Actually, mip-maps improve visual quality and performance if you have the memory available. They improve visual quality due to the reduced aliasing they can provide. The performance improvements are due to caching. You are correct that swapping textures can be a performance problem - even now it's best to sort your primitives to reduce state changes - but when you're using mip-maps, texels (texture elements - a pixel of a texture) are effectively grouped together in a smaller memory footprint. Video cards have caches much the same as CPUs do. If you have to move the entire big texture into this cache it exceeds the available space, whereas the smaller mip-mapped version is a quarter the size (and even smaller for the lower mip-map levels). The great thing about graphics is they have a lot of spatial coherence. If you select the correct mip-map level, adjacent pixels are highly likely to feature texels from within a small area. Without mip-mapping and with large textures the rasterizer has to jump all over the texture - and there goes cache coherency.
And it's not just GPUs. Back in Quake 1 and 2, they maintained a surface cache where they mixed the base texture with a lightmap (in software). Keeping the texture resolution as low as possible meant less space in the surface cache and less time mixing textures. You can read a bit about that here.
I really don't understand your shock here. I don't deny that coding to the hardware directly could achieve much, much greater results but I don't think you're appreciating what was really going on back then.
For starters, I'm guessing you're talking about VGA resolutions, and the 320x200 type not 640x480 in 16 colors. My smallest screen has a resolution of 1024x768. VGA resolution is a tiny box in the corner. The machine I'm typing this has a 1920x1200 screen. Actual VGA has a maximum of 256 colors! Beyond clever palette hacks, things like alpha-blending or anti-aliasing are virtually impossible. Think about this; 320x200x8 fits into 64 *kilobytes* of memory. Just do the math on even 1024x768x16.
Pegging the processor? How much does it affect your interactivity with the rest of the environment? When I was writing real-time architectural software, we had an 'experienced computer professional' try and tell us that our software was using too much CPU. We ran at the fastest frame-rate we could, but played nice. You could quite happily have Photoshop plugging away in the background and it wouldn't be affected because we yielded gracefully. Flash does the same.
Compare this with DOS. There are no other applications running. Your game is pegging the CPU with literally nothing else running on the system (Oh OK, resident programs like mouse drivers). It is pretty much incapable of *not* pegging the CPU.
It may seem to you as if things have taken a step backwards, but I put it to you that what Flash does now would be impossible under a DOS machine from 15 years ago.
I'm an Australian living in Japan and I've been here a couple of years now. Australian internet basically sucks - ask anyone with half a clue. Coming to Japan meant that I had a faster connection to my home than any company I'd worked for in Australia. (26Mbs down/1Mbs up vs. 8Mbs). It seemed crazily fast. Then when I moved house, I upgraded to 50Mbps fibre. It's what they call a 'mansion-type' (mansion just means apartment in Japan). The building has 1Gbps, and each apartment has a 50Mbps connection to that little black box. I've seen it transfer 4 megabytes a second to a friend of mine on the same setup. And the whole thing costs about $35 US a month at current rates. There are faster plans too. Standard FTTH is 100Mbs and I think there's some kind of family plan where you get 1Gbps to the home and then as many 100Mbps connections as you like hanging off that.
I seem to remember a story on Slashdot (maybe last year?), about the Japanese government teaming up with NTT and Fujitsu to get 10Gbps connections to the home by 2010. I can't wait.
As could be seen on the TGS floor by the tens of thousands of media and public attendees, both the hardware and software worked flawlessly.
When I was lining up to have a go at Heavenly sword, I saw two machines crash of the 8 or so they had running. On both occasions they let the machine wait for a few minutes before turning it on again. I had a friend and everyone else in the line who saw it too. Now that said, we were in the line for an hour and the machines may have been running flawlessly all day - I don't know. But I saw two machines crash in the space of about an hour.
Those were the only ones I saw crash though. So I guess it could have just been the game itself; It was clearly a demo made just for the show. But then why would you have to wait for a few minutes before resetting it...
Ah great! Now I have to balance buying a non-DRM'd product to show the people in charge that it can actually work against owning a Jessica Simpson song. The agony of these modern times.
Re:Is this compatible with consumer VoIP?
on
Ekiga 2.0 Released
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· Score: 1
We're this far down the comments, and this is the first mention of VOIP. When a technical person sees video standards and GnomeMeeting in an article they make assumptions, but I do believe it could have been spelled out a little clearer. Don't you?
