I've never understood the obsession with Halo
on
Halo 2 Reviews
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· Score: 5, Insightful
To me, it was like you were just going through the same repeating rooms over and over fighting endless hoards of monsters. Especially the library. I didn't play all the way through, I gave up once I got to the part where you go through the core stage again - only this time BACKWARDS! I think I had more fun playing Unreal 2 or Red Faction or other games that got considerably less critical acclaim.
I guess I just don't get the big selling point behind Halo- do people just like it for the action? I mean the story was interesting, but the levels definately were not.
After playing SS2, so many games seemed lousy. But I was thinking the same thing in Doom3, reminded me of SS2. Of course, just about everything in Deus Ex reminded me of SS2 as well. Neither game could compare.
The many demands the termination of this exchange. We regret any inconvenience.
I am not talking about GC, I am talking about GC implementations. At a very high level, it all looks pretty, but in the real world somewhere a malloc is still called, somewhere a free is still called.
I don't think there's any rule that says C programs must always follow x=(foo*)malloc(sizeof(foo)) free(x); Res tricting C to that is like restricting GC to straight reference counting. You could manage your own buffers, and with knowledge of when and where they'll be used that would be unavailable to a gc, you can know exactly when to free them and exactly how large they need to be.
It is nice to look at the run-time cost of GC, and it usually looks pretty good on paper. But there is the cost of the GC itself, and the fact that in order to so analyze a program it has to be interpreted in a VM on current hardware. If GC were implemented at the hardware level (you know, dropping the V out of VM), then it definately has the capability to be faster than manual management. Inside the context of a virtual machine, it can be faster. But the computers of today (Which, there's a very good chance, will be the computers of tomorrow and for a number of years after that as well) don't understand it.
In the end you, the VM, the GC, are just passing instructions to a CPU that doesn't know a fooObj* from a barObj*, and if you look at it as just a stream of instructions, it's difficult to imagine that someone else can send instructions you can't.
Ok, I hereby withdraw my statement where I claimed to know absolutely everything about garbage collection. It is a weird statement, you know, considering how I ended it with a question mark. Usually we call those questions. But then again the internet is all about not reading but insulting someone for asking a question you consider stupid.
Someone asked a question, I answered it and asked another. If anyone who knows anyone about garbage collection wouldn't ask a stupid question like mine, what do you say to the parent's question? He must be some grade A idiot.
I don't know a lot about garbage collection. I don't care about garbage collection, because I know it will never be as efficient as well-managed memory.
Never said it was good design, but this sort of problem is big in some of the software I test. One of the problems with having GC is that you don't specifically assign a place where an object, maybe a hash, is done with, so you have to carefully make sure that every object that references it stops referencing it when it is sure it won't need it anymore. But such problems are hard to catch. In non-gc, you'd free it, and if you accidentally still had a reference to it somewhere, the program would probably explode and it'd be very obvious that you had this problem. In Java, it is a bit more obscure. In a large team project, a coder might not be aware of the implications of holding on to a particular reference.
But in the end, good planning and communcation is always the best solution.
Ah yes, nothing says efficiency like periodically examining every single object held in memory (well, every single non-garbage collectable). Silly me. Sure, maybe it only happens when you run out of memory, and of course up until the point sweep is run you are using more memory than you ought to be, so generally resoruces are being wasted all around, but hey it's cool computers are faster now or something.
Java's garbage collection sort of creates a general laziness among some coders who don't clean up because they don't have to. Without effective clean up routines, like destructors, you commonly end up with a chain that can hold a lot of memory out that is being unused. All it takes is one pointer *ahem* reference to some object that contanis a reference to another, that contains an array... If you've got a few hashes and arrays in the way, it may be difficult to tell exactly where memory is being used, thus memory leaks.
Also, I don't know for sure, but would what happen if two objects referenced each other but nothing else referenced them. Would gc know to follow the links between the two and see that nothing in the main app is using them?
I dunno, half-life certainly seemed very creative, focusing a lot more on adventure than just shooting things, and some other games have picked up on that.
I think the main reason you don't see a graphical competition is because the tools are so much more in-depth. Skill aside, it is somewhat easier to describe a vast scene because you can draw on the player's own knowledge and creativity than to have to painstakingly model every detail of it. Think of like that big tree from Rivne or something- describing would likely be a bit easier than modeling it in 3D.
Not that IF games are very easy to produce; in fact, though it is easy enough to make fun of their short comings, allowing for every possible outcome a person could possibly type in is a difficult task.
Sometimes I think we don't have all the concepts of a 'game' nailed down yet from what they started in the days of text adventure. I really enjoy books, but sometimes there are movies, such as Star Wars, that just wouldn't work like a book. I think that graphical games can show just as much creativity as an IF game, and IF games can suck just as much as the latest FPS.
I actually meant in the last three months (this is a brand new PC I built myself).
