> Who needs patches when you make the game right the first time?
Ever heard of EXPLOITS?
QA does NOT find ALL bugs, as much as we developers wished it did:)
> On account of the inevitable bandwidth increase, games can mostly be on the central server, and hence most patches can be server side or implemented "real-time" before the game actually begins, also relieving the need for a local storage device.
In an ideal world, server changes wouldn't break clients. But we're not there yet.
> I don't want to be interrupted at any hour just so someone can throw some small talk at me.
I go "on-line" whenever I play UO. If you loose connection in the game, you need to be able to tell your friend(s) that you're link dead, so they can cast invisibility on you.
> Besides, when I'm busy programming or almost any other form of hacking like setting up my LAN,
If you don't want to get interrupted, just go on "invisible" mode. I have my 4 closest friends who can see me while I'm in invis.
If you have people q'ing u ever 5 seconds, then don't respond to them. All the people on my icq list know to q me only if its important.
> I know, get a cordless.
I wasn't too big on having a cordless, but after a year, I'd say it's pretty cool. Get a cordless with a built in answering machine. Leave the handset by the phone. Screen all your calls, and only pick up if friends call. (Dam telemarketers, I just hang up on them now. "Are you interested in... "No. *Click*")
> But then I would always leave it on a table or shelf
Just get into a habit of always leaving it on the table. Works for me;-)
With PS2 (Sony), X-BOX (MS), and the GameCube (Nintendo) out or coming out next year, how are you going to compete againt the "big boys" ?
It's a known fact that consoles (hardware) sells for a loss, and make it up on licensing the games (software). What game developers do you have lined up?
As a game programmer I'd be interested in getting a dev kit. The registration page doesn't have any info on price, or hardware specs. Could you give us any of those?
> Above an average of about 40FPS, nobody notices anymore - they can't! As others have mentioned, the top end is probably closer to 60fps than 40.
Higher Frames Per Seconds follows the law of decreasing returns. A jump for +10 fps from 15 fps to 25 fps is MUCH more noticable then the jump from 45 fps to 55 fps.
> So it's smooth all the time, not just when you're standing around with nothing happening.
Yes exactly.
What these people who complain about "why anyone needs a FPS higher then 40?" are also forgetting is something called temporal anti-aliasing. The computer generates STATIC frames. You need a much higher frame rate for it to look smooth.
(I also crank my monitor refresh from 75 Hz up to 100 Hz because the anything less then 100 starts to give me a head-ache. Granted sort-of independent of the framerate, but I don't want my monitor running at 60Hz capping my 100 fps:)
"glQuake/QuakeWorld was the 'killer' 3D app that pushed 3D into the mainstream." - Pohoreski
Thank-you Carmack, for helping drive low-end PC's be competative against high-end SGI boxes.
Couple of questions:
Q. After reading the voodooextreme interview, it sounds like you are pursuing an allmost completely different rendering pass/phases with Doom 3. Can you give us any more details?:-)
Q. Could you give us your thoughts on T&L? Why does 3Dfx say it's not important?
I was using this combo 2 (pardon the pun:-) until just a few months ago.
I finally got a Hercules Prophet II (GeForce 2) w/ 64 megs of ram. Won't have to upgrade the video card for another 2 to 3 years:-)
Cheers
P.S.
You can RUN dual PCI + AGP cards. Works great for 3D development. Of course Matrix has the dual-head support, but you can't get the GeForce in PCI (yet)
> Surround yourself with good people (hire continuously), then trust them to solve problems as they see fit.
I agree, that's certainly one of the tricks of being an effective manager:
"Let people do their job !"
of course which depends on:
"Hire competent people !"
Weekly, or Bi-monthly meetings with the programmers are also usefull, to make sure the whole team is "heading the same way" so to speak. You're the "captain" of the ship, you don't tell the engineer how to run the engines, but you need to check in with all the engineers to make sure everything is running smoothly in case you need to change heading via orders from HQ (aka the management's boss)
Try to schedule programmers to do Code Reviews of each other's code. Pair them up, so ego's aren't bruised. That way they can learn from each other. It might take a while to get the hang of it, but it is definately worth it. (Leveraging an open source benefit here:)
> you would write half of all contracts with the companies; you don't, and you aren't.
