all we need to know now is what % of google employees use a windows OS at google HQ.
Merely to balance out the level of asinine statistics/articles in the world, naturally.
Also, to comment on the AR portion (my earlier post was cut short by a trip for groceries with the wife), one of the key elements in the UAV project mentioned in the article (though not specifically mentioned) is the notion of augmented virtuality. To render a virtual scene of what surrounds an unmanned vehicle based on our best knowledge of those surroundings (terrain, weather, etc..), and then augment this scene with the actual sensor information (video, radar, etc..) to fuse multiple information sources into a cohesive interface for a ground controller, that really comprises the best picture possible.
Extending this to a squadron/flight of UAVs and researching input device combinations as well as interaction strategies is the meat of that research. Since we're researching future-state UAVs (i.e. doesn't exactly exist yet), spending $4 mill on bleeding edge, high-FOV displays makes a decent amount of sense - in 5-10 years the exponential progress will have increased where a $4m pricetag can get you, and brought down the price of the system that's going to be built soon.
As an aside, I've always thought the idea of protyping AR interactions using VR would be a decently practical approach, albeit in somewhat lower-res than AR (or VR) will eventually achieve. And, like I said, if you can make it out to Ames at some point check us out.
True, there is that trick with the back wall.
The brightness with the new projectors is a pretty night-and-day difference.
The glasses we have for active stereo are still the same though, so that limitation
is the same. I personally haven't looked into what (if any) new shutter
technology is either out there these days.
You should come back and check it out once it's completed later this year.
I'd be much more of a fan of the hiperwall if they could get rid of the seams,
though the increase in resolution is nice.
What are the dimensions on the wall?
#1 -
Yes, though head-tracking is typically only done for 1 user, there are ways to set it up with
multiple head-tracks and render/shutter multiple times per application-frame. Further, the
difference between tracked/non-tracked users is really only an issue for objects that are near
the 'screen' or would be 'inside' the walls. Large-scale or large-distance viewing is not affected
since the binocular disparity is so small.
#2 -
The floor of the old C6 could handle 7-8 people safely, which is about as many as you can pack
into a 10'x room anyways.
One of the reasons blizzard has publicly acknowledged for a lack of new classes in the upcoming expansion is their diffuculty in balancing the currently existing classes. Go to their forums and do a search for 'expansion classes' or perhaps 'hero classes' - I've lost the reference since I stopped playing WoW.
Believe what you will, but War2 wasn't balanced - the races were practically clones of one another, yet the ability for humans to micromanage the paladin's heal ability wasn't interfaced well enough for it to compete with the fire & forget nature of bloodlust. Blizzard has learned since then, but their best balance was probably hit in Starcraft at or after the time of Brood Wars, but it certainly wasn't balanced at release. Polished, yes. Balanced... not quite.
* Priests and Paladins have been removed to keep in line with our policy about not bringing religious/political/sexual mentionings into the game.
I imagine this would actually be a thing players would appreciate, since Blizzard can't balance classes anyways.
Are you serious? Blizzard known for game balance? In WoW?
You mean they're lying when they say the game isn't balanced and that's a primary
reason they're not introducing new classes with the expansion?
Or the fact that most classes have undergone severe revisions to date (see: first year), and will likely see many more over the lifetime of the game?
I'd bet that any company, that waited for 5-10 years after the emergence of a genre before even attempting to put together their own ripoff vision of a game could do what Blizzard does.
RTS? Westwood first. Blizzard didn't get good at copying these games for a while; and the balance was horrible throughout. Even with the units in WC2 being near-clones of it all, the minute differences (spells) made the orcs 10x better than the humans.
MMO? Everyone else first. Blizzard just waited long enough to gather everyone else's good ideas and observe what went wrong, and re-hash it, that their first stab was good enough. Throw in a healthy mix of diablo, minus the ease-of-hacking.
All you're doing with this editorial is saying to Blizzard - 'hey look, you can totally identity-rape me in a social game, but I'll still fork over my $14 every month.'
I think your new name only tells half the story; perhaps WillingVictim would suit you better.
I commend you for your well-written article, and shake my head at your inability to speak with the voice that truly counts to Blizzard - your wallet.
Parent modded to +4? D&D doesn't 'throw out' anything; D&D is the product, the publishers/designers throw things out. That aside, let's refresh:
WoTC bought TSR in 1997. 3.0 came out in 2000, 3 years later. 3.5 came out in 2003, 3 years later.
