't they just ask a few gamers?
Here is what I found when I used to play Quake 1.
< 15 ms = smooth as glass!
< 75 ms = good
< 150 ms = tolerable
> 150 ms = forgot it
> Stealing free software is already illegal.
How do you steal something that is free ?!?
> If somebody is already claiming it as their own, how is this clause going to stop them?
That is plagiarizing, aka copyright infringement and fraud, not stealing.
> that nonsensical and illusory 'freedom'
/way/ more important than keeping children's brains in their heads
You're right to life, and property is illusionary and nonsensical ?!
> promised by the Illuminati's Constitution is
That's a slippery slope argument.
You can make all the laws you want to stop people from from hurting and killing others, but it won't stop every "unbalanced" person.
Like the previous poster said: " No law, passed at any level of government, will ever be able to prevent kids going postal"
Ben Franklin said it best: "Those who would sacrifice essential liberties for a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Cheers
> The links on the page you cite are broken...
Aye, I already found the correct link, and emailed the web master.
Thx anyways.
> Richard Bartle is credited with characterizing RPG players into 4 categories: Explorer, Socializer, Achiever, and Killer.
;-)
Ah the landmark, Hearts, Clubs, Spades, Diamonds paper. The Journal of MUD Research has been renamed "Journal of Virtual Environments"
i.e.
http://www.pennmush.org/~jomr/v1n1jove.html
> Killers can go hostile and attack anyone
This is the BIGGEST problem I have with Diablo 2. I *don't* want to PvP, yet some jerk goes hostile in town, then finds me outside of town and attack me *without* my consent! WTF? Why don't *BOTH* people have to agree to a duel??!!
That and "character classes" turned me off. (Diablo 2 is a stripped down EQ, and I *can* see the fun in that) but I'd rather have a skill-based-profession style of game play.
> Enjoy D2 if that's your bag
I agree: "Play whatever floats your boat."
I'll probably pick up the expansion just to check it out, but I don't see myself spending hours and hours fighting monsters just to get that "phat l00t"
> In terms of realism, the old way didn't really take long enough (you try unstrapping a shield from your arm and drawing a longsword and see how long it takes)
Speaking as a game programmer, most games are meant to be FUN first. Realism comes SECOND (Hard-code simulations have the order swapped, obviously.) Rarely do you achieve both simultanously.
The term usually applies to movies, where specific scenes have a commercial product (pepsi, coke, m&m) with the camera implicitly focused on the product.
The effect is the same in this case. Specific placement of commercial products in hopes that the viewers buy the product.
> At the worst point in the crisis, Britannia's monetary system virtually collapsed, and players all over the kingdom were reduced to bartering.
.. and they tend to use a combination of pseudo Middle English and computerese, slipping from "thee" and "thou" to ...
No they weren't. Money was (and is) still used for buying. I have never seen (or heard) of anyone bartering goods. (This isn't Diablo 2, where people refuse to take money for items, strangely enough.)
I was there in Apr 98, and the economy never "collapsed." (A good friend of mine played from Beta to Gold) Is the economy screwed, yes. Money grows on trees in UO. Prices of things have just steadly increased (aka hyper-inflation.) Hint to wanna-be-game designers: Don't put gold on EVERY monster in an RPG.
> Britannia has suffered a wave of extinctions, paralyzing hoarding, and a crime problem so intractable that at one point the game was forced to, in effect, split itself in half.
No kidding about the "PK problem." Gee, maybe because:
a) there was NO way to track down the murderers. (You would get gang-banged by 5 PKs, they take your stuff, and recall out. All in a matter of minutes.)
b) An expercienced PK could take on DOZENS of inexpercienced warriors and win.
I lost a lot of friends who quit UO because getting PK'd was NOT FUN, and they had no choice to abstain from it, unless they quit the game. Guess what a lot of people did.
> Early on, more experienced players figured out how to identify new characters, or, as they are called, "newbies."
They are called "noobs" cuz they tend to ask a lot of annoying questions (Can you give me money, Can you give me a item, etc.) and are ignorant about the game mechanics.
Noobs are dead easy to identity. If they don't have magic armor/clothing, or GM made equipment, they are newbies.
> In addition to being unfamiliar with the landscape, newbies cannot defend themselves against older characters who have had more time to collect skill points.
That USED to be true before mid 2000. ALL new characters start in "Trammel", a "mirror" of the world where you can't engage in PvP (Player vs Player) combat, unless you are in a guild, or factions.
> Players can they can have pets and train them to do tricks;
Tricks?! "Stay" does NOT count as a trick.
>
Hahah. Yeah right. Old English is dead in UO. I have seen a FEW characters who were role-playing, but this is a RARE sight.
> "You have to realize that the world is what you make of it."
Sort of. Player's really can't shape the world. Trees CAN NOT be cut down, you can't destroy an enemies house, you can mine but can't make the caves any deeper, People walking do NOT leave well-worn trails, You can NOT place a house over landscape that has trees, etc.
> Now the game is programmed so that the servers continually add more ore and sheep and wolves to the landscape.
This is called "respawning". Ore, Wood, and other resources spawn every 15 mins. Daily rares only spawn once a day at server startup.
A good article. Would be better if it was accurate and told more of the background, though.
> You upgrade when you cant stand your old machine anymore and the new one you buy will be at least 4 times faster.
:)
:)
:)
:)
:) *
Four times? I tend to get a cpu twice as fast as my old one (on Mhz and Benchmarks.)
> Seems to be around a 3 year cycle.
Yeah, that's about right.
My upgrade schedule was:
Apple, 1 Mhz
XT, 4 Mhz
286, 12 Mhz
386sx, 16 Mhz
Pentium, 100 Mhz
Pentium Pro, (180 o/c to 200
Dual Cel 550s (366 o/c to 550
Athlon 1.2 Ghz (not o/c as I prefer 100% stable)
My upgrade schedule has been around every 2 to 3 years as well.
Currently, I'm not upgrading for another 2 years when 2+ Ghz machines are out (Just upgraded back in Feb. Probably will upgrade the GeForce 2 first though next year.)
> and Im not very easily impressed by gee-whiz-gotta-have-that hardware anymore.
I hear ya. As you get older, computers just don't have the same "magic" or "pizzaz". (I grew up with an 8-bit 1 Mhz Apple ][ w/ 64k. Now we have video cards with 64 Megs of ram. Times sure change
i.e. P4 1.5 Ghz. Yeah, so. It's not THAT MUCH faster then an Athlon 1.2.
Don't get me wrong, I still want faster hardware, but it just doesn't phase me the same way when I got my 386sx-16.
e.g.
Cant' wait for 3D graphics to look just as good as 2D. I want a real 3D MMPRG to make Quake 3 look like Donkey Kong.
* Can't waiting for the GeForce 3 to become "bottom end" / ubiqiutous
Cheers
I had an old ISA SB16 in my dual celerons 2 years ago. I upgrade to the PCI SB Live and my framerate jumped 2x ! Why? Because the PCI bus runs at 33 Mhz compared to 8 Mhz ISA. (SB Live was using just a fraction of the CPU)
So while the orginal poster is incorrect about ping = frame rate, older hardware using less efficient protocols vs new hardware can make a difference.
> And I am not arguing with you (of course ;-).
Aye, you're just pointing some of the problems of treating corporations as persons. You're exactly right (And I agree with you.)