Bink is still around because it's the best solution for game development, not because there aren't visually superior or cheaper-to-license codecs out there. It has low enough decoding overhead that you can do things like load your levels in the background while a cinematic is playing, or stream the video into a texture in your 3D environment, and has extremely friendly APIs and libraries that save developer time and headaches.
It only took me about 30 seconds of looking around the Ardour site to see how ridiculously underpowered it is. Support for VST effects is basically a hack. There's no support for VST instruments at all. ProTools it definitely is not. Hell, it's not even Reaper and that only cost me $60.
I'm honored to get such a complimentary response from a QW legend. =D
I'm not sure if you're going to be checking back here to see if I replied, but if you do, give me a holler at the email address in my Slashdot profile. I'm a game designer and I love picking the brains of highly skilled players.
Actually, raw reaction time, which doesn't even change too much between 20 and 30, is not the primary element of skill at first person shooters. I've looked at the raw reaction time (i.e. click your mouse when you see a light turn on) of many gamers, some who absolutely dominate me and some at or below my level, and there was no real correlation between that reaction time and skill. From what I've gathered, I've determined that skill at FPS games is more a function of experience and training rather than raw reaction time.
The basic categories that set an elite gamer apart from an average or newbie gamer go something like this:
Predicting your opponent and being unpredictable yourself: Knowing where your opponent is going to be, and acting in a manner that your opponent can't predict. If you can put your crosshair where you know your enemy is going to be, and he can't do the same, you're going to win even if he has better raw reaction time than you. This is a function of experience with the game.
Decision making: Evaluating the importance of the various high-level goals in the game, deciding which ones to prioritize, and acting on that decision. Making better decisions, making them faster. Again, a function of experience with the game.
Aiming skill: If an enemy appears on your screen away from your crosshair, how quickly and accurately you can move your mouse to put the crosshair over him. This is a function of training, learning exactly how much mouse movement corresponds to how much movement on screen, and being able to precisely produce that movement with your hand. This is often confused for reaction time when watching people play, but really, the reaction time component is only in seeing the enemy and deciding to shoot him. The rest is muscle memory.
This is where input lag really hurts, it's very very important that your field of view appears to correspond to your mouse movements with absolutely no lag. Console games don't suffer from this because aiming with console controllers is far less precise than using a mouse, so the input lag "hides" behind the imprecision of the joystick. When the game meets the PC where people are using mice, the lag between moving your mouse and your on screen view changing becomes perceptible.
Movement skill: The ability to manipulate your controls to allow you to travel faster. Not just finding the most efficient routes, but being able to use quirks in the game's movement code to give yourself more velocity. Another function of training, getting the control inputs just right can be difficult to master.
Teamwork: In team-based games, communication, chemistry, planning, and effective group decision making.
statistics show that married people (men and women) are happier, healthier, have more sex (in spite of the stereotype) and live longer than single people
What do the statistics say about married people with children versus those without children?
People aren't generally so closely associated with their jobs unless they are in a highly visible position such as PR, upper management, and so forth. "IBM worker commits crime" wouldn't be a headline unless the crime actually involved IBM.
IBM worker steals car! Microsoft employee kills wife!
Because smoking a bit of weed is totally equivalent to stealing a car and killing your wife. Totally. Or this god damned country could be rational about it and realize that it's just a fucking plant that people smoke to feel good.
If the user gets addicted and starts using more and more, the drug use might affect work performance.
You can say the same about alcohol, and that doesn't have nearly the stigma attached to it that other drugs have. The vast majority of people are able to use alcohol responsibly. Hell, the nicotine in tobacco is incredibly addictive, and smoke breaks are widely accepted despite their effects on productivity. Also, weed isn't even addictive.
There's a huge difference between testing positive for drugs and actually getting high on the job. Testing positive for weed doesn't mean that you were actually high on the job, it just means that you were high some time in the past month. What this means is you can be fired for something you only do in your own personal time and which doesn't affect your job performance in any conceivable way. That is what is wrong with drug screenings, my employer should keep their damn nose out of my personal life.
That's not how rights work. Rights are not granted because we already have them. They can only be taken away. The US constitution starts with the assumption that every person has all possible rights available to them, and from there those rights are restricted. The constitutional amendments stating the specific rights that we have are in no way comprehensive, and the 9th amendment in fact makes that clear.
I wasn't talking about "good" or "fun" games, I was talking about games that, for better or for worse, became the de-facto standards for high-level competitive play in tournaments by virtue of being the first of their kind. Believe me, I'll be the first to say that CS is a terrible game with its random-number-generator weapons and a money system that punishes the losing team by making it extremely difficult to turn around a losing streak. Not to mention the absurdity of sending an elite counter-terrorist unit into a situation armed only with pistols. All these things don't make it any less mind-numbingly popular, however. C'est la vie.