Sorry, but some of us DO write contracts that we sign. At my current job I wrote the full 100% contract. After I had been hired, I gave them my contract, the company then sent it off to their lawyer, made a few tweaks, I reviewed it, and we were set.
Reading and writing contracts isn't THAT difficult! Heck, the founding fathers were lawyers and they never went to law-school.
> It may be argued that you don't have to sign anything, and that is true;
Yes, that is why I refuse to sign a driver's license. I am not going to waive my rights* to freely travel. Know your rights! Excerise them!
Remember, If you don't READ _and_ UNDERSTAND what you are signing, then don't sign it.
Uhm, you DO know that not only is the universe expanding, it is ALSO accelerating !
Edwin Hubble realized that galaxies were rushing away from each other at a rate proportional to their distance, i.e. the farther away, the faster the recession
The rate is called the "Hubble constant" which you can read about it here:
Excel 95 actually has a "mini-Doom" game built in. No enemies to shoot though. And no bullets. Ok, maybe "Doom-Style-Walkthrough" would be a better term;-)
1. Open Excel 95 with a blank work sheet
2. Go down to the 95th row
3. Select the whole row
4. Tab over to coloum B
5. Goto Help/About
6. Hold down ctrl-alt-shift and click on the tech support button
7. A window appears call "Hall of Tortured souls"
8. At the end of the hall and all the programmers names
9. Do a 180 turn and type excelkfa. Walk thuorgh the wall and see the pictures.
I'm not sure you're a developer, but it doesn't sound like it:-( Apologies if you are.;-)
> It is getting harder all the time to port a game from Windows due to what is occuring in the Direct3D vs. OpenGL wars
That depends. If you code is using an middle layer then it's not a problem at all. You just have to re-write the middle layer.
Big game developers like EA have been porting [ PC ] games to console for ages. If it was really a big deal, don't you think we would see less ports?
> OpenGL which hides certain critical info (like texture memory issues.)
You must be refering to the huge thread that Tim Sweeny posted to the "OpenGL Game Developers List."
I believe there was no acceptable solution, due to an app could switch away from having focus at any time, and the OS would have to keep track of what app had what texture handle.
> The OpenGL ARB has its head stuck in (the sand)
There is something to be said for doing "The Right Thing" instead of throwing a spec together then 6 months down the road realizing, "Oh crap, we need to fundamentally change it."
That's why OpenGL extensions are such a great compromise. They let video card manufactors come up with their own spec, and if it is a good solution, it becomes part of the official spec.
(In contrast where the next revision of D3D uses it, no matter if it is a good or bad idea. Remember Execute Buffers? It was a stupid idea that was part of the spec, no-where to be seen now.)
Yes, OpenGL has a lack of "leadership." There was an article on Game Developer just a short while ago discussing this. Fortunately nVidia has taken the lead.
Yeah, I know most game developers don't care about porting, but some of us ARE trying. Mac first, then Linux.
Where's Jon Leech for his insight when you need him;-)
Funny that Electronic Arts isn't officially doing anything on the X box yet, since consoles have been their forte. Heck, they pretty much jumped-started the old Sega Genesis way back when. And PSX ports have allways been a priority.
> What I'm saying--and I'm a game developer--is that a Voodoo 2 could be pushed about 5x farther than anyone has pushed it, but we're so busy playing catch-up with new cards and bad drivers that there's no incentive.
I'm a game developer too.
And you're partially right, but you're forgetting about fill-rate and transforms. There are only so many triangles the Voodoo can draw per second. The GeForce has raised this number considerably. 15 Million vertices per second (don't have the numbers for the Voodoo 2, but it is considerably less. 3Dfx FAQ lists 80 million pixels/sec, wheresa the GeForce 2 can hit 1 Gig pixels/sec)
What are the short comings of the Voodoo 2?
a) Unfortunately (or fortunatly) us 3D game programmers don't want to be locked into a proprietary API like Glide, we'd rather use OpenGL or even D3D.
b) max textures sizes are only 256x256
c) and only 16-bit. Gotta have 32-bit all in the name of realism;)
d) 16 megs of texture memory
e) no resolution above 1024x768
f) no full-scene anti-aliasing
Yes, all of these are "non-essential", but customers are wanting all of them.
