...it's not just musical scores and sound effects that make the game.
You also have sound quality and the type of encoding that is used.
Specifically, multi-channel sound.
Why specifically multi-channel sound? That's only one element of a good sound stage.
Take the C64 -- it had the most sophisticated consumer-grade sound chip prior to the introduction of SoundBlaster Live! with the (previously pro-only) EMU soundchip. Everything between relied on FM synthesis (think 80s/90s Casio keyboard -- yuck!) or the brute-force handling of massive amounts of sample data.
As a result, the C64 had it's own voice, rather than bleeping or croaking. You play me a C64 soundtrack and my brain's back in the game -- the sound was part of the experience.
OK, so multi-channel is useful for an immersive 3D game experience, but that's not what you said. Furthermore (as you yourself point out) most of what can be achieved by brute force (true multichannel) has been acheived perfectly well simply by programming a stereo engine properly (although you didn't make explicit the assumption that the player is wearing headphones).
Yeah, that was brilliant. It was good in Dark Forces, too, but then they switched to CD music for the later games (X-Wing vs Tie Fighter, Jedi Knight and iMuse was relegated to picking the perfect moment to change track.
Old skool MIDI iMuse was just seamless and added so much.
Another game with good music: Little Big Adventure (AKA Twinsen's Odyssey). I could just close my eyes. It had warmth, it had feeling, it had scale and it always matched the environment perfectly. It took a forced perspective cartoon and made it cinematic, immersive even. Absolute classic game thanks to every single element being carefully crafted.
What the hell has Bjork got to do with it? Iceland was unpopulated until the ninth century AD when it was founded as a long-term fishing outpost by Gaels and vikings.
In fact, some of Bjork's features may be from early Greenlandic populations, as any boats between Norway and Greenland would have stopped off at Iceland for supplie. Who were the Greenlanders? Eskimos. Who aren't genetically linked to South Americans.
Please don't be an educated bigot -- do a bit of research before displaying your total racial ignorance.
Yes, because the world is just teeming with prehistoric skeletons. Why, just the other day I tripped over the remains of a Neanderthal, causing me to fall face first onto a Beaker Person skull, which rolled away and got trapped in the rib cage of an early Pict. In the park.
Respecting someone's right to an opinion and respecting their opinion are two completely different things. I respect other peoples right to an opinion, but that doesn't mean I have to respect the opinion itself. Quite frankly, I think that people who seriously believe in creationism need to be checked into the loonie bin.
There is also a difference between respecting someone and respecting their opinion. I may find your opinions on many things irrational, or oversimplistic or whatever, but I wouldn't call you a loony -- because that would be rude.
It is particularly worth noting that an important element of the atheistic view of the psychology of religion is that we believe because we're told. At best, that's normal human behaviour; at worst, gullible. It is certainly not insanity by any clinical definition of the term. You are being unreasonable.
Yes of course there's evidence for Creationism. The Bible is evidence. It's extremely weak evidence, and wouldn't be admissible in a court of law. ("Your honour, I object." "On what grounds?" "Hearsay." "Sustained.")
I'm not a creationist, and I'm staunchly opposed to Creationism in the science classroom[*], but I know the difference between "no evidence" and "evidence so thin it could hide behind a supermodel".
[*] Creationism is a great topic for a practical philosophy class. It has it all: the testable vs the untestable; would a creator be so fickle as to trick his creations into heresy and punishing them for it; is carbon dating really proven -- ie can we really assume that the laws governing radioactive decay haven't changed over the millenia etc etc etc. Creationism is a fantastic topic for debate if no-one's trying to force it on other people as a "truth".
I'm assuming this is a standard Google agreement, and wasn't written with Chrome in mind.
Why? Because as written it effectively makes web browsing instantly into fraud.
Reading the EULA literally, it says that simply by visiting a webpage (it includes the word "display" in there, remember) I'm telling Google that I am an agent of the copyright holder and granting rights on the copyright holder's behalf.