I live in Kanagawa, but spent today in Akihabara and in my local Yodobashi Camera (mega-geeky places to hang out in Japan). I saw similar things. People were as interested to play the PSPs on the next booth over. I had no trouble getting on the two machines they had set up, and got to have a go without delay. The other thing was that there wasn't much playable. I saw someone getting frustrated with Kameo (had some issues working the controls out - couldn't make his armadillo do a super-roll), and other than that it was mainly just video snippets. They were all very well produced and looked like in-game footage, but I have to agree with the parent thread; there's nothing terribly spectacular setting them apart graphically. And especially when you can't play very much it's not very enticing. I noticed the number one selling game that week was ICO for the PS2 (discounted down to about $15). It think they're happy with the cooler, cheaper stuff.
I was lucky enough to go to the XBox 360 Lounge. As an aside, it's a really nice place that serves good food at a cheap price. But the main point is just how dedicated Microsoft are to get the 360 in the public mindset. Personally, I don't think they've made as big a dent as they'd hoped.
I've lived in Japan for 2 days short of a year. I can tell you after numerous trips pricing everything from speakers and cameras to notebooks and DIY desktops that Akihabara is not as cheap as other places in Japan. Big electrical places like Yodobashi Camera or Bic Camera are usually quite a bit cheaper. Maybe not the 30-40% you're talking, but certainly better. The base price is usually about 10% lower and they have points cards which bring things down another 5-25% (depending on what you buy).
What Akihabara does have is a reputation with tourists, more porn than you can shake a stick at (though less than the 'entertainment' districts), and it gets the newer stuff faster. My girlfriend bought an iPod mini there in a duty free shop because we couldn't get it for another 2 weeks or more in our local Yodobashi (Machida) or the larger Shinjuku store.
Akihabara takes a while to get around. To find the best price for something will take you at least a day of looking at lots and lots of similarly priced things before finding the one shop on a side street that has the model you want and 10% less than the competition. I've been told you're expected to haggle in Akihabara (one of the few places in Japan where it's OK), but when you don't speak the language well it's kind of difficult. The only places with English speakers are the duty-free places and they're usually the most expensive places, and the least likely to want to haggle.
It annoys my girlfriend. We live in Japan and bought a Japanese keyboard. I'm so used to touch-typing that it doesn't bother me all that often. She, on the other hand, has to press all the buttons in the vague area with the shift key off and on. Lot's of fun to watch. Not even the 'shifted' number keys work as expected. The open and close brackets are on 8 and 9 respectively.
One of us has to suffer. I'd rather her than me:-)
Even though Halo didn't revolutionize the first-person shooter genre, its influences have already taken place -- it's two-weapon, one grenade system has had profound effects, just to name one -- and it's earned its place in the annals of gaming -- IGN review
Do you remember the time when developers (and reviewers) thought more weapons were always better? There were games that promoted themselves as having 30 different weapons, always accessible. There is such a thing as too much choice (especially when most of them were variations of other weapons).
As someone who didn't know them that well, I went and did a little digging (since the story didn't even link to them). Argonaut Games are a company that employes well over 100 people. For some information on them and there games, check here.
Well, I have bought quite a few CDs that I knew were copy protected. But then I knew what to expect. I come from Australia, where copy controlled CDs are labelled as such. This hadn`t been a problem until recently. I`d managed to turn all those CDs into MP3s (for my own use, thank you very much), and the CDs had played in all my devices.
I decided to go to Japan. I took a spindle of CDs/DVDs with me. The new laptop I got doesn`t play any of the copy controlled CDs I brought with me. Thanks guys. No, really thanks.
By the way, for anyone who might be travelling abroad, keep in mind how difficult it is to get a DVD player that supports your region when you don`t speak the language. I`ll be watching them on my laptop for quite some time.
Can someone tell the rest of us what the content referred to here is:
due to an almost universal player backlash against the next expansion pack that is seen more as a $30.00 patch for missing content
I thought one of the things with these MMORPGs is that first and foremost they're 'massive'. Did they break some content and are charging to put it back in? Are the people complaining about it just after something for free? Or are Sony just milking it for all it's worth?
You mean (gulp) outside? You can't do that. There's like plants and animals out there. They eat you and stuff. And the sun! What about the sun? I'm sure you've been working on your geek tan. Why would you want to ruin that? Mine's a lovely blue. The star burns you know.
I hear there's even girls out there. Dude, it's not worth it. Trust me - I've heard the stories.
Although if you'll read the replies, you'll see the parent is full of it, the point they make is on first glance interesting and second glance ridiculous.
1Gb of mail is useful. A previous poster mentioned how he backs his mail up to CD every year (about a gigs worth). How often do you trawl through your old email? How often do you read all your old email? How often do you detach every attachment from those emails? Realistically, I don't look at 95% of my email once it's over a week old.
Bandwidth constraints wouldn't be a huge issue for email applications, and I think Google is one company who could take a fair bit of punishment anyway. 1Gb is a fair bit of email for your average user. Your average user has to clean out there 6Mb Yahoo account reasonably frequently, but a limit like that won't give even the most spam-hungry mail account a seisure for a few months at least.
