As always, I am surprised by a lack of recognition for eDonkey2000 at Slashdot. The ed2k is, I believe, technologically superior, it has better clients (and larger variety, and the leading ones are also open source). The system is also provides prolonged availablity much better.
In addition to this, ed2k is better protected from "anti-piracy" attacks. There is additional server layer, very resistant to servers being temporarily shut off and requiring (I believe) less traffic. A lot of negotiation is performed directly between clients - the Overnet model does not require servers at all. Finally, the actual links are in the form of short text links that can be e-mailed, printed and even spelled over the phone, not in the form of.bittorrent files that have to be hosted somewhere. This is also the reason why ed2k-link sites are more resistant to lawsuits.
P.S. This seems to me just one more case of an inferior technology receiving an unfair share of coverage. Like MS dominates the media, BitTorrent seems to dominate Slashdot...
Something like that. I was watching water reflections in Real Life (tm) and it really surprised me how similar they look to the simulated ones (those in recent games like Enclave).
Don't forget his acting achievements on the propaganda front that are really comparable with McCarthy's best results.
Surprise-surprise! USSR was not an evil empire, although the US propaganda definitely succeeded in making ordinary Americans believe that. That is a topic for a separate discussion, but just consider internationalism in the USSR vs. racism in the US and gender equality in Soviet Russia since 1917 vs. woman position in the US until few decades ago. Or find out which country used nuclear bombs against civilians, doesn't it deserve to be called evil empire for that? Or who killed more innocents in Vietnam or Korea. Or who supported the most number of totalitarian wacko dictators in the third world?
Somehow, for some extremely surreal and mystic reason, nobody wants to kill Finns, Swiss and New Zealanders... I wonder why. The last time I checked, none of them had a pressing need to have a 100000 ton nuclear aircraft. May be the bad people are not so bad after all? Even if they do hate, they only hate Americans and not other people, right?
Could you please remind me when it was that someone have threatened US the last time. And I don't mean when your own president threatened you with Iraqi WMD, I mean real genuine threats. It seems to me the perfect case of artificially manufacturing the image of the external enemy. Sadly, this is done by your own selected officials so that they can still play with the expensive military toys.
The article heavily concentrated on heavy users, but the same questions - "download" or "get a physical copy" - have to be answered by normal users every day. For example I have 200Gb of storage filled with DivX movies and I needed to choose between cheaper CD-Rs and faster access HDDs. I also need to decide whether to get the film on a printed CD for 3$ or to download it using a flat-rate megabit connection. These were not the easy choices and I am looking forward to 20Tb drives.
1. Games that simulate something that you play with. 2. Games that simulate you as another character in another world.
First category includes games ranging from chess to RTS, to economic simulators, to logic games. These need gameplay first, story second and graphics third. All parts are important, though. You (an average game player that represents THE CUSTOMER) might settle for a game with poor graphics, but brilliant story and gameplay, all right... But given a choice between that and a game with slightly worse story and gameplay, but with brilliant state-of-the-art graphics, he might as well choose the good looking game. Another thing is that sequels (for non-story-based games) must have great graphics, because the potential for gameplay improvement is limited. That is football sims and The Sims themselves.
Second category includes first and foremost FPS games and also things like racing sims, flight sims, etc. The gameplay is pretty well defined already. Unless you are making a truly innovative game (and all games cannot be truly innovative, there is no developer capability for that and no market) like Rez or Black & White, you must concentrate on realism (graphics and audio realism that is). Gameplay and story are also very important, but not as important as graphics - you are making the story, kind of. These games will ultimately lead to the development of full-immersion VR indistinguishable from reality. To claim that FPSs don't need good graphics is to slow down the development of VR which is a bad thing.