I agree, that the Voodoo 2 is still a sweet piece of hardware.
> But everyone in the game business knows that you don't need to optimize too much on the PC, because everyone will upgrade.
Again partially correct.
But there are 2 main reasons not to optimize.
a) It's time to ship the dam game (and start making some money off of it.)
b) It's costing a lot of money (programmer's time) just to get another few % increase in speed out of the game.
Of course the main argument to optimize is
a) Lets people with slower computers have an ejoyable experience, which means more people will buy your game since they don't have to upgrade (just yet)
I do agree, it is sad, that we just "pass-the-buck" via "get a faster computer"
> A 1.66GHz chip in a desktop? Who in their right mind would need that kind of computing power?
Game Developers (Artists: Reduce Render Time and Programmers: Compile Time)
Engineers (CAD modeling)
Biologists, and Chemists (Medical Imaging: Voxel processing)
Real-Time image recognition
And of course games.
a) AI seems to be making use of the extra time we have with faster cpu's. AI is now actually getting 20% cpu time per frame, due to graphics being off-loaded to the 3d video card.
b) More accurate and realistic physics.
> Desktops have only a limited number of functions
You have to stop thinking "inside the box."
i.e.
Why spend $10K for an SGI box, when an NT box is $5K. Better bang for the buck.
> there's a point (the "absolute processing point") where the speed of a program is dependent solely on the algorithm used, and not on how fast the microprocessor is chugging along.
For some apps, yes.
But lets say you use an O(n) counting sort. Now if you sort 1,000,000 entries on a 500 Mhz, the 1 GHz will do the job in roughly 1/2 the time.
Of course it's even worse if the comparision sort is O(n log n)
Cheers
--
glQuake was the "killer 3D app" that got 3D into the mainstream. Pardon the pun. -- Pohoreski
> Also a DX engine is all but guarretted to run on all windows systems
I do agree DX is good, but you don't do much porting do you?;-)
> This being importent becaues of the fact that 90% of gamers are windows users
And this number comes from where?
You're forgetting Mac gamers and Linux gamers. Of course the "bread and butter" comes from Windows, but by writing platform dependent code, you're not leveraging any of the advantages of portable code.
> So all newer features offered on Nvidia board will be made available to DX developer first
All the new features have been available under OpenGL as exentions, unless I'm missing something? Nvidia can't go offering new features until the next revision of DX ships. With OpenGL they can add new extensions, update their driver, and boom, everyone is in business.
> XBOX uses d3d.
There are OpenGL bindings too last I heard. Carmack is on the board of advisors for X-Box, so I'm pretty sure he'd make it a priority for OpenGL support.
IN CONGRESS, July 4, 1776.
The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America,
and
We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions,
You see it specifically writes " united States of America" with a lowercase "u". Which means, America is the name of the geographic LAND.
The definition of the United States can be found in the Constitution :
Section. 8.
To exercise exclusive Legislation in all Cases whatsoever, over such District (not exceeding ten Miles square) as may, by Cession of particular States,
Which means United States is the name of the LEGAL ENTITY. (Black's Law for "Legal Entity" states: "An entity, other then a natural person.")
Now the definition of U.S. citizen in the Bill of Rights you notice it also uses an uppercase "u".
AMENDMENT XIV
Section 1.
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.
Notice the and! Which means it is possible to expatriate (give or revoke up your U.S. citizenship) and become an State Citizen or an American.
And yes, I know Black's Law Dictionary defines American as "pertaining to the United States", but American != United States as I have tried to show above.
> the first company to look at (IMO) is Lotus corp. The spreadsheet is the piece of software that made Personal Computers worthwhile.