Anyway, restating my point: bandwidth constraints wouldn't matter so much for an email service.
Slashdot Mirror
And it's not just GPUs. Back in Quake 1 and 2, they maintained a surface cache where they mixed the base texture with a lightmap (in software). Keeping the texture resolution as low as possible meant less space in the surface cache and less time mixing textures. You can read a bit about that here.
I hope that's all clear.
I look forward to Stephen Conroy protecting my internet from unwanted material.
</sarcasm>
I really don't understand your shock here. I don't deny that coding to the hardware directly could achieve much, much greater results but I don't think you're appreciating what was really going on back then.
For starters, I'm guessing you're talking about VGA resolutions, and the 320x200 type not 640x480 in 16 colors. My smallest screen has a resolution of 1024x768. VGA resolution is a tiny box in the corner. The machine I'm typing this has a 1920x1200 screen. Actual VGA has a maximum of 256 colors! Beyond clever palette hacks, things like alpha-blending or anti-aliasing are virtually impossible. Think about this; 320x200x8 fits into 64 *kilobytes* of memory. Just do the math on even 1024x768x16.
Pegging the processor? How much does it affect your interactivity with the rest of the environment? When I was writing real-time architectural software, we had an 'experienced computer professional' try and tell us that our software was using too much CPU. We ran at the fastest frame-rate we could, but played nice. You could quite happily have Photoshop plugging away in the background and it wouldn't be affected because we yielded gracefully. Flash does the same.
Compare this with DOS. There are no other applications running. Your game is pegging the CPU with literally nothing else running on the system (Oh OK, resident programs like mouse drivers). It is pretty much incapable of *not* pegging the CPU.
It may seem to you as if things have taken a step backwards, but I put it to you that what Flash does now would be impossible under a DOS machine from 15 years ago.
My chips go all the way to 11.
Shut up you damn Amish! Honestly you guys ruin all good threads on the net.
As far as I know, it's 50/50. The 4Mbps I mentioned was an FTP transfer where I was the server. I used FileZilla (http://filezilla-project.org/).
I'm an Australian living in Japan and I've been here a couple of years now. Australian internet basically sucks - ask anyone with half a clue. Coming to Japan meant that I had a faster connection to my home than any company I'd worked for in Australia. (26Mbs down/1Mbs up vs. 8Mbs). It seemed crazily fast. Then when I moved house, I upgraded to 50Mbps fibre. It's what they call a 'mansion-type' (mansion just means apartment in Japan). The building has 1Gbps, and each apartment has a 50Mbps connection to that little black box. I've seen it transfer 4 megabytes a second to a friend of mine on the same setup. And the whole thing costs about $35 US a month at current rates. There are faster plans too. Standard FTTH is 100Mbs and I think there's some kind of family plan where you get 1Gbps to the home and then as many 100Mbps connections as you like hanging off that. I seem to remember a story on Slashdot (maybe last year?), about the Japanese government teaming up with NTT and Fujitsu to get 10Gbps connections to the home by 2010. I can't wait.
I really get down to business when I wear my LaTeX suit. It's funny; it's clunky and yet at the same time, so sleek.
The red Pacer ;-)
Ah great! Now I have to balance buying a non-DRM'd product to show the people in charge that it can actually work against owning a Jessica Simpson song. The agony of these modern times.
We're this far down the comments, and this is the first mention of VOIP. When a technical person sees video standards and GnomeMeeting in an article they make assumptions, but I do believe it could have been spelled out a little clearer. Don't you?
excited gamers read previews, foolishly believe them, start making pre-sale orders of mediocre game
Yeah... big whoopee. You mean advertising works? Man I never thought I'd see the day. Here I was thinking they made ads purely for self-indulgence.
I live in Kanagawa, but spent today in Akihabara and in my local Yodobashi Camera (mega-geeky places to hang out in Japan). I saw similar things. People were as interested to play the PSPs on the next booth over. I had no trouble getting on the two machines they had set up, and got to have a go without delay. The other thing was that there wasn't much playable. I saw someone getting frustrated with Kameo (had some issues working the controls out - couldn't make his armadillo do a super-roll), and other than that it was mainly just video snippets. They were all very well produced and looked like in-game footage, but I have to agree with the parent thread; there's nothing terribly spectacular setting them apart graphically. And especially when you can't play very much it's not very enticing. I noticed the number one selling game that week was ICO for the PS2 (discounted down to about $15). It think they're happy with the cooler, cheaper stuff.
I was lucky enough to go to the XBox 360 Lounge. As an aside, it's a really nice place that serves good food at a cheap price. But the main point is just how dedicated Microsoft are to get the 360 in the public mindset. Personally, I don't think they've made as big a dent as they'd hoped.
I've lived in Japan for 2 days short of a year. I can tell you after numerous trips pricing everything from speakers and cameras to notebooks and DIY desktops that Akihabara is not as cheap as other places in Japan. Big electrical places like Yodobashi Camera or Bic Camera are usually quite a bit cheaper. Maybe not the 30-40% you're talking, but certainly better. The base price is usually about 10% lower and they have points cards which bring things down another 5-25% (depending on what you buy).
What Akihabara does have is a reputation with tourists, more porn than you can shake a stick at (though less than the 'entertainment' districts), and it gets the newer stuff faster. My girlfriend bought an iPod mini there in a duty free shop because we couldn't get it for another 2 weeks or more in our local Yodobashi (Machida) or the larger Shinjuku store.
Akihabara takes a while to get around. To find the best price for something will take you at least a day of looking at lots and lots of similarly priced things before finding the one shop on a side street that has the model you want and 10% less than the competition. I've been told you're expected to haggle in Akihabara (one of the few places in Japan where it's OK), but when you don't speak the language well it's kind of difficult. The only places with English speakers are the duty-free places and they're usually the most expensive places, and the least likely to want to haggle.
I hope all that helps a fellow geek in need.
It annoys my girlfriend. We live in Japan and bought a Japanese keyboard. I'm so used to touch-typing that it doesn't bother me all that often. She, on the other hand, has to press all the buttons in the vague area with the shift key off and on. Lot's of fun to watch. Not even the 'shifted' number keys work as expected. The open and close brackets are on 8 and 9 respectively.
:-)
One of us has to suffer. I'd rather her than me
First one I remember is Marathon the original had a deathmatch map called 5-D Space. Remember that one guys?
Is this a testament to how far the Pentium Mobile architecture has come, or a sad comment on the clockspeed-pushing design of the Pentium 4?
Or perhaps a testament to how fill-rate limited the game was? Honestly, what was the game? Doom 3? Or Monkey Isnald 3? It makes a difference.
Even though Halo didn't revolutionize the first-person shooter genre, its influences have already taken place -- it's two-weapon, one grenade system has had profound effects, just to name one -- and it's earned its place in the annals of gaming -- IGN review
Do you remember the time when developers (and reviewers) thought more weapons were always better? There were games that promoted themselves as having 30 different weapons, always accessible. There is such a thing as too much choice (especially when most of them were variations of other weapons).
As someone who didn't know them that well, I went and did a little digging (since the story didn't even link to them). Argonaut Games are a company that employes well over 100 people. For some information on them and there games, check here.
Could it be that the LEDs are run of the clock battery? A couple of LEDs don't take a lot of power.
Well, I have bought quite a few CDs that I knew were copy protected. But then I knew what to expect. I come from Australia, where copy controlled CDs are labelled as such. This hadn`t been a problem until recently. I`d managed to turn all those CDs into MP3s (for my own use, thank you very much), and the CDs had played in all my devices.
I decided to go to Japan. I took a spindle of CDs/DVDs with me. The new laptop I got doesn`t play any of the copy controlled CDs I brought with me. Thanks guys. No, really thanks.
By the way, for anyone who might be travelling abroad, keep in mind how difficult it is to get a DVD player that supports your region when you don`t speak the language. I`ll be watching them on my laptop for quite some time.
Can someone tell the rest of us what the content referred to here is:
due to an almost universal player backlash against the next expansion pack that is seen more as a $30.00 patch for missing content
I thought one of the things with these MMORPGs is that first and foremost they're 'massive'. Did they break some content and are charging to put it back in? Are the people complaining about it just after something for free? Or are Sony just milking it for all it's worth?
You mean (gulp) outside? You can't do that. There's like plants and animals out there. They eat you and stuff. And the sun! What about the sun? I'm sure you've been working on your geek tan. Why would you want to ruin that? Mine's a lovely blue. The star burns you know.
I hear there's even girls out there. Dude, it's not worth it. Trust me - I've heard the stories.
Pass the cheetos will ya?
Although if you'll read the replies, you'll see the parent is full of it, the point they make is on first glance interesting and second glance ridiculous.
1Gb of mail is useful. A previous poster mentioned how he backs his mail up to CD every year (about a gigs worth). How often do you trawl through your old email? How often do you read all your old email? How often do you detach every attachment from those emails? Realistically, I don't look at 95% of my email once it's over a week old.
Bandwidth constraints wouldn't be a huge issue for email applications, and I think Google is one company who could take a fair bit of punishment anyway. 1Gb is a fair bit of email for your average user. Your average user has to clean out there 6Mb Yahoo account reasonably frequently, but a limit like that won't give even the most spam-hungry mail account a seisure for a few months at least.
Anyway, restating my point: bandwidth constraints wouldn't matter so much for an email service.