Regarding your sarcastic comment about "genetics". Well, you might be surprised but yes, it will be very close to what you describe. Haven't you noticed that all games now use motion capture, from FPS to RTS? Don't you realise that both Sims and HL2 (and probably SWG) have procedural models that can be tweaked and (in case of Sims) can "genetically" evolve. Don't you realise that many games now have face expression capabilities, not only FPS games. Yes, non-FPS games may lag behind, because as I explained above, they are in a different category. But they eventually accept all technologies of the previous generation of FPS games. Compare Quake and WC3. Compare Q2 and C&C: Generals. Compare Q3 and Rome: Total War. All the technologies quickly become generic. John Romero's lighing is revolutionary today, but tomorrow its varieties will be included in all new games, even train simulators. Shadows were once a revolutionary technology and I remember how cool it was for Kingpin to include them for characters. Today you have shadows for every object in every game. Now translucent shadows and soft shadows are introduced in FPS games. Expect them in all other games quite soon.
Can you tell me any reason whatsoever, why games should look like shit? If we ignore for a moment the efforts needed to design the game engine and create a good-looking world, why shouldn't the games look 100% realistic? Is that a bad thing per se? Or do you simply think that your priorities should dictate what developers do and also ignore the fact that many innovative and original games are made every year?
Calling your product Phantom doesn't exactly inspire confidence in customers and investors, does it really? The only worse thing I can think about right now would be opening calling it VaporStation (tm) or BS-box (tm).:-)
I wonder if I can sue the manufacturer of my jacket, my former employer for giving it to me and the shoe manufacturer for the small electric shocks that I might occasionally receive after wearing all that. And sue Ford as well, because after riding in a car (while wearing these clothes) and then touching the metal frame, I can get a small shock as well...
Well, I said "useful to amateur machinima creators", not to professional directors like George Lucas (but wait, doesn't Lucas already use Unreal engine?). Anyway, the point is that making movies will become extremely easy. Lionhead is already developing their "Movies" game, where you will be able to film short (a few minutes) trailers (that's interface for you). Half-Life and Unreal now include machinima tools (that's camera controls). Everything else follows and there is nothing stopping that progress.
The only thing uncertain is the quality of the final films. You are right that many films made will not be worth 10$. And I am sure that generally they will not be as rich as professionally made films (you can't put as many small touches as 100 people working together for a year can). And because of that movie studios will definitely not vanish overnight.
But note that the game market in the US is already larger than the movie market (may be not exactly, as the DVD/video was not included in that estimate). That means that money thrown on engines is at least comparable with money spent on custom CGI tools for films.
It won't be a niche market anymore, and hopefully movie studios will gradually migrate to (merge with) the game industry. Don't worry about games based on movies (and vice versa) to be poor-quality hacks. The developers will eventually learn how to do that properly.
The stated goals of Valve, id, NVidia and others is "cinematic computing" or movie-quality experience in games. Thanks to Moore's Law they can reach these goals quite soon (if creative problems are resolved as assumed above). You can already use the GeForceFX to render Shrek or Aki Ross in real time. Yeah, that is not the whole scene and it is a few years late, but you see the trend. In a five years you are likely to see Gollum-quality characters in your games, in ten years you might see video-realistic humans.
And when all this will happen, the games will be nearly capable of making the films even without human participation. Imagine a "creative replay" feature in Doom 6 that would make an action-packed horror thriller out of your recorded game. That might not be very original (but many movies aren't original at all), but the production quality (video, sound, suspence, stunts, explosions, monsters, emotions, etc.) can be high enough. Add to that some creative ideas from actual humans (the story, the moral behind the story and little touches, like manually adding the rabbit from Doom2) and they can make it. A simple example (if we have to use real films) is the Blair Witch Project. Add a story, and the rest can easily be provided by the game.
P.S. We tend to overestimate short-term progress and underestimate long-term progress. I am just as inclined to that as everyone else. Make appropriate timeframe corrections as you see fit.
Massive is certainly nice, but it only solves one (albeit important) aspect of the problem: it makes good AI characters fighting in large groups and also provides some physics. That's why it probably isn't suitable for anything other than medieval battle scenes. We will need everything else as well, like Sims2-style genetics, Half-Life2 facial expressions, Doom3 lightning and sound editing, etc.
I guess if you sell the laptops that do such things, overseas customers are probably the least of your worries.:) Honestly, the chances of having any serious problems are usually quite low for a decent manufacturer. I I might expect than a new Toshiba notebook will cost me around 15$ in repair services or less (on average). That's why I might take the risk and ignore the warranty. Especially if the product is not available in any other way. Like, for example, a Segway.