Uhm, you DO know that Visicalc on the Apple ][ was out before Lotus 123, right?
I do agree that 123 helped push computers into "the mainstream business", but please don't turn a blind eye to how Apple got the whole thing started. Wordstar, AppleWorks, etc.
> but Intel has tried to replace x86 with the iAPX432 and the i860.
Interesting. I have heard of the i860, but not the iAPX432. Will have to read the history on that one.
Q. Wasn't the i860 a graphics processor at one time?
> The press releases and company touted both as a replacement for the even then aging x86, but since the customers wanted the x86 they kept pushing the instruction set
Yeah, the old catch-22. No new "killer app" for the new hardware.
> But quite simply they are not starting over, and never will. Intel will never have a clean break. Again, because they know all the customer's want it x86.
You might be right, but I don't know if I would say never. In 10-20 years do you think we will still be running x86 compatible software? I think it's doubtfull, but plausable.
Maybe once Intel ships the IA-64 we'll start seeing more software developed for it;-)
Slashdot Mirror
> The slight difference being that guns kill people.
And so do cars, knives, bombs, missiles, aids, cancer, etc.
Maybe we should ban every and anything that can kill a person.
*sarcasm off*
> Who needs patches when you make the game right the first time?
:)
Ever heard of EXPLOITS?
QA does NOT find ALL bugs, as much as we developers wished it did
> On account of the inevitable bandwidth increase, games can mostly be on the central server, and hence most patches can be server side or implemented "real-time" before the game actually begins, also relieving the need for a local storage device.
In an ideal world, server changes wouldn't break clients. But we're not there yet.
> I don't want to be interrupted at any hour just so someone can throw some small talk at me.
... "No. *Click*")
;-)
I go "on-line" whenever I play UO. If you loose connection in the game, you need to be able to tell your friend(s) that you're link dead, so they can cast invisibility on you.
> Besides, when I'm busy programming or almost any other form of hacking like setting up my LAN,
If you don't want to get interrupted, just go on "invisible" mode. I have my 4 closest friends who can see me while I'm in invis.
If you have people q'ing u ever 5 seconds, then don't respond to them. All the people on my icq list know to q me only if its important.
> I know, get a cordless.
I wasn't too big on having a cordless, but after a year, I'd say it's pretty cool. Get a cordless with a built in answering machine. Leave the handset by the phone. Screen all your calls, and only pick up if friends call. (Dam telemarketers, I just hang up on them now. "Are you interested in
> But then I would always leave it on a table or shelf
Just get into a habit of always leaving it on the table. Works for me
Cheers
With PS2 (Sony), X-BOX (MS), and the GameCube (Nintendo) out or coming out next year, how are you going to compete againt the "big boys" ?
It's a known fact that consoles (hardware) sells for a loss, and make it up on licensing the games (software). What game developers do you have lined up?
As a game programmer I'd be interested in getting a dev kit. The registration page doesn't have any info on price, or hardware specs. Could you give us any of those?
Thx
> SF Rush
Was that the San Francisco driving game?
There was one driving game that showed the voodoo splash screen. The game was a lot of fun to play too.
> Above an average of about 40FPS, nobody notices anymore - they can't! As others have mentioned, the top end is probably closer to 60fps than 40.
:)
Higher Frames Per Seconds follows the law of decreasing returns. A jump for +10 fps from 15 fps to 25 fps is MUCH more noticable then the jump from 45 fps to 55 fps.
> So it's smooth all the time, not just when you're standing around with nothing happening.
Yes exactly.
What these people who complain about "why anyone needs a FPS higher then 40?" are also forgetting is something called temporal anti-aliasing. The computer generates STATIC frames. You need a much higher frame rate for it to look smooth.
I don't feel like repeating myself earlier... http://slashdot.org/com ments.pl?sid=00/09/18/1121250&cid=34
(I also crank my monitor refresh from 75 Hz up to 100 Hz because the anything less then 100 starts to give me a head-ache. Granted sort-of independent of the framerate, but I don't want my monitor running at 60Hz capping my 100 fps
"glQuake/QuakeWorld was the 'killer' 3D app that pushed 3D into the mainstream." - Pohoreski
:-)
Thank-you Carmack, for helping drive low-end PC's be competative against high-end SGI boxes.