Yeah, I dislike Q3 duels for various reason I won't get into... And Counter-Strike is a joke with skill being mostly determined by who can outsmart the random number generator better. But if you like Quake and team games, you should try out the team-based modes in Quake Live, especially Clan Arena (my favorite). Another great team based game I've been playing for a long time is Dystopia, a mod for the Source Engine.
The reason is that Quake's gameplay has become a de-facto standard of sorts for competitive gaming. Most real-life competitive sports that people play regularly have been around a hundred years or more, so it shouldn't come as a surprise that computer gaming has standardized on older games as well. Quake isn't alone, we also have Starcraft in the RTS world, Counter-Strike in the team-based tactical FPS genre and probably a few others.
For games as entertainment, yes we do want original ideas. For games as competition, we want stable platforms that players can rely on to stick around for a while to make the investment in developing skills in those games worthwhile.
At LAN parties we play UT because the skill ceiling is lower so the less skilled among us don't get owned so bad... When I'm playing for my own enjoyment it's Q3 all the way. It just *feels* better to me, the movement, the weapon mechanics and balance, etc.
I work in the television industry. I work with "modern editing software" every day. I'm also a musician with a home recording studio. So when I tell you to shut the fuck up because you have no fucking clue what you're talking about, I want you to be assured that I have the credentials to do so.
Editing software doesn't do the work for you any more than the tools you use at your job actually do your job for you. The 2-minute stories you see on the news every night take a good couple hours each to edit, and that's with well-organized footage shot specifically for the story. Now, imagine having to search all of youtube for your footage (despite the summary, the footage is far from "random," but is rather chosen based on how the editor felt it would fit in to the composition musically. Hearing what will make a good sample within any given piece of audio is a talent in itself), and editing it together in a way that makes musical sense. There is no magical "Turn this into a song" button. Every piece of audio and video needs to be lined up and mixed manually. There is a great deal of manual labor as well as artistic decision making involved.
Much better, you're up to 7/10, and actually worth replying to.
Also, the GP didn't say how much the warranty cost.
I don't remember exactly, but far more than simply buying a new mouse when the old one fails, especially considering we're talking about devices with no moving parts here. I've never had an optical mouse fail on me under normal use. Also, depending on how you value your time, spending the hour or so digging up the receipt and waiting on the phone, going through whatever procedures they require for you to get your replacement... It's simply not worth spending that kind of time on something you can pay for out of pocket by just working for 15 minutes.
If it weren't for competitive strategies such as that we'd all still be paying $50 per mouse like we were 10 - 15 years ago.
Yeah, advances in miniaturization and manufacturing techniques have totally had nothing to do with that. I suppose you think the reason I've got more computing power for a third of the cost in my iPod Touch than my desktop machine had 15 years ago is because Apple sells warranties too!
Insinuating that people are somehow idiots who can't think for themselves, and that companies prey on them is WAY more insulting.
I suggest you take a hypnosis class some time, you'll learn that even your average person is fairly suggestible. On the low end of the bell curve there are people you can sell *anything* to. There's enough weak-willed people out there that a good panhandler can live in a house.
I worked for OfficeMax a few years ago. Everybody who worked there received commissions for selling those overpriced plans to customers.
OfficeMax was my shitty high school job, I had the same thing... I don't think I'll ever forget the poor customer who bought the protection plan on a $5 mouse because I was following the script and she didn't know how to say "no." I stopped following the script after that.
True that, at least for-profit stations can just try to sell more ads, preempting network advertising if necessary to find the air time. PBS needs to go out and beg for more money.
If you ask me, the procrastinators deserve a time out from TV if they've been too lazy to get off their butts and get ready for something that's been planned for years and heavily advertised for months. Let em watch static until they can get a converter, the radio will work fine if there's an emergency.
Because the spectrum has already been sold to companies that were promised they'd be allowed to use it as of February 17th. Delaying the cutoff means these businesses have to put their plans on hold. We're talking millions in lost revenue.
Also, TV stations currently have to maintain both digital and analog broadcasting towers. The power bill for even one tower is insane, let alone two, and the additional cost of maintaining two towers for longer than anticipated can be crippling for stations who already have tight margins due to decreased ad revenue. And no, we're not talking about corporate conglomerates like Disney and GE (owners of ABC and NBC), the majority of TV stations are locally owned and operated and pay the networks for affiliation.
The total cost of issuing the coupons for converter boxes is FAR less than the total amount of money raised by the government by selling off the spectrum formerly used by analog TV. The government actually made a profit on this deal.
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Bink is still around because it's the best solution for game development, not because there aren't visually superior or cheaper-to-license codecs out there. It has low enough decoding overhead that you can do things like load your levels in the background while a cinematic is playing, or stream the video into a texture in your 3D environment, and has extremely friendly APIs and libraries that save developer time and headaches.