So you are saying Halo needs patches for Hardware issues? Doesn't that prove my point? If everyone had one set of hardware, you woudn't need a patch for hardware issues would you? That's not an issue for Nintendo.
Multiplayer problems? Again, not an issue for 99% of Nintendo games.
The PS2 game Xenosaga has a glitch that causes it to freeze up if you return to a certain point in the game, preventing players who didn't get an item at that point the first time through from mastering the game.
Final Fantasy 3 for SNES was full of glitches, many of which were related to specific party members, for example having Umaro and Relm in the same party would often cause the game to lock up. Nintendo later released another version of the cart, presumably with this problem fixed. Unfortunately all the people who got the game first, all the fans who shelled out $50 for it, were the ones who didn't get the completely playable game.
This bug is sad. How many Sim games have been released where, after you play them so long, your city just stops working?
Plenty of PC titles work out of the box for plenty of people. I've installed over two dozen games on this machine and all save one (Final Fantasy 7) worked right out of the box (that list includes Halo btw). But then again, you can't play FF7 at all on a gamecube - there's no issues with backwards compatibility save with the ps2, and there's absolutely no cross platform (aside from different versions of the same program). I know how to use my PC, how to configure it, and how to install games. And when I do, they work.
So what's the leaf to take? There should only be one CPU, one OS, one HDD mfg, one graphics card, and one source of software? Aka communism? I mean, you'd probably whine your heart out about "M$" but you adore Nintendo for doing the same?
I run an AMD, not an Intel. I use linux (on one pc). I have a choice in the matter. I wouldn't surrender all my choice so that novices have an easier time playing games.
Two years ago the dorm room I lived in was made for two people and had six outlets. Unfortunately, all six outlets were right next to each other, and stuck on the front of the heater (somehow) below the windows so they weren't very useful... Ethernet/phone/coaxial were all together coming out of one spot so in the end there was a group of two extension cords, one phone, one ethernet, and one coaxial cable carrying everything through my half over to my roommate's half of the room.
This year I have an air conditioner-grade extension cable into a 1-3 adapter which has three surge protectors plugged into it, all of which are completely filled (total of about 6 std plugs and 7 adapters)... and that's only my computers, the tv/ps2/etc is all on the other side of the room.
So if there's any outlet adding, it's not happening at my school. But then again what is?
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To me, it was like you were just going through the same repeating rooms over and over fighting endless hoards of monsters. Especially the library. I didn't play all the way through, I gave up once I got to the part where you go through the core stage again - only this time BACKWARDS! I think I had more fun playing Unreal 2 or Red Faction or other games that got considerably less critical acclaim.
I guess I just don't get the big selling point behind Halo- do people just like it for the action? I mean the story was interesting, but the levels definately were not.
After playing SS2, so many games seemed lousy. But I was thinking the same thing in Doom3, reminded me of SS2. Of course, just about everything in Deus Ex reminded me of SS2 as well. Neither game could compare.
The many demands the termination of this exchange. We regret any inconvenience.
I am not talking about GC, I am talking about GC implementations. At a very high level, it all looks pretty, but in the real world somewhere a malloc is still called, somewhere a free is still called.
s tricting C to that is like restricting GC to straight reference counting. You could manage your own buffers, and with knowledge of when and where they'll be used that would be unavailable to a gc, you can know exactly when to free them and exactly how large they need to be.
I don't think there's any rule that says C programs must always follow
x=(foo*)malloc(sizeof(foo))
free(x);
Re
It is nice to look at the run-time cost of GC, and it usually looks pretty good on paper. But there is the cost of the GC itself, and the fact that in order to so analyze a program it has to be interpreted in a VM on current hardware. If GC were implemented at the hardware level (you know, dropping the V out of VM), then it definately has the capability to be faster than manual management. Inside the context of a virtual machine, it can be faster. But the computers of today (Which, there's a very good chance, will be the computers of tomorrow and for a number of years after that as well) don't understand it.
In the end you, the VM, the GC, are just passing instructions to a CPU that doesn't know a fooObj* from a barObj*, and if you look at it as just a stream of instructions, it's difficult to imagine that someone else can send instructions you can't.
Ok, I hereby withdraw my statement where I claimed to know absolutely everything about garbage collection. It is a weird statement, you know, considering how I ended it with a question mark. Usually we call those questions. But then again the internet is all about not reading but insulting someone for asking a question you consider stupid.
Someone asked a question, I answered it and asked another. If anyone who knows anyone about garbage collection wouldn't ask a stupid question like mine, what do you say to the parent's question? He must be some grade A idiot.
I don't know a lot about garbage collection. I don't care about garbage collection, because I know it will never be as efficient as well-managed memory.