Couple of questions:
Q. After reading the voodooextreme interview, it sounds like you are pursuing an allmost completely different rendering pass/phases with Doom 3. Can you give us any more details?
Q. Could you give us your thoughts on T&L? Why does 3Dfx say it's not important?
Cheers
> I *still* use Matrox Millennium 2 w/ Voodoo 2
:-) until just a few months ago.
:-)
I was using this combo 2 (pardon the pun
I finally got a Hercules Prophet II (GeForce 2) w/ 64 megs of ram. Won't have to upgrade the video card for another 2 to 3 years
Cheers
P.S.
You can RUN dual PCI + AGP cards. Works great for 3D development. Of course Matrix has the dual-head support, but you can't get the GeForce in PCI (yet)
> Surround yourself with good people (hire continuously), then trust them to solve problems as they see fit.
:)
:)
I agree, that's certainly one of the tricks of being an effective manager:
"Let people do their job !"
of course which depends on:
"Hire competent people !"
Weekly, or Bi-monthly meetings with the programmers are also usefull, to make sure the whole team is "heading the same way" so to speak. You're the "captain" of the ship, you don't tell the engineer how to run the engines, but you need to check in with all the engineers to make sure everything is running smoothly in case you need to change heading via orders from HQ (aka the management's boss)
Try to schedule programmers to do Code Reviews of each other's code. Pair them up, so ego's aren't bruised. That way they can learn from each other. It might take a while to get the hang of it, but it is definately worth it. (Leveraging an open source benefit here
Score: 0 (Obvious
Cheers
> If you play a mod, don't upgrade!
The problem is, some servers have ALREADY upgrade ! Argh.
> you would write half of all contracts with the companies; you don't, and you aren't.
Sorry, but some of us DO write contracts that we sign. At my current job I wrote the full 100% contract. After I had been hired, I gave them my contract, the company then sent it off to their lawyer, made a few tweaks, I reviewed it, and we were set.
Reading and writing contracts isn't THAT difficult! Heck, the founding fathers were lawyers and they never went to law-school.
> It may be argued that you don't have to sign anything, and that is true;
Yes, that is why I refuse to sign a driver's license. I am not going to waive my rights* to freely travel. Know your rights! Excerise them!
Remember, If you don't READ _and_ UNDERSTAND what you are signing, then don't sign it.
Cheers
* Court cases for those interested: Right to Travel vs. Permission to Drive
Maybe you were readin this one?
> but how eventually when the expansion halted
Uhm, you DO know that not only is the universe expanding, it is ALSO accelerating !
The rate is called the "Hubble constant" which you can read about it here:
Cheers
Excel 95 actually has a "mini-Doom" game built in. No enemies to shoot though. And no bullets. Ok, maybe "Doom-Style-Walkthrough" would be a better term ;-)
1. Open Excel 95 with a blank work sheet
2. Go down to the 95th row
3. Select the whole row
4. Tab over to coloum B
5. Goto Help/About
6. Hold down ctrl-alt-shift and click on the tech support button
7. A window appears call "Hall of Tortured souls"
8. At the end of the hall and all the programmers names
9. Do a 180 turn and type excelkfa. Walk thuorgh the wall and see the pictures.
I'm not sure you're a developer, but it doesn't sound like it :-( Apologies if you are. ;-)
;-)
> It is getting harder all the time to port a game from Windows due to what is occuring in the Direct3D vs. OpenGL wars
That depends. If you code is using an middle layer then it's not a problem at all. You just have to re-write the middle layer.
Big game developers like EA have been porting [ PC ] games to console for ages. If it was really a big deal, don't you think we would see less ports?
> OpenGL which hides certain critical info (like texture memory issues.)
You must be refering to the huge thread that Tim Sweeny posted to the "OpenGL Game Developers List."