The try-before-you-buy aspect of copying a single recorded song at a time keeps people from buying albums that have only a couple good tracks on them. While the ability to taste and sample new music makes people buy albums by new and different artists that they wouldn't found overwise.
Look, I usually don't care about "customer service", I care about buying a product. I am going to great lengths already to find the products 10000+ km from my home and you think that your lack of Russian-language skills would bother me? Not the slightest bit. I am even willing to ignore the warranty (I don't want the PITA sending the product back to the States) and would be more than happy to pay the local repair shop to fix it. Liability is also a non-issue, unless your notebook jumps on my little sister and chops her head off. If I am buying from the States, I already accept the delay - having to wait a week more until the money are in your account is not a problem either (and I would happily send a check or transfer the money instead of using a credit card, which I don't have anyway). Most people also understand (or can be made to understand) that customs are their own problem.
So in the end, there is nothing to prevent almost any company from sending their products abroad. And there is defenitely a market potential for the intermediaries like Pregrad.Net who take care of international orders for their customers. Why it is not done yet? May be because capitalist society is inherently ineffective in taking care of the customers? Or may be because Americans are not aware that there are other countries on this planet. Yeah, whatever the reason.:)
In Russia there is a company called Pregrad.Net (means "no barriers" in Russian). They take orders for products sold in any online store, then they buy them in the US and deliver to Russia themselves, taking care of customs, credit card problems (you can pay them with domestic money transfer), etc. They even buy products on eBay.
Of course, that doesn't directly help you in Hungary, but anyway...
Good point, but wrong.:) When you make an advanced game system, it will either give a lot of control to the developers or just take that control for itself.
In the first case, developers would be able to edit facial expressions. In the second (a la Half-Life 2) the facial expressions will be generated automatically according to the situation. And while the first case would not be very useful to amateur machinima creators, the second one just might.
With Half-Life 2 you can have a small team play out the scenes and be sure that game face expression and physics engines will take care of the rest. Look at their trailer - the gameplay already looks close enough to movies.
The idea is not to replace the physics of the real world with a CGI environment, it is to replace basically everything except the director with software.:) Currently you still need some "actors", because it is easier to control the characters that way, and you need sound and video editors to turn the game footage into the final film. But the rest is done automatically. Once you have a standard renderers (and model/level formats), as John Carmack suggests (in a few years, probably in less than a decade), you will also have access to all the props and decorations you might need. Just what Valve is already doing for Half-Life 2 - they create a library of objects to simplify the level design.
Then you will be able to quickly select and tweak the models, levels and objects, load up the game engine, take control of the characters, give some orders to AI bots (just look at the Rome: Total War trailer to see how AI-controlled bots can make for "totally awesome" Braveheart-quality footage), may be even recording actions for some characters and then running these recordings to remove the need for additional human players and record the scenes. You can be sure that most of the stunts, the lipsync, environmental sounds, etc. are done automatically by the engine. Then you will have the video and audio footage. Now just load up the editor and make the final film.
The only remaining question would be the rendering quality, but with the impressive progress done by the game industry every year, I have no doubts that real-time video-realistic graphics can be achieved quite soon, probably in less than a decade, a few years after movie studio CGI reaches that level.
Your post is interesting and informative, but slightly off-topic. It boils down to the fact that PDF is good for publishing industry. Sure, but the story is about ebooks.
1) While PDF is a good solution (as I already said in another post) for remote printing, the applications supporting it (Acrobat Reader) are a very poor choice for well, reading. Reading ebooks in Acrobat Reader is like wiping your ass with emery paper.:) 2) While HTML is a poor choice for publishers, a similar XML-based format could be made (may be it already exists), that would work just as well as PDF. 3) It is actually a good thing that they haven't fixed the bug. More power to the readers, I say!:)
The parent might be flamebait, but it is also insightful.
Adding artificial limitations to computer programs is stupid. PDF format is evil and serves little valid purposes. One of them is remote printing - sending an electronic copy to someone else, who can print it and have the print layout preserved. But if you need to print the document, you can probably get it in.doc format and find a Windoze machine somewhere around (or a Mac, or *nix with OpenOffice, or anything else).