It only took me about 30 seconds of looking around the Ardour site to see how ridiculously underpowered it is. Support for VST effects is basically a hack. There's no support for VST instruments at all. ProTools it definitely is not. Hell, it's not even Reaper and that only cost me $60.
Touch-typing has taken over from cursive as the essential skill for written communication.
I'm honored to get such a complimentary response from a QW legend. =D I'm not sure if you're going to be checking back here to see if I replied, but if you do, give me a holler at the email address in my Slashdot profile. I'm a game designer and I love picking the brains of highly skilled players.
Actually, raw reaction time, which doesn't even change too much between 20 and 30, is not the primary element of skill at first person shooters. I've looked at the raw reaction time (i.e. click your mouse when you see a light turn on) of many gamers, some who absolutely dominate me and some at or below my level, and there was no real correlation between that reaction time and skill. From what I've gathered, I've determined that skill at FPS games is more a function of experience and training rather than raw reaction time.
The basic categories that set an elite gamer apart from an average or newbie gamer go something like this:
Predicting your opponent and being unpredictable yourself: Knowing where your opponent is going to be, and acting in a manner that your opponent can't predict. If you can put your crosshair where you know your enemy is going to be, and he can't do the same, you're going to win even if he has better raw reaction time than you. This is a function of experience with the game.
Decision making: Evaluating the importance of the various high-level goals in the game, deciding which ones to prioritize, and acting on that decision. Making better decisions, making them faster. Again, a function of experience with the game.
Aiming skill: If an enemy appears on your screen away from your crosshair, how quickly and accurately you can move your mouse to put the crosshair over him. This is a function of training, learning exactly how much mouse movement corresponds to how much movement on screen, and being able to precisely produce that movement with your hand. This is often confused for reaction time when watching people play, but really, the reaction time component is only in seeing the enemy and deciding to shoot him. The rest is muscle memory.
This is where input lag really hurts, it's very very important that your field of view appears to correspond to your mouse movements with absolutely no lag. Console games don't suffer from this because aiming with console controllers is far less precise than using a mouse, so the input lag "hides" behind the imprecision of the joystick. When the game meets the PC where people are using mice, the lag between moving your mouse and your on screen view changing becomes perceptible.
Movement skill: The ability to manipulate your controls to allow you to travel faster. Not just finding the most efficient routes, but being able to use quirks in the game's movement code to give yourself more velocity. Another function of training, getting the control inputs just right can be difficult to master.
Teamwork: In team-based games, communication, chemistry, planning, and effective group decision making.
statistics show that married people (men and women) are happier, healthier, have more sex (in spite of the stereotype) and live longer than single people What do the statistics say about married people with children versus those without children?
People aren't generally so closely associated with their jobs unless they are in a highly visible position such as PR, upper management, and so forth. "IBM worker commits crime" wouldn't be a headline unless the crime actually involved IBM.
IBM worker steals car! Microsoft employee kills wife!
Because smoking a bit of weed is totally equivalent to stealing a car and killing your wife. Totally. Or this god damned country could be rational about it and realize that it's just a fucking plant that people smoke to feel good.
If the user gets addicted and starts using more and more, the drug use might affect work performance.
You can say the same about alcohol, and that doesn't have nearly the stigma attached to it that other drugs have. The vast majority of people are able to use alcohol responsibly. Hell, the nicotine in tobacco is incredibly addictive, and smoke breaks are widely accepted despite their effects on productivity. Also, weed isn't even addictive.
There's a huge difference between testing positive for drugs and actually getting high on the job. Testing positive for weed doesn't mean that you were actually high on the job, it just means that you were high some time in the past month. What this means is you can be fired for something you only do in your own personal time and which doesn't affect your job performance in any conceivable way. That is what is wrong with drug screenings, my employer should keep their damn nose out of my personal life.
who granted those rights to you?
That's not how rights work. Rights are not granted because we already have them. They can only be taken away. The US constitution starts with the assumption that every person has all possible rights available to them, and from there those rights are restricted. The constitutional amendments stating the specific rights that we have are in no way comprehensive, and the 9th amendment in fact makes that clear.
Welcome to the internet, where there's a lot less context to tell a joke from a serious comment. ;)
I wasn't talking about "good" or "fun" games, I was talking about games that, for better or for worse, became the de-facto standards for high-level competitive play in tournaments by virtue of being the first of their kind. Believe me, I'll be the first to say that CS is a terrible game with its random-number-generator weapons and a money system that punishes the losing team by making it extremely difficult to turn around a losing streak. Not to mention the absurdity of sending an elite counter-terrorist unit into a situation armed only with pistols. All these things don't make it any less mind-numbingly popular, however. C'est la vie.
Linux and Mac are on their way, probably once they get out of beta.