I believe there was no acceptable solution, due to an app could switch away from having focus at any time, and the OS would have to keep track of what app had what texture handle.
> The OpenGL ARB has its head stuck in (the sand)
There is something to be said for doing "The Right Thing" instead of throwing a spec together then 6 months down the road realizing, "Oh crap, we need to fundamentally change it."
That's why OpenGL extensions are such a great compromise. They let video card manufactors come up with their own spec, and if it is a good solution, it becomes part of the official spec.
(In contrast where the next revision of D3D uses it, no matter if it is a good or bad idea. Remember Execute Buffers? It was a stupid idea that was part of the spec, no-where to be seen now.)
Yes, OpenGL has a lack of "leadership." There was an article on Game Developer just a short while ago discussing this. Fortunately nVidia has taken the lead.
Yeah, I know most game developers don't care about porting, but some of us ARE trying. Mac first, then Linux.
Where's Jon Leech for his insight when you need him
3D Game Programmer
Cheers
Kind of strange that EA isn't on the list?
Funny that Electronic Arts isn't officially doing anything on the X box yet, since consoles have been their forte. Heck, they pretty much jumped-started the old Sega Genesis way back when. And PSX ports have allways been a priority.
Makes one wonder...
> If DOOM3 is as critical to accelerator success as Q3 and Q2 were, this could very well spell the end of 3dfx as we know it.
;-) to ship.
Doom3/Doom2K isn't going to be out for another YEAR. That leaves plenty of time for the Voodoo 6 (or 7 or whatever they call it
> You seem to imply that Direct3D is something different to DirectX.
:-(
... most developers use the terms Direct3D and DirectX interchangeably.
Since D3D is a sub-set of DX, once must be carefull in terminology (allthough the original poster wasn't
>
I try not to, hence, probably the reason for the confusion. Go figure.
> What I'm saying--and I'm a game developer--is that a Voodoo 2 could be pushed about 5x farther than anyone has pushed it, but we're so busy playing catch-up with new cards and bad drivers that there's no incentive.
;)
I'm a game developer too.
And you're partially right, but you're forgetting about fill-rate and transforms. There are only so many triangles the Voodoo can draw per second. The GeForce has raised this number considerably. 15 Million vertices per second (don't have the numbers for the Voodoo 2, but it is considerably less. 3Dfx FAQ lists 80 million pixels/sec, wheresa the GeForce 2 can hit 1 Gig pixels/sec)
What are the short comings of the Voodoo 2?
a) Unfortunately (or fortunatly) us 3D game programmers don't want to be locked into a proprietary API like Glide, we'd rather use OpenGL or even D3D.
b) max textures sizes are only 256x256
c) and only 16-bit. Gotta have 32-bit all in the name of realism
d) 16 megs of texture memory
e) no resolution above 1024x768
f) no full-scene anti-aliasing
Yes, all of these are "non-essential", but customers are wanting all of them.
I agree, that the Voodoo 2 is still a sweet piece of hardware.
> But everyone in the game business knows that you don't need to optimize too much on the PC, because everyone will upgrade.
Again partially correct.
But there are 2 main reasons not to optimize.
a) It's time to ship the dam game (and start making some money off of it.)
b) It's costing a lot of money (programmer's time) just to get another few % increase in speed out of the game.
Of course the main argument to optimize is
a) Lets people with slower computers have an ejoyable experience, which means more people will buy your game since they don't have to upgrade (just yet)
I do agree, it is sad, that we just "pass-the-buck" via "get a faster computer"
Cheers
--
uSA != U.S.
> A 1.66GHz chip in a desktop? Who in their right mind would need that kind of computing power?
Game Developers (Artists: Reduce Render Time and Programmers: Compile Time)
Engineers (CAD modeling)
Biologists, and Chemists (Medical Imaging: Voxel processing)
Real-Time image recognition
And of course games.
a) AI seems to be making use of the extra time we have with faster cpu's. AI is now actually getting 20% cpu time per frame, due to graphics being off-loaded to the 3d video card.
b) More accurate and realistic physics.
