Actually, your description of what MP3 is doing is almost identical to what the algorithm is doing to remove unnecessary triangles.
He's not just throwing out high definition data either (which would be a poor compression algorithm). He's finding a seed point, and then trying to build the largest flat surface that masks the underlying points, because they don't really give much detail anyways (not always true).
So when are we going to start giving money to SCO? I mean, seriously.. Before you get all upset and huffy LISTEN TO ME. Are you listening?
Okay. Of the more interesting claims that SCO made was that the GPL is unenforceable, and unconstitutional. This is a haughty claim, and one that I do not believe has any legal basis whatsoever.
However, the GPL also hasn't really been tested in court. And this makes it weak, in comparison to other licenses which *have.* Better for the movement as a whole that we get a precedent in our favor on such an easy, obviously wrong case, then one that (potentially) could be more legally tenuous on down the line.
So as I said, when are we going to start the collection for SCO? I would very much like to see that aspect of the case worked through the court system.
Additionally, the statements in and of themselves are not all that strange. The article says the average machine, not the required machine.
Consider that the same thing could've been said about Windows 95 when it was first being developed (while windows 3.1 still ran on an 8 MHz 286 with a whopping 8 megs of ram!)...
A: "Yeah, they say that the average machine that will be running Windows 95 will be 100 times faster with a 1 gig of hard disk space, and a network card so that the connection to the internet can always be on!"
B: "What's the internet?"
Re:at the rate PC games are pushing the market
on
Cinematic Game Graphics
·
· Score: 3, Informative
IAAVGGP. (I am a video game graphics programmer.)
No offense intended, but you really have no idea at all what you are talking about. We're not holding on to old ideas; we're still waiting for hardware to catch up to the ideas we had 30 years ago. Almost all of the algorithms and processes used to do cutting edge rendering today are based on academic papers from the 1970s.
This actually brings up an interesting problem with the Linux development model.
Because the development group is a (relatively) rag tag bunch of people who send code in, there isn't really an organization than can countersue companies like SCO for defamation, slander and libel.
Which is what any normal company would be doing to SCO right now.
As a previous poster mentioned, 'who you know' can be as or more important than what you know.
The other question is whether or not you are willing to relocate. If you are, then its pretty easy to move up (speaking from experience). If not, then you are severely limited in your choices.
You haven't developed for the PS2. Its a real bitch.
Seriously, consider the following:
1) Launch titles usually look / sound / play weak compared to games developed later for the same console. The hardware hasn't changed during that time, so what did? All of the quirks and the bottenecks have been figured out.
2) The XBox doesn't have this disadvantage, because developing for it is *very* similar to developing for the PC.
Personally, all I believe MS has to do to become successful is get someone like Squenix to develop an RPG solely for them (and clearly they have the bucks to make such a proposition) that's *really* good. For instance, if FFXIII were an XBox only title, you would see a radical jump in sales in Japan for the XBox.
You clearly have no understanding of the game development process. At all.
Hiring some "U.S. coder buddies" and some "Russian artists" is not the way to make a game that you can "sell like hotcakes." It is the way to make a game like Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing, which has the distinction of being the *only* game in the history of Gamespot to recieve a 1.0. For your reference, the developer's website is at Stellarstone.com.
There are several problems with this, but it boils down to a couple of key points:
1) Making games with today's technology is very hard in the amount of time allotted to development. Basically, you have one and a half to two years to rewrite *every component of a game.* Every time we write a new engine, we reinvent the camera. We reinvent user input, and a method of displaying that UI to the user. A new networking protocol, graphics engine, AI, physics, oh yeah, and game mechanics. Considering that there are entire companies devoted to developing each of these components, and have teams comparable or larger then we have for an entire game, one can see that it is non-trivial. Writing a typical game engine requires not one or two coders, but a team full of them (typically 10-20 for a medium to large title).