Every 10 years or so? Wizards hasn't owned D&D for 10 years yet. Yes, I know the release dates for AD&D (2nd ed) and 3rd edition were roughly 10 years apart, but TSR was still around and the owner of D&D until 1997. Also, do some research and you'll find that TSR was already kicking around many ideas that went into 3.0 well before WoTC bought them out.
I'm glad that blizzard takes the time to fix their incremental errors, but don't try to tell me that they are managing the impossible. The only reason there are so many fixes and so many patches is that their games (SC/WC3) are fundamentally flawed and unbalanced. The same goes for the Diablo series - buggy/exploitable as hell, constantly rebalanced/patched...
Don't forget that it took Blizzard until SC to actually realize that different races didn't have to be clones of each other, with two full iterations (WC/WC2) of first-hand experience and years of observing other companies attempt it first.
Blizzard doesn't bother to balance the game; they simply patch any 'overpowered' strategy to death, rinse, repeat.
Not to rain on your parade, I'm a big MK fan, but I don't see the co-op mode as a huge advance in Mario Kart. They didn't introduce any new behaviors, they just added another way to map existing behaviors onto two controllers. Innovative idea, I'll grant, but I don't see this earn MK the title of "huge progress" on its own.
Well, it's hard to say that Blizzard innovates and then not give examples. The simplest way to convince me (or anyone else, really) is to give examples of where Blizzard has innovated - and just saying "diablo" doesn't count. Examples of what made it innovative. Show where it went that it's predecessors didn't. I've run in to too many fanboys who don't provide a good argument to show what Blizzard did that was worthy of being deemed 'innovative' - simply giving concrete examples that show original thought on Blizzard's behalf is all that is needed.
Blizzard innovated the RTS genre? Hah, try Westwood. Remember Dune II from back in 1992? Warcraft appeared on the scene a full two years later. Dune II is what brought RTS to the forefront, not Warcraft.
As far as Diablo goes - Rogue, Nethack, etc.. I don't think I could fit all of Diablo's predecessors on a page without bankrupting/.'s harddrives. Rogue - 1983, Nethack - 1992, Diablo 1996. Given 15 years of hack'n'slash games Blizzard had ample material to stich together into their action-arcade "classic".
Blizzard does not contribute new ideas to the gaming industry. Blizzard is the ex-post-facto of the gaming industry. It filters out all the bad innovations and streamlines the past few years of hard work done by inventive developers into a crisp, well-polished, well-supported game.
In short, I agree with your final statement - Good work definitely needs to be recognized. However, none of the innovative work you stress is done by blizzard - so why don't you try recognizing the actual innovators?
I'm hoping that sometime in future/. supports the </fanboy> tag.
Blizzard knowingly pays their employees way below average (roughly half) what another company would pay the same programmer. Blizzard thrives on profiting from the blood sweat and tears of those willing to take half-pay to have a job programming games. I'm not saying Blizzard is a bad place to work, and I'm not saying I wouldn't love to be on the development team for WoW myself.
File that away..
Now, it's been pretty public knowledge that this patch has been worked on by only one or two individuals within blizzard. So, Blizzard sinks two years of pay (Blizzard pay) into two people to come up with this patch. Estimated cost: $200,000, to be on the high side. I'd have to say that this 200k investment will be worth itself in PR alone. They're going to be opening up their MMORPG World of Warcraft (WoW) for beta sometime in the next few months - think of the PR effect this has on their stance in that genre; not to mention the fact that it is a possible testbed for skill ideas for WoW (synergies, and other improvements to diablo).
So, in short, I see this as simply another Blizzard 'success' - released way after it should have been, gobbled up by fanboys and the gaming-media industry, ultimately profitable for the people managing Blizzard.
I think that the idea of players offering quests is a good one, however I don't think the issues you bring up are sufficiently difficult to handle.
When the character giving the quest gives the quest, the game world takes and holds the reward from them. If the quest isn't completed, they get their stuff back. If it's completed, the game world transfers the reward to the quester.
Motivating players to give quests is as simple as creating a reward for someone to give them out.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not cyber bullying that's destroying online anonymity... it's the SK government.
all we need to know now is what % of google employees use a windows OS at google HQ. Merely to balance out the level of asinine statistics/articles in the world, naturally.