Given the nature of the internet, this is likely to be untrue in the region of 99.999% of the time -- and as a major internet infrastructure company, Google knows this better than most.
If Google accepts these rights and exercises them, knowing them to be fraudulent, they are responsible. They cannot argue "good faith" in a case like this.
This is not "OMG! Google do evil!", just "OMG! Google got so tied up in Web2.0 that they forgot to write an EULA for Web."
They tell me the calorie count of nuts is wrong. They measure calorie content by burning things. Nuts burn well -- they're practically wood. Much of that energy is in indigestible fibres.
I don't find that -- I find that because swimming exercises so many muscle groups simultaneously, I don't really feel like I've done anything. I don't get all that hungry afterwards, but I do find that I never feel full after my next meal....
I have 10-15 DS games. Traveling with them is a real PITA. Either I am hauling around a manpurse or pockets full of cartridges.
The ARRRR4 would allow me to load all of my games to a single cartridge thus reducing the risk of theft, loss, or damage.
Wow. You want a lot, don't you? Next you'll be wanting to carry your entire music collection with you -- "hold everything", as it were. What a bizarre notion.
What do you think this is, the 21st century?!?!?
HAL.
Sure I can always lose it too but I find its generally easier to keep track of one thing, especially when that one thing "lives" in a larger one thing than it is to keep track of lots of little ones.
For the record I am not deluded. I know that one of the primary uses for these things is piracy, however that is not their ONLY use. Further arguments on that subject would be semantics.
Well, if you've got full control, you have a lot of options. How vindictive are you? Once you've exhausted all avenues or enquiry, you could connect in, set up a massive raging ravenous bittorrent seed of lots of rubbish pop music and wait for the RIAA to nail the guy for you.
Nononono! Even better idea! Cook TV dinners at night, freeze then during the day. This would be soooooooooooo efficient -- all that energy that would have otherwise have been used by cookers and freezers gives way to an incidental side-effect of the storage process.
Yes, but coal, gas, oil and nuclear power plants all must continue to run overnight. Most of these use steam turbines and reheating partially cooled water is a lot less efficient than keeping it on the boil. Starting a turbine up from static takes a lot more energy than keeping it moving. It also takes in the order of weeks to stop or start a nuclear reactor.
Even before the big push for renewables were overgenerating significantly at night. The low cost of night-time electricity gave rise to fire-brick storage heaters. It's also the reason why the showers in some low-end hotels and campsites are only properly hot in the morning. It also helped support the rise in shift-working: the overtime may be expensive, but the machines run cheaply.
[decompress air]
when you release preassurized gas through an air regulator, the gas temperature will
drop down, this is how refrigerators work.
[...]
The temperature would be so low that you have high equipment costs for the turbines,
or simply damaged turbines.
Surely there's a simple way to put this cooling to work: given that the cooling happens during daytime hours, you could build a series of Ben & Jerry's factories alongside these air storage facilities. And at night you could cook breakfast for all B&J's workers using the heat generated while filling the caverns.
So long you built a copy as exact as possible, yes. By that I mean built from the same materials. You can use modern construction equipment if you want to, not like there's much of a difference if a block was put in place by manual labor or a crane, though I do see the value of trying to reenact ancient building methods to test in practice how things worked. Just don't make it out of concrete, because obviously that wouldn't be the same thing.
That's beautifully arbitrary.
It's in a different place. It's still the same thing.
It's constructed differently. It's still the same thing.
The mud-and-straw render, long since lost in the original, has been replaced by an archaeologist's "best guess", which isn't exact. It's still the same thing.
Underneath that render, where it can't be seen by any living human, is concrete. Now it's not the same thing.
If it has to be of the same material, you're halfway towards obsessing about authenticity. Now what if I were to point out that no stone is identical and that several quarries were all but exhausted during the building of the pyramids? Are you willing to accept an approximation? And why would that approximation need to be natural stone? Why not a concrete of suitable density? And besides, to the pharoah's architects the stone was probably the least important feature of the build -- they would more likely have looked on it as the source of all their engineering problems.
