Blizzard uses bittorrent, yeah, but don't hand out the.torrent file, instead you must download an executable (available only for Windows and Mac OS, of course) to download their files. This sucks.
emerge --rsync and update your favourite package, and wake up with half the system replaced with different versions.
It's not Gentoo's fault if you are too stupid to check out what will actually be done by an update (--pretend) before doing it. Jesus christ, please learn how the emerge command works before saying shit.
Why bother supporting Direct3D anyway? OpenGL works fine under Windows.
Speaking of that, does anybody know why Blizzard, a company who does in-house Mac ports of all of its games, uses Direct3D under Windows while the Mac version uses (of course) OpenGL? Why are they wasting their precious time on coding a Direct3D backend when they can just use a single OpenGL backend?!
Think about it: who the fuck would want to reboot to play a game when they can just double-click on an icon, and leave other apps open? Seriously, what's the point?
A couple Gentoo devs tried this by starting Gentoo Games, a for-profit organization dedicated to offering "Linux GameCD" solutions to game publishers, but now, 6(?) months and zero contracts later, the project's dead. Can you guess why?
No trolling, but.. something like DirectX wouldn't hurt!
We already have that. Just because we have no fancy trademark name for "a combination of SDL, OpenGL and OpenAL" doesn't make it less useful than DirectX.
What the hell, the article claims the original Quake as "fast-paced". Weird, the first thing that came to my mind when I first played it was "God, this is so slooow compared to Doom..."
What the hell are you talking about? All consoles predating the XBox and Gamecube were co-processor-heavy architechtures, with slow main CPUs, fast/feature-full graphical sub-systems and dedicated sound CPUs. The PS2, with his many co-processors, is not much different from a SNES, which had a puny 3.5 MHz CPU, a co-processor dedicated to sound decompression and tracking, and a complex set of logic chips that took care of (at that time) complex graphical operations like scrolling layers, alpha effects and rotation/scaling.
Kinda makes me think they should have stuck with the LGPL. Not that I don't understand why they went to GPL (it's all about the Benjamin's).
Trolltech-style business model: release your libraries freely as GPL, and sell commercial licenses to those who don't want to be restricted by Stallman's fascist pet license.
You seem to be forgetting that back when the N64 was on the drawing board, optical media sucked. The early days of CD-ROMs were filled with some of the worst video games of all time (Sherlock Holmes anyone?), and the loading times were absurd. The CD-I sucked, the Sega CD sucked, and so on, until the Playstation came along. One has to applaud Nintendo for not having jumped in the CD-ROM bandwagon in those dark times, when the dreaded word "multimedia" was on everybody's lips, and everybody in the software industry did multimedia just for the sake of doing multimedia, even if the end product would be a grotesque waste of electricity.
The problem is, when the N64 was finally released, the CD-ROM industry had stopped sucking a year ago, with the Playstation going stronger and stronger. So basically, Nintendo may have missed the "golden age" of CD-ROM, but they have not participated in the "retarded age" either.
"The article apparently claims that it remained stable at over an additional 100%"
Yes, but for how long? Sega wanted their machines to run a few years tops. Overclocking your Genesis CPU and still having it running after a week barely proves that Sega has underpowered it.
In theory, the only way to make a real-time game uncheatable would imply streaming each client an entire framebuffer of what they should see, and receive only control input from clients. This would be not only bandwidth intensive and latency dependent, but also very very hard on the server's CPU load, since it would basically be both a server and clients. Not to mention 3D hardware rendering on the client would not be used, pissing off a lot of people who spent lots of money on their expensive video card...
And even then, if we ever reach such a game networking model, creative people will STILL make cheats out of it. Hell, one comes to mind right now: an aimbot that analyses the streamed framebuffer and attempts to identify opponents by some particular trait (color, movement, etc), and then sends the server the input required to aim on it.
Oh, and you still have the problem of validating the client's binary, which is a worthless attempt at security, since one can easily replace the checking routine on the client for something that sends fake checksums.
So when you look at it, completely preventing cheating on a real-time game is completely impossible.
There's a good reason for that type of naming, and it's called branding. You may find "Playstation 2" to be a sucky name (I do too), but for the masses, it means _everything_. The Playstation was extremely successful, so when people see "Playstation 2", they think "wow! like the already good Playstation, but newer and better than the original!!"