Also, to comment on the AR portion (my earlier post was cut short by a trip for groceries with the wife), one of the key elements in the UAV project mentioned in the article (though not specifically mentioned) is the notion of augmented virtuality. To render a virtual scene of what surrounds an unmanned vehicle based on our best knowledge of those surroundings (terrain, weather, etc..), and then augment this scene with the actual sensor information (video, radar, etc..) to fuse multiple information sources into a cohesive interface for a ground controller, that really comprises the best picture possible.
Extending this to a squadron/flight of UAVs and researching input device combinations as well as interaction strategies is the meat of that research. Since we're researching future-state UAVs (i.e. doesn't exactly exist yet), spending $4 mill on bleeding edge, high-FOV displays makes a decent amount of sense - in 5-10 years the exponential progress will have increased where a $4m pricetag can get you, and brought down the price of the system that's going to be built soon.
As an aside, I've always thought the idea of protyping AR interactions using VR would be a decently practical approach, albeit in somewhat lower-res than AR (or VR) will eventually achieve. And, like I said, if you can make it out to Ames at some point check us out.
True, there is that trick with the back wall.
The brightness with the new projectors is a pretty night-and-day difference. The glasses we have for active stereo are still the same though, so that limitation is the same. I personally haven't looked into what (if any) new shutter technology is either out there these days. You should come back and check it out once it's completed later this year.
I'd be much more of a fan of the hiperwall if they could get rid of the seams, though the increase in resolution is nice. What are the dimensions on the wall?
If you can make it to Ames, IA once it's completed...
#1 -
Yes, though head-tracking is typically only done for 1 user, there are ways to set it up with multiple head-tracks and render/shutter multiple times per application-frame. Further, the difference between tracked/non-tracked users is really only an issue for objects that are near the 'screen' or would be 'inside' the walls. Large-scale or large-distance viewing is not affected since the binocular disparity is so small.
#2 -
The floor of the old C6 could handle 7-8 people safely, which is about as many as you can pack into a 10'x room anyways.
At least while they're alive and/or comfortable.
The screenshots are from the old system, built circa 2000, which has about 1/16th the resolution.
I've seen far fewer dead Macs than Dells or Gateways.
Probably because there are far fewer Macs in the first place.
One of the reasons blizzard has publicly acknowledged for a lack of new classes in the upcoming expansion is their diffuculty in balancing the currently existing classes. Go to their forums and do a search for 'expansion classes' or perhaps 'hero classes' - I've lost the reference since I stopped playing WoW.
Believe what you will, but War2 wasn't balanced - the races were practically clones of one another, yet the ability for humans to micromanage the paladin's heal ability wasn't interfaced well enough for it to compete with the fire & forget nature of bloodlust. Blizzard has learned since then, but their best balance was probably hit in Starcraft at or after the time of Brood Wars, but it certainly wasn't balanced at release. Polished, yes. Balanced... not quite.
* Priests and Paladins have been removed to keep in line with our policy about not bringing religious/political/sexual mentionings into the game. I imagine this would actually be a thing players would appreciate, since Blizzard can't balance classes anyways.
Are you serious? Blizzard known for game balance? In WoW?
You mean they're lying when they say the game isn't balanced and that's a primary reason they're not introducing new classes with the expansion?
Or the fact that most classes have undergone severe revisions to date (see: first year), and will likely see many more over the lifetime of the game?
I'd bet that any company, that waited for 5-10 years after the emergence of a genre before even attempting to put together their own ripoff vision of a game could do what Blizzard does.
RTS? Westwood first. Blizzard didn't get good at copying these games for a while; and the balance was horrible throughout. Even with the units in WC2 being near-clones of it all, the minute differences (spells) made the orcs 10x better than the humans.
MMO? Everyone else first. Blizzard just waited long enough to gather everyone else's good ideas and observe what went wrong, and re-hash it, that their first stab was good enough. Throw in a healthy mix of diablo, minus the ease-of-hacking.
All you're doing with this editorial is saying to Blizzard - 'hey look, you can totally identity-rape me in a social game, but I'll still fork over my $14 every month.' I think your new name only tells half the story; perhaps WillingVictim would suit you better. I commend you for your well-written article, and shake my head at your inability to speak with the voice that truly counts to Blizzard - your wallet.