Unfortunately, most people don't use PDFs for printing, they use PDFs to read the documents on the computer, using their screens, not paper. And treating the electronic document as a paper one (even with continuos pages) is extremely stupid. If we judge Acrobat Reader not on the basis of how similar documents look on PalmOS PDA and on some Weird (tm) computer with some Queer OS (tm), but on the basis of its reader functionality, it will probably get rated only 4/10, not more. There are millions of important and useful features >>>that are missing in Acrobat Reader. Like automatically opening the document at the same position where you was reading it last time (and remember my settings, not document defaul settings). Or changing the fonts/colour/background as it suits this individual user. Or the ability to make notes, highlight text, doodle on the margines, etc. (not in the Adobe Acrobat, but in the Acrobat Reader, where they are actually needed). And the ability to start up instantly (what good is a reference book if you're unable to check it quickly?).
And please don't forget that if you give the fool the ability to create PDF files, the biggest problem is that he will use it. There are too many PDF files and most often the same task can be done MUCH better by an.html file, or even a.doc file (as proprietary as it is).
In short, the Acrobat Reader is actually crap, it is total crap, it is a lame piece of crap or, as the parent so elegantly put it, it is a "fucking nazi peice of shit".
The parent comment is classified. If you need to access the contents of the comment, please report to the nearest domestic security station, where your request will be properly investigated.
There are no vulnerabilities in the national fibre optic network. There have never been any vulnerabilities in the national fibre optic network. Any unauthorised discussion of this topic is thinkcrime. Questioning the state is plusungood.
In other news, the production of chocolate over the past year increased by 71% from 500^H^H^H 245 g per capita to 420 g per capita.
Slashdot Mirror
Here are mine:
jumper
fat guy stretching
tomato
prisoner
two guys in green hats
pregnant spider
flying beetle
alien policemen
batman
dark batman
the resulting password being: jrfgtoprtsprfeanbndn
As always, I am surprised by a lack of recognition for eDonkey2000 at Slashdot. The ed2k is, I believe, technologically superior, it has better clients (and larger variety, and the leading ones are also open source). The system is also provides prolonged availablity much better.
.bittorrent files that have to be hosted somewhere. This is also the reason why ed2k-link sites are more resistant to lawsuits.
In addition to this, ed2k is better protected from "anti-piracy" attacks. There is additional server layer, very resistant to servers being temporarily shut off and requiring (I believe) less traffic. A lot of negotiation is performed directly between clients - the Overnet model does not require servers at all. Finally, the actual links are in the form of short text links that can be e-mailed, printed and even spelled over the phone, not in the form of
P.S. This seems to me just one more case of an inferior technology receiving an unfair share of coverage. Like MS dominates the media, BitTorrent seems to dominate Slashdot...
Something like that. I was watching water reflections in Real Life (tm) and it really surprised me how similar they look to the simulated ones (those in recent games like Enclave).
The Sims: Eating Like Pigs
The Sims: Mad Orgy
The Sims: Criminal Intent
The Sims: Alternate Lifestyle
There shouldn't be any more expansion packs!
Source: some obscure game site that is no longer online.
Don't forget his acting achievements on the propaganda front that are really comparable with McCarthy's best results.
Surprise-surprise! USSR was not an evil empire, although the US propaganda definitely succeeded in making ordinary Americans believe that. That is a topic for a separate discussion, but just consider internationalism in the USSR vs. racism in the US and gender equality in Soviet Russia since 1917 vs. woman position in the US until few decades ago. Or find out which country used nuclear bombs against civilians, doesn't it deserve to be called evil empire for that? Or who killed more innocents in Vietnam or Korea. Or who supported the most number of totalitarian wacko dictators in the third world?
Somehow, for some extremely surreal and mystic reason, nobody wants to kill Finns, Swiss and New Zealanders... I wonder why. The last time I checked, none of them had a pressing need to have a 100000 ton nuclear aircraft. May be the bad people are not so bad after all? Even if they do hate, they only hate Americans and not other people, right?
Could you please remind me when it was that someone have threatened US the last time. And I don't mean when your own president threatened you with Iraqi WMD, I mean real genuine threats. It seems to me the perfect case of artificially manufacturing the image of the external enemy. Sadly, this is done by your own selected officials so that they can still play with the expensive military toys.