> Desktops have only a limited number of functions
You have to stop thinking "inside the box."
i.e.
Why spend $10K for an SGI box, when an NT box is $5K. Better bang for the buck.
> there's a point (the "absolute processing point") where the speed of a program is dependent solely on the algorithm used, and not on how fast the microprocessor is chugging along.
For some apps, yes.
But lets say you use an O(n) counting sort. Now if you sort 1,000,000 entries on a 500 Mhz, the 1 GHz will do the job in roughly 1/2 the time.
Of course it's even worse if the comparision sort is O(n log n)
Cheers
--
glQuake was the "killer 3D app" that got 3D into the mainstream. Pardon the pun. -- Pohoreski
> Also a DX engine is all but guarretted to run on all windows systems ;-)
I do agree DX is good, but you don't do much porting do you?
> This being importent becaues of the fact that 90% of gamers are windows users
And this number comes from where?
You're forgetting Mac gamers and Linux gamers. Of course the "bread and butter" comes from Windows, but by writing platform dependent code, you're not leveraging any of the advantages of portable code.
> So all newer features offered on Nvidia board will be made available to DX developer first
All the new features have been available under OpenGL as exentions, unless I'm missing something? Nvidia can't go offering new features until the next revision of DX ships. With OpenGL they can add new extensions, update their driver, and boom, everyone is in business.
> XBOX uses d3d.
There are OpenGL bindings too last I heard. Carmack is on the board of advisors for X-Box, so I'm pretty sure he'd make it a priority for OpenGL support.
Cheers
I was comparing D3D and OpenGL obviously.
;-)
Or not so obviously
> Is there a DirectX version?
... remember, BOTH API's are functionally equivalent.
;-)
Why? Doesn't the OpenGL version work?
Lets end this now before it erupts into a lame flamefest about "OpenGL roxs.. Direct3D blows"
> I'd prefer to work in that API.
Which one? DirectX or D3D ? Yeah, DirectX is ok.
However, I'll take the ease-of-use of OpenGL over D3D anyday. Carmack does too, among a few developers. I wonder why?
A nice clean, orthogonal, and portable rendering API, what more do you want?
Cheers
Not quite correct.
If you read the orginal Declaration of Independence:andYou see it specifically writes " united States of America" with a lowercase "u". Which means, America is the name of the geographic LAND.
The definition of the United States can be found in the Constitution :
Which means United States is the name of the LEGAL ENTITY. (Black's Law for "Legal Entity" states: "An entity, other then a natural person.")
Now the definition of U.S. citizen in the Bill of Rights you notice it also uses an uppercase "u".
Notice the and! Which means it is possible to expatriate (give or revoke up your U.S. citizenship) and become an State Citizen or an American.
And yes, I know Black's Law Dictionary defines American as "pertaining to the United States", but American != United States as I have tried to show above.
You might want to also read this link, which shows there are actually THREE definitions of United States
Please read before replying
Cheers
> the first company to look at (IMO) is Lotus corp. The spreadsheet is the piece of software that made Personal Computers worthwhile.
Uhm, you DO know that Visicalc on the Apple ][ was out before Lotus 123, right?
I do agree that 123 helped push computers into "the mainstream business", but please don't turn a blind eye to how Apple got the whole thing started. Wordstar, AppleWorks, etc.
Cheers
> but Intel has tried to replace x86 with the iAPX432 and the i860.
;-)
Interesting. I have heard of the i860, but not the iAPX432. Will have to read the history on that one.
Q. Wasn't the i860 a graphics processor at one time?
> The press releases and company touted both as a replacement for the even then aging x86, but since the customers wanted the x86 they kept pushing the instruction set
Yeah, the old catch-22. No new "killer app" for the new hardware.
> But quite simply they are not starting over, and never will. Intel will never have a clean break. Again, because they know all the customer's want it x86.
You might be right, but I don't know if I would say never. In 10-20 years do you think we will still be running x86 compatible software? I think it's doubtfull, but plausable.
Maybe once Intel ships the IA-64 we'll start seeing more software developed for it
Cheers