Parent modded to +4? D&D doesn't 'throw out' anything; D&D is the product, the publishers/designers throw things out. That aside, let's refresh:
WoTC bought TSR in 1997.
3.0 came out in 2000, 3 years later.
3.5 came out in 2003, 3 years later.
Every 10 years or so? Wizards hasn't owned D&D for 10 years yet. Yes, I know the release dates for AD&D (2nd ed) and 3rd edition were roughly 10 years apart, but TSR was still around and the owner of D&D until 1997. Also, do some research and you'll find that TSR was already kicking around many ideas that went into 3.0 well before WoTC bought them out.
I'm glad that blizzard takes the time to fix their incremental errors, but don't try to tell me that they are managing the impossible. The only reason there are so many fixes and so many patches is that their games (SC/WC3) are fundamentally flawed and unbalanced. The same goes for the Diablo series - buggy/exploitable as hell, constantly rebalanced/patched...
Don't forget that it took Blizzard until SC to actually realize that different races didn't have to be clones of each other, with two full iterations (WC/WC2) of first-hand experience and years of observing other companies attempt it first.
Blizzard doesn't bother to balance the game; they simply patch any 'overpowered' strategy to death, rinse, repeat.
Not to rain on your parade, I'm a big MK fan, but I don't see the co-op mode as a huge advance in Mario Kart. They didn't introduce any new behaviors, they just added another way to map existing behaviors onto two controllers. Innovative idea, I'll grant, but I don't see this earn MK the title of "huge progress" on its own.
Well, it's hard to say that Blizzard innovates and then not give examples. The simplest way to convince me (or anyone else, really) is to give examples of where Blizzard has innovated - and just saying "diablo" doesn't count. Examples of what made it innovative. Show where it went that it's predecessors didn't. I've run in to too many fanboys who don't provide a good argument to show what Blizzard did that was worthy of being deemed 'innovative' - simply giving concrete examples that show original thought on Blizzard's behalf is all that is needed.
Blizzard innovated the RTS genre? Hah, try Westwood. Remember Dune II from back in 1992? Warcraft appeared on the scene a full two years later. Dune II is what brought RTS to the forefront, not Warcraft.
/.'s harddrives. Rogue - 1983, Nethack - 1992, Diablo 1996. Given 15 years of hack'n'slash games Blizzard had ample material to stich together into their action-arcade "classic".
/. supports the </fanboy> tag.
As far as Diablo goes - Rogue, Nethack, etc.. I don't think I could fit all of Diablo's predecessors on a page without bankrupting
Blizzard does not contribute new ideas to the gaming industry. Blizzard is the ex-post-facto of the gaming industry. It filters out all the bad innovations and streamlines the past few years of hard work done by inventive developers into a crisp, well-polished, well-supported game.
In short, I agree with your final statement - Good work definitely needs to be recognized. However, none of the innovative work you stress is done by blizzard - so why don't you try recognizing the actual innovators?
I'm hoping that sometime in future
Blizzard knowingly pays their employees way below average (roughly half) what another company would pay the same programmer. Blizzard thrives on profiting from the blood sweat and tears of those willing to take half-pay to have a job programming games. I'm not saying Blizzard is a bad place to work, and I'm not saying I wouldn't love to be on the development team for WoW myself.
File that away..
Now, it's been pretty public knowledge that this patch has been worked on by only one or two individuals within blizzard. So, Blizzard sinks two years of pay (Blizzard pay) into two people to come up with this patch. Estimated cost: $200,000, to be on the high side. I'd have to say that this 200k investment will be worth itself in PR alone. They're going to be opening up their MMORPG World of Warcraft (WoW) for beta sometime in the next few months - think of the PR effect this has on their stance in that genre; not to mention the fact that it is a possible testbed for skill ideas for WoW (synergies, and other improvements to diablo).
So, in short, I see this as simply another Blizzard 'success' - released way after it should have been, gobbled up by fanboys and the gaming-media industry, ultimately profitable for the people managing Blizzard.
I think that the idea of players offering quests is a good one, however I don't think the issues you bring up are sufficiently difficult to handle. When the character giving the quest gives the quest, the game world takes and holds the reward from them. If the quest isn't completed, they get their stuff back. If it's completed, the game world transfers the reward to the quester. Motivating players to give quests is as simple as creating a reward for someone to give them out.