Still, the "Ryan Gordon way" of doing things (ie. get porting contracts and release Linux installers for the Windows CDs at release, at best on the disc itself, at worst as a download a month after) sure beats Loki's broken business model (ie. do Linux ports of old games people have already bought the Windows version 6 months ago, and attempt to sell them a second time).
Are game companies so locked in to using Microsoft's APIs like DirectX that they can't program a game to be portable anymore?
Yes.
Seriously, nowadays in the PC game industry, unless your name is John Carmack, you just use DirectX, period. To most developpers the idea of using something else doesn't even come to mind. Besides, for them only Microsoft's Operating System exists, so why do portability? Microsoft has pushed DirectX (and, more importantly, Direct3D) so much that they OWN the freaking industry now.
GPL is not anti-business. Trolltech or MySQL AB, anyone? Both companies offer their products as GPL, and sells licenses to those who want to do commercial stuff the GPL won't allow. Ironically, this makes the GPL the most useful OSS license in the commercial world.
And no offense, but after reading your post I suddently lost all interest in Apple's products. Seriously, I was planning on getting a Mac as my next computer, but now that I know Apple is so anti free software, yet uses it significantly in their products, puts them on the same level as SCO, IMHO.
This sucks. Yeah, we all saw THAT coming, but now that it finally happened, this is a very sad day for Linux. Pixar was one of the most significant driving forces of Linux in the multimedia workplace. Plus, it means nVidia will probably put a lot less work in their Linux drivers now, since one of their biggest customers won't need it anymore.
Well, at least there's still ILM and (I think?) Disney... (but for how long before they decide to go the Pixar way?)
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Blizzard uses bittorrent, yeah, but don't hand out the .torrent file, instead you must download an executable (available only for Windows and Mac OS, of course) to download their files. This sucks.
Actually no, just for the record, it wasn't the Doom engine.
emerge --rsync and update your favourite package, and wake up with half the system replaced with different versions.
It's not Gentoo's fault if you are too stupid to check out what will actually be done by an update (--pretend) before doing it. Jesus christ, please learn how the emerge command works before saying shit.
Why bother supporting Direct3D anyway? OpenGL works fine under Windows.
Speaking of that, does anybody know why Blizzard, a company who does in-house Mac ports of all of its games, uses Direct3D under Windows while the Mac version uses (of course) OpenGL? Why are they wasting their precious time on coding a Direct3D backend when they can just use a single OpenGL backend?!
Think about it: who the fuck would want to reboot to play a game when they can just double-click on an icon, and leave other apps open? Seriously, what's the point? A couple Gentoo devs tried this by starting Gentoo Games, a for-profit organization dedicated to offering "Linux GameCD" solutions to game publishers, but now, 6(?) months and zero contracts later, the project's dead. Can you guess why?
No trolling, but.. something like DirectX wouldn't hurt!
We already have that. Just because we have no fancy trademark name for "a combination of SDL, OpenGL and OpenAL" doesn't make it less useful than DirectX.
Nevermind, I confused BZFlag with something else.
You should've switched to Windows 2000 instead. All the stability and performance, none of the bullshit.
Didn't it? I can think of some great XBox ports - Deus Ex: Invisible War, for example.
The fact that you could only think of one speaks for itself.
What the hell, the article claims the original Quake as "fast-paced". Weird, the first thing that came to my mind when I first played it was "God, this is so slooow compared to Doom..."
FPS == First-Person Shooter, dummy.
If it doesn't have Leonard Nimoy singing the ballad of Bilbo Baggins, it will fail for sure.
What the hell are you talking about? All consoles predating the XBox and Gamecube were co-processor-heavy architechtures, with slow main CPUs, fast/feature-full graphical sub-systems and dedicated sound CPUs. The PS2, with his many co-processors, is not much different from a SNES, which had a puny 3.5 MHz CPU, a co-processor dedicated to sound decompression and tracking, and a complex set of logic chips that took care of (at that time) complex graphical operations like scrolling layers, alpha effects and rotation/scaling.
Kinda makes me think they should have stuck with the LGPL. Not that I don't understand why they went to GPL (it's all about the Benjamin's).