The article heavily concentrated on heavy users, but the same questions - "download" or "get a physical copy" - have to be answered by normal users every day. For example I have 200Gb of storage filled with DivX movies and I needed to choose between cheaper CD-Rs and faster access HDDs. I also need to decide whether to get the film on a printed CD for 3$ or to download it using a flat-rate megabit connection. These were not the easy choices and I am looking forward to 20Tb drives.
There is a 2nd Moore's Law for the manufacturing. The price of your semiconductor factory doubles every 18 months (or something like that).
Finally, a Beowulf cluster worth imagining...
Good point, but alas, wrong again. :)
There are two kinds of games.
1. Games that simulate something that you play with.
2. Games that simulate you as another character in another world.
First category includes games ranging from chess to RTS, to economic simulators, to logic games. These need gameplay first, story second and graphics third. All parts are important, though. You (an average game player that represents THE CUSTOMER) might settle for a game with poor graphics, but brilliant story and gameplay, all right... But given a choice between that and a game with slightly worse story and gameplay, but with brilliant state-of-the-art graphics, he might as well choose the good looking game. Another thing is that sequels (for non-story-based games) must have great graphics, because the potential for gameplay improvement is limited. That is football sims and The Sims themselves.
Second category includes first and foremost FPS games and also things like racing sims, flight sims, etc. The gameplay is pretty well defined already. Unless you are making a truly innovative game (and all games cannot be truly innovative, there is no developer capability for that and no market) like Rez or Black & White, you must concentrate on realism (graphics and audio realism that is). Gameplay and story are also very important, but not as important as graphics - you are making the story, kind of. These games will ultimately lead to the development of full-immersion VR indistinguishable from reality. To claim that FPSs don't need good graphics is to slow down the development of VR which is a bad thing.
Regarding your sarcastic comment about "genetics". Well, you might be surprised but yes, it will be very close to what you describe. Haven't you noticed that all games now use motion capture, from FPS to RTS? Don't you realise that both Sims and HL2 (and probably SWG) have procedural models that can be tweaked and (in case of Sims) can "genetically" evolve. Don't you realise that many games now have face expression capabilities, not only FPS games. Yes, non-FPS games may lag behind, because as I explained above, they are in a different category. But they eventually accept all technologies of the previous generation of FPS games. Compare Quake and WC3. Compare Q2 and C&C: Generals. Compare Q3 and Rome: Total War. All the technologies quickly become generic. John Romero's lighing is revolutionary today, but tomorrow its varieties will be included in all new games, even train simulators. Shadows were once a revolutionary technology and I remember how cool it was for Kingpin to include them for characters. Today you have shadows for every object in every game. Now translucent shadows and soft shadows are introduced in FPS games. Expect them in all other games quite soon.
Can you tell me any reason whatsoever, why games should look like shit? If we ignore for a moment the efforts needed to design the game engine and create a good-looking world, why shouldn't the games look 100% realistic? Is that a bad thing per se? Or do you simply think that your priorities should dictate what developers do and also ignore the fact that many innovative and original games are made every year?
Calling your product Phantom doesn't exactly inspire confidence in customers and investors, does it really? The only worse thing I can think about right now would be opening calling it VaporStation (tm) or BS-box (tm). :-)
I wonder if I can sue the manufacturer of my jacket, my former employer for giving it to me and the shoe manufacturer for the small electric shocks that I might occasionally receive after wearing all that. And sue Ford as well, because after riding in a car (while wearing these clothes) and then touching the metal frame, I can get a small shock as well...
Well, I said "useful to amateur machinima creators", not to professional directors like George Lucas (but wait, doesn't Lucas already use Unreal engine?). Anyway, the point is that making movies will become extremely easy. Lionhead is already developing their "Movies" game, where you will be able to film short (a few minutes) trailers (that's interface for you). Half-Life and Unreal now include machinima tools (that's camera controls). Everything else follows and there is nothing stopping that progress.