Never said it was good design, but this sort of problem is big in some of the software I test. One of the problems with having GC is that you don't specifically assign a place where an object, maybe a hash, is done with, so you have to carefully make sure that every object that references it stops referencing it when it is sure it won't need it anymore.
But such problems are hard to catch. In non-gc, you'd free it, and if you accidentally still had a reference to it somewhere, the program would probably explode and it'd be very obvious that you had this problem. In Java, it is a bit more obscure. In a large team project, a coder might not be aware of the implications of holding on to a particular reference.
But in the end, good planning and communcation is always the best solution.
Ah yes, nothing says efficiency like periodically examining every single object held in memory (well, every single non-garbage collectable). Silly me.
Sure, maybe it only happens when you run out of memory, and of course up until the point sweep is run you are using more memory than you ought to be, so generally resoruces are being wasted all around, but hey it's cool computers are faster now or something.
Java's garbage collection sort of creates a general laziness among some coders who don't clean up because they don't have to. Without effective clean up routines, like destructors, you commonly end up with a chain that can hold a lot of memory out that is being unused. All it takes is one pointer *ahem* reference to some object that contanis a reference to another, that contains an array... If you've got a few hashes and arrays in the way, it may be difficult to tell exactly where memory is being used, thus memory leaks.
Also, I don't know for sure, but would what happen if two objects referenced each other but nothing else referenced them. Would gc know to follow the links between the two and see that nothing in the main app is using them?
I dunno, half-life certainly seemed very creative, focusing a lot more on adventure than just shooting things, and some other games have picked up on that.
I think the main reason you don't see a graphical competition is because the tools are so much more in-depth. Skill aside, it is somewhat easier to describe a vast scene because you can draw on the player's own knowledge and creativity than to have to painstakingly model every detail of it. Think of like that big tree from Rivne or something- describing would likely be a bit easier than modeling it in 3D.
Not that IF games are very easy to produce; in fact, though it is easy enough to make fun of their short comings, allowing for every possible outcome a person could possibly type in is a difficult task.
Sometimes I think we don't have all the concepts of a 'game' nailed down yet from what they started in the days of text adventure. I really enjoy books, but sometimes there are movies, such as Star Wars, that just wouldn't work like a book. I think that graphical games can show just as much creativity as an IF game, and IF games can suck just as much as the latest FPS.
Well, a the average washing machine basin is only about a meter deep, and a wash cycle is usually around 25 minutes or so... think it could make it?
So the question then becomes, are dryers hotter than 60C?
If so, this just might be the PDA for someone who lives with one of those people who just has to wash everything they see.
I actually meant in the last three months (this is a brand new PC I built myself).
So you are saying Halo needs patches for Hardware issues? Doesn't that prove my point? If everyone had one set of hardware, you woudn't need a patch for hardware issues would you? That's not an issue for Nintendo.
Multiplayer problems? Again, not an issue for 99% of Nintendo games.
The PS2 game Xenosaga has a glitch that causes it to freeze up if you return to a certain point in the game, preventing players who didn't get an item at that point the first time through from mastering the game.
Final Fantasy 3 for SNES was full of glitches, many of which were related to specific party members, for example having Umaro and Relm in the same party would often cause the game to lock up. Nintendo later released another version of the cart, presumably with this problem fixed. Unfortunately all the people who got the game first, all the fans who shelled out $50 for it, were the ones who didn't get the completely playable game.
This bug is sad. How many Sim games have been released where, after you play them so long, your city just stops working?
Plenty of PC titles work out of the box for plenty of people. I've installed over two dozen games on this machine and all save one (Final Fantasy 7) worked right out of the box (that list includes Halo btw). But then again, you can't play FF7 at all on a gamecube - there's no issues with backwards compatibility save with the ps2, and there's absolutely no cross platform (aside from different versions of the same program). I know how to use my PC, how to configure it, and how to install games. And when I do, they work.
So what's the leaf to take? There should only be one CPU, one OS, one HDD mfg, one graphics card, and one source of software? Aka communism? I mean, you'd probably whine your heart out about "M$" but you adore Nintendo for doing the same?
I run an AMD, not an Intel. I use linux (on one pc). I have a choice in the matter. I wouldn't surrender all my choice so that novices have an easier time playing games.
Two years ago the dorm room I lived in was made for two people and had six outlets. Unfortunately, all six outlets were right next to each other, and stuck on the front of the heater (somehow) below the windows so they weren't very useful... Ethernet/phone/coaxial were all together coming out of one spot so in the end there was a group of two extension cords, one phone, one ethernet, and one coaxial cable carrying everything through my half over to my roommate's half of the room.
This year I have an air conditioner-grade extension cable into a 1-3 adapter which has three surge protectors plugged into it, all of which are completely filled (total of about 6 std plugs and 7 adapters)... and that's only my computers, the tv/ps2/etc is all on the other side of the room.
So if there's any outlet adding, it's not happening at my school. But then again what is?