Trolltech-style business model: release your libraries freely as GPL, and sell commercial licenses to those who don't want to be restricted by Stallman's fascist pet license.
Cooling liquids in portable devices. Sounds like a bad idea to me. What if you break it? That would most definitely not be fun.
You seem to be forgetting that back when the N64 was on the drawing board, optical media sucked. The early days of CD-ROMs were filled with some of the worst video games of all time (Sherlock Holmes anyone?), and the loading times were absurd. The CD-I sucked, the Sega CD sucked, and so on, until the Playstation came along. One has to applaud Nintendo for not having jumped in the CD-ROM bandwagon in those dark times, when the dreaded word "multimedia" was on everybody's lips, and everybody in the software industry did multimedia just for the sake of doing multimedia, even if the end product would be a grotesque waste of electricity.
The problem is, when the N64 was finally released, the CD-ROM industry had stopped sucking a year ago, with the Playstation going stronger and stronger. So basically, Nintendo may have missed the "golden age" of CD-ROM, but they have not participated in the "retarded age" either.
"The article apparently claims that it remained stable at over an additional 100%"
Yes, but for how long? Sega wanted their machines to run a few years tops. Overclocking your Genesis CPU and still having it running after a week barely proves that Sega has underpowered it.
In fact "Mega Drive" is the original japanese name too. That stupid "Genesis" name was in north america only.
In theory, the only way to make a real-time game uncheatable would imply streaming each client an entire framebuffer of what they should see, and receive only control input from clients. This would be not only bandwidth intensive and latency dependent, but also very very hard on the server's CPU load, since it would basically be both a server and clients. Not to mention 3D hardware rendering on the client would not be used, pissing off a lot of people who spent lots of money on their expensive video card...
And even then, if we ever reach such a game networking model, creative people will STILL make cheats out of it. Hell, one comes to mind right now: an aimbot that analyses the streamed framebuffer and attempts to identify opponents by some particular trait (color, movement, etc), and then sends the server the input required to aim on it.
Oh, and you still have the problem of validating the client's binary, which is a worthless attempt at security, since one can easily replace the checking routine on the client for something that sends fake checksums.
So when you look at it, completely preventing cheating on a real-time game is completely impossible.
There's a good reason for that type of naming, and it's called branding. You may find "Playstation 2" to be a sucky name (I do too), but for the masses, it means _everything_. The Playstation was extremely successful, so when people see "Playstation 2", they think "wow! like the already good Playstation, but newer and better than the original!!"
Still, the "Ryan Gordon way" of doing things (ie. get porting contracts and release Linux installers for the Windows CDs at release, at best on the disc itself, at worst as a download a month after) sure beats Loki's broken business model (ie. do Linux ports of old games people have already bought the Windows version 6 months ago, and attempt to sell them a second time).
Are game companies so locked in to using Microsoft's APIs like DirectX that they can't program a game to be portable anymore?
Yes.
Seriously, nowadays in the PC game industry, unless your name is John Carmack, you just use DirectX, period. To most developpers the idea of using something else doesn't even come to mind. Besides, for them only Microsoft's Operating System exists, so why do portability? Microsoft has pushed DirectX (and, more importantly, Direct3D) so much that they OWN the freaking industry now.
GPL is not anti-business. Trolltech or MySQL AB, anyone? Both companies offer their products as GPL, and sells licenses to those who want to do commercial stuff the GPL won't allow. Ironically, this makes the GPL the most useful OSS license in the commercial world.
And no offense, but after reading your post I suddently lost all interest in Apple's products. Seriously, I was planning on getting a Mac as my next computer, but now that I know Apple is so anti free software, yet uses it significantly in their products, puts them on the same level as SCO, IMHO.
This sucks. Yeah, we all saw THAT coming, but now that it finally happened, this is a very sad day for Linux. Pixar was one of the most significant driving forces of Linux in the multimedia workplace. Plus, it means nVidia will probably put a lot less work in their Linux drivers now, since one of their biggest customers won't need it anymore.
Well, at least there's still ILM and (I think?) Disney... (but for how long before they decide to go the Pixar way?)
6) GUI Konstruct-Icons now replaced by Dinobots
Finally, I was really looking forward to that one.