This brings to mind the paper temples: temples that cannot last and must be rebuilt every few years. Yet each one is authentic as it is a faithful reproduction of the last -- certainly more authentic than any renovated buildings.
They were designed to make us question notions of permanence and possession -- and it worked.
The art world also has fake paintings that give immense pleasure and a connection to the historical artist to the owners of the pantings. But now there is a test that proves some of the paintings are not real. So, basically, the tests exist so that a few art snobs can invalidate the paintings owned by others.
If we granted reproductions equal value to the original then the original would be as disposable as the original. The original may then be destroyed or painted over and would be lost for ever. Any subsequent copies would be copies of copies. Quality (subjectively, or objectively "the original's qualities) would be lost over time.
An original painting is irreplacable, in that an original can never be perfectly recreated. A copy similarly can never be perfectly recreated, but I wouldn't call this irreplacable because it wasn't bought because it was its own painting -- it was bought as a reproduction of the original. A second reproduction may be different, yet can still be as good a reproduction (or better).
Well the Gulf of Mexico is pretty horseshoe shaped, and there's lots of islands in the horseshoe.
I can't be the first person to notice this -- someone saw fit to name the national music of Trinidad & Tabago "Calypso". There's a lot of stories about seafarers getting lost in storms and most of those that show some semblance of a reference to the Americas have realistic timescale for travelling the trade winds across the Atlantic.
Slashdot Mirror
...it's not just musical scores and sound effects that make the game.
You also have sound quality and the type of encoding that is used.
Specifically, multi-channel sound.
Why specifically multi-channel sound? That's only one element of a good sound stage.
Take the C64 -- it had the most sophisticated consumer-grade sound chip prior to the introduction of SoundBlaster Live! with the (previously pro-only) EMU soundchip. Everything between relied on FM synthesis (think 80s/90s Casio keyboard -- yuck!) or the brute-force handling of massive amounts of sample data.
As a result, the C64 had it's own voice, rather than bleeping or croaking. You play me a C64 soundtrack and my brain's back in the game -- the sound was part of the experience.
OK, so multi-channel is useful for an immersive 3D game experience, but that's not what you said. Furthermore (as you yourself point out) most of what can be achieved by brute force (true multichannel) has been acheived perfectly well simply by programming a stereo engine properly (although you didn't make explicit the assumption that the player is wearing headphones).
Yeah, that was brilliant. It was good in Dark Forces, too, but then they switched to CD music for the later games (X-Wing vs Tie Fighter, Jedi Knight and iMuse was relegated to picking the perfect moment to change track.
Old skool MIDI iMuse was just seamless and added so much.
Another game with good music: Little Big Adventure (AKA Twinsen's Odyssey). I could just close my eyes. It had warmth, it had feeling, it had scale and it always matched the environment perfectly. It took a forced perspective cartoon and made it cinematic, immersive even. Absolute classic game thanks to every single element being carefully crafted.
HAL.
Quite simply, you're confusing phenotype with genotype to propose an argument. Bad Thing.
> (although the Ainu are sadly going extinct as a distinct ethnic group in Japan).
Maybe you would be in favour of a forced breeding program?
HAL.
What the hell has Bjork got to do with it? Iceland was unpopulated until the ninth century AD when it was founded as a long-term fishing outpost by Gaels and vikings.
In fact, some of Bjork's features may be from early Greenlandic populations, as any boats between Norway and Greenland would have stopped off at Iceland for supplie. Who were the Greenlanders? Eskimos. Who aren't genetically linked to South Americans.
Please don't be an educated bigot -- do a bit of research before displaying your total racial ignorance.
HAL.
Yes, because the world is just teeming with prehistoric skeletons. Why, just the other day I tripped over the remains of a Neanderthal, causing me to fall face first onto a Beaker Person skull, which rolled away and got trapped in the rib cage of an early Pict. In the park.
HAL.