2) Making games is an iterative process. This is what *really* kills overseas development, and why I feel my job (I'm a graphics programmer) is pretty secure for at least the forseeable future. You can't plan out every aspect of your game. You can plan how you think it will work, and you can implement it. But if you don't leave time in your schedule to rework that when you are done, your game will suck. Designers and artists regularly come to my desk and ask me to help them prototype something. They need code support to try something different out in game. And they need it *now.* They can't wait 24 hours everytime they need some little piddily task completed so that they can see how something works.
You say that the common US developer is shoddy, and this I cannot disagree with. But the common US game developer is far from shoddy. We work hard, and we work smart. And we are paid well for what we can do because few others can do it (in what other IT field can you expect to make 75K with two years of experience?) Out of the 30 or so coders whom I've worked closely with on various projects, only two have been useless. And both of them have since left the game industry because it was too hard for them.
You may not believe me. After all, what do I know? But John Carmack gave a speech at GDC this year which pretty much touched on the points that I made above.
You guys think its bad that people cheat and make it to their sixth year of CS without being able to do string comparisons or understand working directories?
My roomate in college was in a senior level Electrical Engineering class when someone tried to argue with the professor about why the result of this equation:
(3 * 2) ^ 5
was 96, and not the correct answer of 7776. (I'm simplifying the equation substantially, but the basic gist is the same).
Turns out the man had made it to his fourth year of EE without understanding order of operations.
You are assuming (incorrectly) that the publisher maintains the rights to the software that developers write for them. More importantly, you are assuming that Nintendo had any long-term rights to the code for Ninja Gaiden (this is highly unlikely as Tecmo was both the developer *and* publisher for the original series on the NES).
Tecmo developed the *code.* They owned the code, they kept the code. The code was independent of the medium (NES carts) that it was originally developed on.
So in order for them to make this code work on the XBox, they would simply remove the code specifically pertaining to the Cart and away they go.
"As computer hardware continues to accelerate at this pace, the divide between computing power with hardcore gamers and non-hardcore gamers increase, it will be harder and harder to make PC games."
This is actually not as true as you might believe. I am a graphics programmer, and the sad truth is that we are barely scratching the surface of the capabilities of the newer and newer cards. Sure, they have improved fill rates and higher vertex throughput, but only if you organize your data in such a way to keep the number of batches sent to the hardware very small (less then 600 per frame will get you close to 60 fps on *anything* newer than Radeon 9500, regardless of what's in the batches).
One of the main reasons that games post only slightly better results between card x and y (and the reason why even older generations of card x and y don't perform terribly worse), is because the increase in performance on the cards and CPU speeds have more or less caused us to get lazy. Rather than using insane optimization tricks to improve the performance by the linear performance imrpovement of the card; we've just gotten more linearly lazy about our data submission.
The overwhelming majority of games don't even keep the GPU busy at all. We just spin on the CPU side, submitting batches to the hardware.
If you're interested in a technical presentation on the subject, you can look here (pdf required).
he always dreamed about making games that give people total freedom, but what he discovered is that complete freedom in a game world is boring after about ten minutes.
Peter Molyneux was also responsible for Black & White if you recall.
Slashdot Mirror
Better toys? Toys like games?
Hahahahahha
Actually, your description of what MP3 is doing is almost identical to what the algorithm is doing to remove unnecessary triangles.
He's not just throwing out high definition data either (which would be a poor compression algorithm). He's finding a seed point, and then trying to build the largest flat surface that masks the underlying points, because they don't really give much detail anyways (not always true).
...would wipe Europe off the map.
:-p
Can I nominate France to host the project?
So when are we going to start giving money to SCO? I mean, seriously.. Before you get all upset and huffy LISTEN TO ME. Are you listening?
Okay. Of the more interesting claims that SCO made was that the GPL is unenforceable, and unconstitutional. This is a haughty claim, and one that I do not believe has any legal basis whatsoever.
However, the GPL also hasn't really been tested in court. And this makes it weak, in comparison to other licenses which *have.* