If you want to design console games, it would be best to be familiar with modern console gaming dont you think?
"Modern" in general or Sony in particular?
As for where to get one, how about your local pawnshop or a store that carries used games/controllers?
That's where I got my Xbox 360 wired controller a couple years ago, and I use it with my PC. But the wireless version of that controller uses proprietary RF communications, not Bluetooth, and for some reason, I didn't seem to find a lot of DS3s when I hit nearby pawn shops this past spring.
How would a vector animation like Homestar Runner or "Badger Badger Badger" have been created without Flash? With Flash, you can buy an old copy of Adobe Flash and use that. But with HTML5, you have to rent (not buy) Edge Animate on Creative Cloud. Or would you recommend creating the vector animation in Flash, rendering to AVI, and sending that to the viewer as MP4 and WebM? That not only bloats the file size by a factor of ten (in my tests) but also destroys any possibility of interactivity.
[Context: an assertion that split-screen is irrelevant because people can buy a PC and a car and go to a LAN party]
You're missing the fact that adults and most teens of 16+ age, drive.
You may have missed recent stories about proposals for "cycle highways" in Munich and London. Or are those designed for someone other than "adults and most teens of 16+ age"?
you can't just go buying Android devices willy-nilly any more than anything else and just expect them to work.
Consoles are easier than tablets. With a console, you can buy the console, the controller, and the games, and be sure that compatibility is warranted just from what is printed on the box. With a tablet, you cannot, as the packaging does not list support for rooting or the Sixaxis Controller app. Therefore, people who remain rationally ignorant because they are busy with other things to do in the day are likely to continue to choose consoles.
Or is there an up-to-date list of which phones and tablets are compatible with the Sixaxis Controller app, so that I'll know before I spend big bucks on a device, shipping, and tax, only to discover that it is incompatible? A quick Google search (sixaxis controller android device compatibility list) failed to find anything relevant.
Because TV manufacturers would have to support it first, or at the very least someone would have to make left/right switchable glasses.
I would have thought that left-only and right-only modes would be more popular to support people who get headaches while watching 3D movies but want to enjoy a movie in 2D with someone else who does enjoy 3D movies. A quick Google search for 2D glasses turns up products compatible with certain 3D technologies.
Or are people actually buying external gamepads like MOGA for use with their tablets and phones?
I don't know if they are but I do know that they can.
Except in practice, "can" doesn't matter quite as much as "are". If only one person owns a particular peripheral, it's not economically viable for a for-profit game developer to add support for that peripheral even to an existing game, let alone develop games from the ground up for that device.
They can also use various PS3 controllers (DS3, Sixaxis) if they don't need to use any other bluetooth devices at the same time... on some devices. Yeah, not a perfect solution, but the point is if it works you can do it for very little money and the app to find out if it will work is free.
For someone who doesn't already own a PS3, where might he find a working DS3 or Sixaxis controller with which to try the Sixaxis Compatibility Checker app? I imagine video game stores' return policies don't cover incompatibility with non-PS3 game systems as a valid reason. Besides, the app's description states that root access is required, and at least on the device I own, rooting would require a factory reset.
Each player is obligated to bring their own computer
This means people have to plan LAN parties in advance. They can't gather for a reason other to play video games and then just spontaneously decide to break out the video games. (See beelsebob's comment.)
And it doesn't help if someone else in the household needs to use the family PC the same night.
power strip, extension cord, ethernet station cable, and chair.
Good luck hauling that behind your bike. Or what am I missing?
Didn't I just read that game consoles are going to be eclipsed by tablets in the next couple of years, in terms of horsepower? Aren't those people just playing games on their PC or on a tablet?
A tablet's input device is a flat sheet of glass. It's fine for games that would have otherwise used a mouse, such as a space shooter like AirAttack HD. It's also good for what are essentially racing games that use only one button, like Rayman Jungle Run. But for games originally designed for a gamepad, there's no way to tell where your thumbs are relative to the on-screen controls at the side while you are looking at the action in the center. It's even worse than the widely panned Turbo Touch 360, which at least has a recessed touchpad with ridges and physical A and B trigger buttons. When I tried the free subset of Pixeline and the Jungle Treasure on my Nexus 7, I kept "whiffing", or pressing outside the active areas of the on-screen gamepad, and missing jumps. This continued until I paired a Bluetooth keyboard, after which the game worked fine.
Or are people actually buying external gamepads like MOGA for use with their tablets and phones? The last time I checked, I couldn't find any sales numbers for these external gamepads, which disappoints me because there's no other way to assure game developers that there's a market for games supporting them.
As for PC, some people choose consoles because they're easier so long as one is happy with vanilla versions of games from major labels.
In 3D, the two cameras are 60 to 65 mm apart (one IPD). This means the two views can share a lot of the visible set calculation and texture caching. Two cameras with half the map between them can't benefit quite as much from that.
The value proposition was obvious: play multiplayer all the time, without having to actually get them over to your house (a non-trivial problem if you're too young to drive, or live in a rural area, or just don't have many friends).
I don't see how online helps in a rural area, as rural areas are generally slower to get wired broadband, and latency over cell or sat is too high for real-time games.
Clearly, the era of split screen was dead - only Nintendo caries the torch on. It's a frustrating loss.
If indie game developers were willing to make PC games designed from the ground up for sharing a screen, would you be willing to buy/build a gaming PC for the living room?
Split-screen gaming usually involves a big hit to framerate and many classic split-screen games (including the early Halo titles) made enormous compromises in this area.
True, Sonic the Hedgehog 2 for Sega Genesis would slow down a lot more in its split-screen mode that put Sonic on top and Tails on bottom. But Super Mario Kart never slowed down. Take that, "Blast Processing". So if Halo 5 can't keep up with rendering two views, this only means Halo 5 is broken.
Plus shared doesn't always mean split. Because Bomberman, Smash TV, and Smash Bros. take place in one room at a time, they don't need to split the screen to fit all players on.
they may want to say that Android M is now Android M&M
Android Slim Shady? I believe Google is content to let others be the king of controversy, especially if it would mean dropping a rap album onto every device Google Play the way Apple dropped a U2 album onto every iPhone.
This is perhaps the key difference. Public transit in my city of roughly 200,000 shuts down at 5:45 PM on Saturdays. On Monday through Friday, it runs until 8:45 PM, and I'm told even this level of service is below average.
If my system is already intelligent enough to do all of this, why do I need suspend/hibernate?
Because a lot of people's systems aren't "already intelligent enough to do all of this." On my PC, for instance, when Firefox restores my tabs, it restores only their URLs, not their content. If I had loaded pages into tabs for later offline reading, they'll come back as "Problem loading page" if I restore the session while offline. And a lot of operating systems' default window managers don't remember positions and open documents, or they put responsibility on each application and the applications included with the operating system set a poor example by not remembering, such as Windows Notepad.
In theory, Windows is already designed this way. Only a few services require a restart. It's just that PC operating systems in general have become so big, and people on the other side of the Internet have become so malicious, that at least one update per month affects a critical system service.
i'd like the auto-update-and-reboot be a bit smarter and signal apps that an update reboot is occurring and then the apps save their state
Windows applications do get a restart notification. Bug the publishers of the applications that you use to register for and act on this notification. On the other hand, Microsoft is hypocritical about this, including with Windows several applications that do not save their state.
I just leave my desktop running all the time, and turn my laptop off if I know I'm not going to need it. If for whatever reason I am going back and forth to my laptop with reasonably short intervals between use (1-2 hours), I just close the lid and plug it in.
Let me guess: you drive everywhere, as opposed to using your laptop while riding as a passenger on a bus or in someone else's car. Waiting for a bus or transferring between buses would quickly drain your battery (or make you have to reopen all your documents in all your applications) with this sort of off-and-on use.
Donations to Wikimedia Foundation are tax deductible. Donations to a political action committee are not. So if Jimbo wants to use Wikimedia's donation drives for politics, it's going to have to make a separate entity to receive political dollars. It's the same reason that NORML is two different companies.
My results differed. Laying the bike down didn't work for me; I still got a full cycle of red: green for cross traffic, then green arrow for oncoming left turning traffic, then green for cross traffic.
Fortunately car drivers are also trained to keep at least a meter distance when passing a cyclist. It seems that the problem in the US is that automobilists pass too closely
It's likewise the law where I live (a US state) that motorists must keep a yard distance (.91 m) when passing a cyclist.
because of that, cyclist claim the whole lane out of self-defense.
I take the lane when there isn't room in the right through lane for one SUV, 0.91 m of clearance, and one bicycle.
Slashdot Mirror
If you want to design console games, it would be best to be familiar with modern console gaming dont you think?
"Modern" in general or Sony in particular?
As for where to get one, how about your local pawnshop or a store that carries used games/controllers?
That's where I got my Xbox 360 wired controller a couple years ago, and I use it with my PC. But the wireless version of that controller uses proprietary RF communications, not Bluetooth, and for some reason, I didn't seem to find a lot of DS3s when I hit nearby pawn shops this past spring.
How would a vector animation like Homestar Runner or "Badger Badger Badger" have been created without Flash? With Flash, you can buy an old copy of Adobe Flash and use that. But with HTML5, you have to rent (not buy) Edge Animate on Creative Cloud. Or would you recommend creating the vector animation in Flash, rendering to AVI, and sending that to the viewer as MP4 and WebM? That not only bloats the file size by a factor of ten (in my tests) but also destroys any possibility of interactivity.
[Context: an assertion that split-screen is irrelevant because people can buy a PC and a car and go to a LAN party]
You're missing the fact that adults and most teens of 16+ age, drive.
You may have missed recent stories about proposals for "cycle highways" in Munich and London. Or are those designed for someone other than "adults and most teens of 16+ age"?
you can't just go buying Android devices willy-nilly any more than anything else and just expect them to work.
Consoles are easier than tablets. With a console, you can buy the console, the controller, and the games, and be sure that compatibility is warranted just from what is printed on the box. With a tablet, you cannot, as the packaging does not list support for rooting or the Sixaxis Controller app. Therefore, people who remain rationally ignorant because they are busy with other things to do in the day are likely to continue to choose consoles.
Or is there an up-to-date list of which phones and tablets are compatible with the Sixaxis Controller app, so that I'll know before I spend big bucks on a device, shipping, and tax, only to discover that it is incompatible? A quick Google search (sixaxis controller android device compatibility list) failed to find anything relevant.
Because TV manufacturers would have to support it first, or at the very least someone would have to make left/right switchable glasses.
I would have thought that left-only and right-only modes would be more popular to support people who get headaches while watching 3D movies but want to enjoy a movie in 2D with someone else who does enjoy 3D movies. A quick Google search for 2D glasses turns up products compatible with certain 3D technologies.
Or are people actually buying external gamepads like MOGA for use with their tablets and phones?
I don't know if they are but I do know that they can.
Except in practice, "can" doesn't matter quite as much as "are". If only one person owns a particular peripheral, it's not economically viable for a for-profit game developer to add support for that peripheral even to an existing game, let alone develop games from the ground up for that device.
They can also use various PS3 controllers (DS3, Sixaxis) if they don't need to use any other bluetooth devices at the same time... on some devices. Yeah, not a perfect solution, but the point is if it works you can do it for very little money and the app to find out if it will work is free.
For someone who doesn't already own a PS3, where might he find a working DS3 or Sixaxis controller with which to try the Sixaxis Compatibility Checker app? I imagine video game stores' return policies don't cover incompatibility with non-PS3 game systems as a valid reason. Besides, the app's description states that root access is required, and at least on the device I own, rooting would require a factory reset.
Each player is obligated to bring their own computer
This means people have to plan LAN parties in advance. They can't gather for a reason other to play video games and then just spontaneously decide to break out the video games. (See beelsebob's comment.)
And it doesn't help if someone else in the household needs to use the family PC the same night.
power strip, extension cord, ethernet station cable, and chair.
Good luck hauling that behind your bike. Or what am I missing?
Didn't I just read that game consoles are going to be eclipsed by tablets in the next couple of years, in terms of horsepower? Aren't those people just playing games on their PC or on a tablet?
A tablet's input device is a flat sheet of glass. It's fine for games that would have otherwise used a mouse, such as a space shooter like AirAttack HD. It's also good for what are essentially racing games that use only one button, like Rayman Jungle Run. But for games originally designed for a gamepad, there's no way to tell where your thumbs are relative to the on-screen controls at the side while you are looking at the action in the center. It's even worse than the widely panned Turbo Touch 360, which at least has a recessed touchpad with ridges and physical A and B trigger buttons. When I tried the free subset of Pixeline and the Jungle Treasure on my Nexus 7, I kept "whiffing", or pressing outside the active areas of the on-screen gamepad, and missing jumps. This continued until I paired a Bluetooth keyboard, after which the game worked fine.
Or are people actually buying external gamepads like MOGA for use with their tablets and phones? The last time I checked, I couldn't find any sales numbers for these external gamepads, which disappoints me because there's no other way to assure game developers that there's a market for games supporting them.
As for PC, some people choose consoles because they're easier so long as one is happy with vanilla versions of games from major labels.
In 3D, the two cameras are 60 to 65 mm apart (one IPD). This means the two views can share a lot of the visible set calculation and texture caching. Two cameras with half the map between them can't benefit quite as much from that.
The value proposition was obvious: play multiplayer all the time, without having to actually get them over to your house (a non-trivial problem if you're too young to drive, or live in a rural area, or just don't have many friends).
I don't see how online helps in a rural area, as rural areas are generally slower to get wired broadband, and latency over cell or sat is too high for real-time games.
Clearly, the era of split screen was dead - only Nintendo caries the torch on. It's a frustrating loss.
If indie game developers were willing to make PC games designed from the ground up for sharing a screen, would you be willing to buy/build a gaming PC for the living room?
Split-screen gaming usually involves a big hit to framerate and many classic split-screen games (including the early Halo titles) made enormous compromises in this area.
True, Sonic the Hedgehog 2 for Sega Genesis would slow down a lot more in its split-screen mode that put Sonic on top and Tails on bottom. But Super Mario Kart never slowed down. Take that, "Blast Processing". So if Halo 5 can't keep up with rendering two views, this only means Halo 5 is broken.
Plus shared doesn't always mean split. Because Bomberman, Smash TV, and Smash Bros. take place in one room at a time, they don't need to split the screen to fit all players on.
you know what's even better? When the players each have their own station in the same room.
Provided your family is rich enough to buy stations for all gamers in the household plus whomever they have over.
Incidentally, peeking makes split-screen better for co-op than the alternative of buying two consoles and two copies of the game.
All DVD uses some flavor of UDF, even a stamped DVD Video.
but who wants to run a P2P networking node on their smartphone?
Some people have proposed exactly that in order to work around abuses by incumbent cellular carriers. See Wireless mesh network.
they may want to say that Android M is now Android M&M
Android Slim Shady? I believe Google is content to let others be the king of controversy, especially if it would mean dropping a rap album onto every device Google Play the way Apple dropped a U2 album onto every iPhone.
Our public transit shuts down at 6:00pm
This is perhaps the key difference. Public transit in my city of roughly 200,000 shuts down at 5:45 PM on Saturdays. On Monday through Friday, it runs until 8:45 PM, and I'm told even this level of service is below average.
If my system is already intelligent enough to do all of this, why do I need suspend/hibernate?
Because a lot of people's systems aren't "already intelligent enough to do all of this." On my PC, for instance, when Firefox restores my tabs, it restores only their URLs, not their content. If I had loaded pages into tabs for later offline reading, they'll come back as "Problem loading page" if I restore the session while offline. And a lot of operating systems' default window managers don't remember positions and open documents, or they put responsibility on each application and the applications included with the operating system set a poor example by not remembering, such as Windows Notepad.
In theory, Windows is already designed this way. Only a few services require a restart. It's just that PC operating systems in general have become so big, and people on the other side of the Internet have become so malicious, that at least one update per month affects a critical system service.
i'd like the auto-update-and-reboot be a bit smarter and signal apps that an update reboot is occurring and then the apps save their state
Windows applications do get a restart notification. Bug the publishers of the applications that you use to register for and act on this notification. On the other hand, Microsoft is hypocritical about this, including with Windows several applications that do not save their state.
I just leave my desktop running all the time, and turn my laptop off if I know I'm not going to need it. If for whatever reason I am going back and forth to my laptop with reasonably short intervals between use (1-2 hours), I just close the lid and plug it in.
Let me guess: you drive everywhere, as opposed to using your laptop while riding as a passenger on a bus or in someone else's car. Waiting for a bus or transferring between buses would quickly drain your battery (or make you have to reopen all your documents in all your applications) with this sort of off-and-on use.
The court ruled in Dastar v. Fox that a trademark cannot be used as an ersatz copyright.
Donations to Wikimedia Foundation are tax deductible. Donations to a political action committee are not. So if Jimbo wants to use Wikimedia's donation drives for politics, it's going to have to make a separate entity to receive political dollars. It's the same reason that NORML is two different companies.
And if I need more, I'll pivot the screen.
Good luck doing that on a laptop, even one bigger than a netbook.
My results differed. Laying the bike down didn't work for me; I still got a full cycle of red: green for cross traffic, then green arrow for oncoming left turning traffic, then green for cross traffic.
Fortunately car drivers are also trained to keep at least a meter distance when passing a cyclist. It seems that the problem in the US is that automobilists pass too closely
It's likewise the law where I live (a US state) that motorists must keep a yard distance (.91 m) when passing a cyclist.
because of that, cyclist claim the whole lane out of self-defense.
I take the lane when there isn't room in the right through lane for one SUV, 0.91 m of clearance, and one bicycle.