Respecting someone's right to an opinion and respecting their opinion are two completely different things. I respect other peoples right to an opinion, but that doesn't mean I have to respect the opinion itself. Quite frankly, I think that people who seriously believe in creationism need to be checked into the loonie bin.
There is also a difference between respecting someone and respecting their opinion. I may find your opinions on many things irrational, or oversimplistic or whatever, but I wouldn't call you a loony -- because that would be rude.
It is particularly worth noting that an important element of the atheistic view of the psychology of religion is that we believe because we're told. At best, that's normal human behaviour; at worst, gullible. It is certainly not insanity by any clinical definition of the term. You are being unreasonable.
HAL.
Uneducated.
Yes of course there's evidence for Creationism. The Bible is evidence. It's extremely weak evidence, and wouldn't be admissible in a court of law. ("Your honour, I object." "On what grounds?" "Hearsay." "Sustained.")
I'm not a creationist, and I'm staunchly opposed to Creationism in the science classroom[*], but I know the difference between "no evidence" and "evidence so thin it could hide behind a supermodel".
[*] Creationism is a great topic for a practical philosophy class. It has it all: the testable vs the untestable; would a creator be so fickle as to trick his creations into heresy and punishing them for it; is carbon dating really proven -- ie can we really assume that the laws governing radioactive decay haven't changed over the millenia etc etc etc. Creationism is a fantastic topic for debate if no-one's trying to force it on other people as a "truth".
HAL.
Some years from now it takes 2 hours to dig thru a stack of USB keys to find the right one.
Some years from now the file is lost due to the electrostatic profile of flash. Some years less than the DVD, I assure you.
HAL.
I'm assuming this is a standard Google agreement, and wasn't written with Chrome in mind.
Why? Because as written it effectively makes web browsing instantly into fraud.
Reading the EULA literally, it says that simply by visiting a webpage (it includes the word "display" in there, remember) I'm telling Google that I am an agent of the copyright holder and granting rights on the copyright holder's behalf.
Given the nature of the internet, this is likely to be untrue in the region of 99.999% of the time -- and as a major internet infrastructure company, Google knows this better than most.
If Google accepts these rights and exercises them, knowing them to be fraudulent, they are responsible. They cannot argue "good faith" in a case like this.
This is not "OMG! Google do evil!", just "OMG! Google got so tied up in Web2.0 that they forgot to write an EULA for Web."
HAL.
I only plug in the one I need to use just now.
The game is NOT original.
I didn't notice anyone saying it was. They said it was "good".
Somewhat different.
HAL.
They tell me the calorie count of nuts is wrong. They measure calorie content by burning things. Nuts burn well -- they're practically wood. Much of that energy is in indigestible fibres.
HAL
I don't find that -- I find that because swimming exercises so many muscle groups simultaneously, I don't really feel like I've done anything. I don't get all that hungry afterwards, but I do find that I never feel full after my next meal....
HAL.
I have 10-15 DS games. Traveling with them is a real PITA. Either I am hauling around a manpurse or pockets full of cartridges.
The ARRRR4 would allow me to load all of my games to a single cartridge thus reducing the risk of theft, loss, or damage.
Wow. You want a lot, don't you? Next you'll be wanting to carry your entire music collection with you -- "hold everything", as it were. What a bizarre notion.
What do you think this is, the 21st century?!?!?
HAL.
Sure I can always lose it too but I find its generally easier to keep track of one thing, especially when that one thing "lives" in a larger one thing than it is to keep track of lots of little ones.
For the record I am not deluded. I know that one of the primary uses for these things is piracy, however that is not their ONLY use. Further arguments on that subject would be semantics.
Well, if you've got full control, you have a lot of options. How vindictive are you? Once you've exhausted all avenues or enquiry, you could connect in, set up a massive raging ravenous bittorrent seed of lots of rubbish pop music and wait for the RIAA to nail the guy for you.