Yeah, I dislike Q3 duels for various reason I won't get into... And Counter-Strike is a joke with skill being mostly determined by who can outsmart the random number generator better. But if you like Quake and team games, you should try out the team-based modes in Quake Live, especially Clan Arena (my favorite). Another great team based game I've been playing for a long time is Dystopia, a mod for the Source Engine.
The reason is that Quake's gameplay has become a de-facto standard of sorts for competitive gaming. Most real-life competitive sports that people play regularly have been around a hundred years or more, so it shouldn't come as a surprise that computer gaming has standardized on older games as well. Quake isn't alone, we also have Starcraft in the RTS world, Counter-Strike in the team-based tactical FPS genre and probably a few others. For games as entertainment, yes we do want original ideas. For games as competition, we want stable platforms that players can rely on to stick around for a while to make the investment in developing skills in those games worthwhile.
At LAN parties we play UT because the skill ceiling is lower so the less skilled among us don't get owned so bad... When I'm playing for my own enjoyment it's Q3 all the way. It just *feels* better to me, the movement, the weapon mechanics and balance, etc.
First off, QuakeLive hasn't had queues in MONTHS. It also has many more players and skill matching to keep games competitive. Seriously, why the shot?
I work in the television industry. I work with "modern editing software" every day. I'm also a musician with a home recording studio. So when I tell you to shut the fuck up because you have no fucking clue what you're talking about, I want you to be assured that I have the credentials to do so.
Editing software doesn't do the work for you any more than the tools you use at your job actually do your job for you. The 2-minute stories you see on the news every night take a good couple hours each to edit, and that's with well-organized footage shot specifically for the story. Now, imagine having to search all of youtube for your footage (despite the summary, the footage is far from "random," but is rather chosen based on how the editor felt it would fit in to the composition musically. Hearing what will make a good sample within any given piece of audio is a talent in itself), and editing it together in a way that makes musical sense. There is no magical "Turn this into a song" button. Every piece of audio and video needs to be lined up and mixed manually. There is a great deal of manual labor as well as artistic decision making involved.
Much better, you're up to 7/10, and actually worth replying to.
Also, the GP didn't say how much the warranty cost.
I don't remember exactly, but far more than simply buying a new mouse when the old one fails, especially considering we're talking about devices with no moving parts here. I've never had an optical mouse fail on me under normal use. Also, depending on how you value your time, spending the hour or so digging up the receipt and waiting on the phone, going through whatever procedures they require for you to get your replacement... It's simply not worth spending that kind of time on something you can pay for out of pocket by just working for 15 minutes.
If it weren't for competitive strategies such as that we'd all still be paying $50 per mouse like we were 10 - 15 years ago.
Yeah, advances in miniaturization and manufacturing techniques have totally had nothing to do with that. I suppose you think the reason I've got more computing power for a third of the cost in my iPod Touch than my desktop machine had 15 years ago is because Apple sells warranties too!
Insinuating that people are somehow idiots who can't think for themselves, and that companies prey on them is WAY more insulting.
I suggest you take a hypnosis class some time, you'll learn that even your average person is fairly suggestible. On the low end of the bell curve there are people you can sell *anything* to. There's enough weak-willed people out there that a good panhandler can live in a house.
3/10, obvious troll is obvious. If it had more of an actual point I might have bitten. Keep trying, you'll get it.
I worked for OfficeMax a few years ago. Everybody who worked there received commissions for selling those overpriced plans to customers.
OfficeMax was my shitty high school job, I had the same thing... I don't think I'll ever forget the poor customer who bought the protection plan on a $5 mouse because I was following the script and she didn't know how to say "no." I stopped following the script after that.
Will it have realistic physics? And by realistic I don't mean video game realistic, but actual rocket science physics like Orbiter has.
True that, at least for-profit stations can just try to sell more ads, preempting network advertising if necessary to find the air time. PBS needs to go out and beg for more money.
If you ask me, the procrastinators deserve a time out from TV if they've been too lazy to get off their butts and get ready for something that's been planned for years and heavily advertised for months. Let em watch static until they can get a converter, the radio will work fine if there's an emergency.
Because the spectrum has already been sold to companies that were promised they'd be allowed to use it as of February 17th. Delaying the cutoff means these businesses have to put their plans on hold. We're talking millions in lost revenue.
Also, TV stations currently have to maintain both digital and analog broadcasting towers. The power bill for even one tower is insane, let alone two, and the additional cost of maintaining two towers for longer than anticipated can be crippling for stations who already have tight margins due to decreased ad revenue. And no, we're not talking about corporate conglomerates like Disney and GE (owners of ABC and NBC), the majority of TV stations are locally owned and operated and pay the networks for affiliation.
The total cost of issuing the coupons for converter boxes is FAR less than the total amount of money raised by the government by selling off the spectrum formerly used by analog TV. The government actually made a profit on this deal.