The only thing uncertain is the quality of the final films. You are right that many films made will not be worth 10$. And I am sure that generally they will not be as rich as professionally made films (you can't put as many small touches as 100 people working together for a year can). And because of that movie studios will definitely not vanish overnight.
But note that the game market in the US is already larger than the movie market (may be not exactly, as the DVD/video was not included in that estimate). That means that money thrown on engines is at least comparable with money spent on custom CGI tools for films.
It won't be a niche market anymore, and hopefully movie studios will gradually migrate to (merge with) the game industry. Don't worry about games based on movies (and vice versa) to be poor-quality hacks. The developers will eventually learn how to do that properly.
The stated goals of Valve, id, NVidia and others is "cinematic computing" or movie-quality experience in games. Thanks to Moore's Law they can reach these goals quite soon (if creative problems are resolved as assumed above). You can already use the GeForceFX to render Shrek or Aki Ross in real time. Yeah, that is not the whole scene and it is a few years late, but you see the trend. In a five years you are likely to see Gollum-quality characters in your games, in ten years you might see video-realistic humans.
And when all this will happen, the games will be nearly capable of making the films even without human participation. Imagine a "creative replay" feature in Doom 6 that would make an action-packed horror thriller out of your recorded game. That might not be very original (but many movies aren't original at all), but the production quality (video, sound, suspence, stunts, explosions, monsters, emotions, etc.) can be high enough. Add to that some creative ideas from actual humans (the story, the moral behind the story and little touches, like manually adding the rabbit from Doom2) and they can make it. A simple example (if we have to use real films) is the Blair Witch Project. Add a story, and the rest can easily be provided by the game.
P.S. We tend to overestimate short-term progress and underestimate long-term progress. I am just as inclined to that as everyone else. Make appropriate timeframe corrections as you see fit.
Have you read his whole post? :) I was replying to the 2nd and 3rd paragraphs. :)
Massive is certainly nice, but it only solves one (albeit important) aspect of the problem: it makes good AI characters fighting in large groups and also provides some physics. That's why it probably isn't suitable for anything other than medieval battle scenes. We will need everything else as well, like Sims2-style genetics, Half-Life2 facial expressions, Doom3 lightning and sound editing, etc.
I guess if you sell the laptops that do such things, overseas customers are probably the least of your worries. :) Honestly, the chances of having any serious problems are usually quite low for a decent manufacturer. I I might expect than a new Toshiba notebook will cost me around 15$ in repair services or less (on average). That's why I might take the risk and ignore the warranty. Especially if the product is not available in any other way. Like, for example, a Segway.
The try-before-you-buy aspect of copying a single recorded song at a time keeps people from buying albums that have only a couple good tracks on them.
While the ability to taste and sample new music makes people buy albums by new and different artists that they wouldn't found overwise.
Look, I usually don't care about "customer service", I care about buying a product. I am going to great lengths already to find the products 10000+ km from my home and you think that your lack of Russian-language skills would bother me? Not the slightest bit. I am even willing to ignore the warranty (I don't want the PITA sending the product back to the States) and would be more than happy to pay the local repair shop to fix it. Liability is also a non-issue, unless your notebook jumps on my little sister and chops her head off. If I am buying from the States, I already accept the delay - having to wait a week more until the money are in your account is not a problem either (and I would happily send a check or transfer the money instead of using a credit card, which I don't have anyway). Most people also understand (or can be made to understand) that customs are their own problem.
:)
So in the end, there is nothing to prevent almost any company from sending their products abroad. And there is defenitely a market potential for the intermediaries like Pregrad.Net who take care of international orders for their customers. Why it is not done yet? May be because capitalist society is inherently ineffective in taking care of the customers? Or may be because Americans are not aware that there are other countries on this planet. Yeah, whatever the reason.
In Russia there is a company called Pregrad.Net (means "no barriers" in Russian). They take orders for products sold in any online store, then they buy them in the US and deliver to Russia themselves, taking care of customs, credit card problems (you can pay them with domestic money transfer), etc. They even buy products on eBay.
Of course, that doesn't directly help you in Hungary, but anyway...
Good point, but wrong. :) When you make an advanced game system, it will either give a lot of control to the developers or just take that control for itself.