Nononono! Even better idea! Cook TV dinners at night, freeze then during the day. This would be soooooooooooo efficient -- all that energy that would have otherwise have been used by cookers and freezers gives way to an incidental side-effect of the storage process.
Please forward my Nobel Prize c/o my employers.
HAL.
Yes, but coal, gas, oil and nuclear power plants all must continue to run overnight. Most of these use steam turbines and reheating partially cooled water is a lot less efficient than keeping it on the boil. Starting a turbine up from static takes a lot more energy than keeping it moving. It also takes in the order of weeks to stop or start a nuclear reactor.
Even before the big push for renewables were overgenerating significantly at night. The low cost of night-time electricity gave rise to fire-brick storage heaters. It's also the reason why the showers in some low-end hotels and campsites are only properly hot in the morning. It also helped support the rise in shift-working: the overtime may be expensive, but the machines run cheaply.
HAL.
[decompress air] when you release preassurized gas through an air regulator, the gas temperature will drop down, this is how refrigerators work. [...] The temperature would be so low that you have high equipment costs for the turbines, or simply damaged turbines.
Surely there's a simple way to put this cooling to work: given that the cooling happens during daytime hours, you could build a series of Ben & Jerry's factories alongside these air storage facilities. And at night you could cook breakfast for all B&J's workers using the heat generated while filling the caverns.
HAL.
So long you built a copy as exact as possible, yes. By that I mean built from the same materials. You can use modern construction equipment if you want to, not like there's much of a difference if a block was put in place by manual labor or a crane, though I do see the value of trying to reenact ancient building methods to test in practice how things worked. Just don't make it out of concrete, because obviously that wouldn't be the same thing.
That's beautifully arbitrary.
It's in a different place. It's still the same thing.
It's constructed differently. It's still the same thing.
The mud-and-straw render, long since lost in the original, has been replaced by an archaeologist's "best guess", which isn't exact. It's still the same thing.
Underneath that render, where it can't be seen by any living human, is concrete. Now it's not the same thing.
If it has to be of the same material, you're halfway towards obsessing about authenticity. Now what if I were to point out that no stone is identical and that several quarries were all but exhausted during the building of the pyramids? Are you willing to accept an approximation? And why would that approximation need to be natural stone? Why not a concrete of suitable density? And besides, to the pharoah's architects the stone was probably the least important feature of the build -- they would more likely have looked on it as the source of all their engineering problems.
HAL.
This brings to mind the paper temples: temples that cannot last and must be rebuilt every few years. Yet each one is authentic as it is a faithful reproduction of the last -- certainly more authentic than any renovated buildings.
They were designed to make us question notions of permanence and possession -- and it worked.
HAL.
The art world also has fake paintings that give immense pleasure and a connection to the historical artist to the owners of the pantings. But now there is a test that proves some of the paintings are not real. So, basically, the tests exist so that a few art snobs can invalidate the paintings owned by others.
If we granted reproductions equal value to the original then the original would be as disposable as the original. The original may then be destroyed or painted over and would be lost for ever. Any subsequent copies would be copies of copies. Quality (subjectively, or objectively "the original's qualities) would be lost over time.
An original painting is irreplacable, in that an original can never be perfectly recreated. A copy similarly can never be perfectly recreated, but I wouldn't call this irreplacable because it wasn't bought because it was its own painting -- it was bought as a reproduction of the original. A second reproduction may be different, yet can still be as good a reproduction (or better).
HAL.
Well the Gulf of Mexico is pretty horseshoe shaped, and there's lots of islands in the horseshoe.
I can't be the first person to notice this -- someone saw fit to name the national music of Trinidad & Tabago "Calypso". There's a lot of stories about seafarers getting lost in storms and most of those that show some semblance of a reference to the Americas have realistic timescale for travelling the trade winds across the Atlantic.
How long was Ulysses away from home...?
HAL
A great adventure is waiting for you ahead.
Hurry onward Lemmiwinks, for you will soon be dead.
The journey before you may be long and filled with woe.
[etc.]