:) Currently you still need some "actors", because it is easier to control the characters that way, and you need sound and video editors to turn the game footage into the final film. But the rest is done automatically. Once you have a standard renderers (and model/level formats), as John Carmack suggests (in a few years, probably in less than a decade), you will also have access to all the props and decorations you might need. Just what Valve is already doing for Half-Life 2 - they create a library of objects to simplify the level design.
In the first case, developers would be able to edit facial expressions. In the second (a la Half-Life 2) the facial expressions will be generated automatically according to the situation. And while the first case would not be very useful to amateur machinima creators, the second one just might.
With Half-Life 2 you can have a small team play out the scenes and be sure that game face expression and physics engines will take care of the rest. Look at their trailer - the gameplay already looks close enough to movies.
The idea is not to replace the physics of the real world with a CGI environment, it is to replace basically everything except the director with software.
Then you will be able to quickly select and tweak the models, levels and objects, load up the game engine, take control of the characters, give some orders to AI bots (just look at the Rome: Total War trailer to see how AI-controlled bots can make for "totally awesome" Braveheart-quality footage), may be even recording actions for some characters and then running these recordings to remove the need for additional human players and record the scenes. You can be sure that most of the stunts, the lipsync, environmental sounds, etc. are done automatically by the engine. Then you will have the video and audio footage. Now just load up the editor and make the final film.
The only remaining question would be the rendering quality, but with the impressive progress done by the game industry every year, I have no doubts that real-time video-realistic graphics can be achieved quite soon, probably in less than a decade, a few years after movie studio CGI reaches that level.
Your post is interesting and informative, but slightly off-topic. It boils down to the fact that PDF is good for publishing industry. Sure, but the story is about ebooks.
:) :)
1) While PDF is a good solution (as I already said in another post) for remote printing, the applications supporting it (Acrobat Reader) are a very poor choice for well, reading. Reading ebooks in Acrobat Reader is like wiping your ass with emery paper.
2) While HTML is a poor choice for publishers, a similar XML-based format could be made (may be it already exists), that would work just as well as PDF.
3) It is actually a good thing that they haven't fixed the bug. More power to the readers, I say!
Are you arguing that Windows machines work great? They probably work well as a revenue source for MS, but that's about it. :)
The parent might be flamebait, but it is also insightful.
.doc format and find a Windoze machine somewhere around (or a Mac, or *nix with OpenOffice, or anything else).
.html file, or even a .doc file (as proprietary as it is).
Adding artificial limitations to computer programs is stupid. PDF format is evil and serves little valid purposes. One of them is remote printing - sending an electronic copy to someone else, who can print it and have the print layout preserved. But if you need to print the document, you can probably get it in
Unfortunately, most people don't use PDFs for printing, they use PDFs to read the documents on the computer, using their screens, not paper. And treating the electronic document as a paper one (even with continuos pages) is extremely stupid. If we judge Acrobat Reader not on the basis of how similar documents look on PalmOS PDA and on some Weird (tm) computer with some Queer OS (tm), but on the basis of its reader functionality, it will probably get rated only 4/10, not more. There are millions of important and useful features >>>that are missing in Acrobat Reader. Like automatically opening the document at the same position where you was reading it last time (and remember my settings, not document defaul settings). Or changing the fonts/colour/background as it suits this individual user. Or the ability to make notes, highlight text, doodle on the margines, etc. (not in the Adobe Acrobat, but in the Acrobat Reader, where they are actually needed). And the ability to start up instantly (what good is a reference book if you're unable to check it quickly?).
And please don't forget that if you give the fool the ability to create PDF files, the biggest problem is that he will use it. There are too many PDF files and most often the same task can be done MUCH better by an
In short, the Acrobat Reader is actually crap, it is total crap, it is a lame piece of crap or, as the parent so elegantly put it, it is a "fucking nazi peice of shit".
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It isn't idiocy, it is brilliance!
There are no vulnerabilities in the national fibre optic network. There have never been any vulnerabilities in the national fibre optic network. Any unauthorised discussion of this topic is thinkcrime. Questioning the state is plusungood.
In other news, the production of chocolate over the past year increased by 71% from 500^H^H^H 245 g per capita to 420 g per capita.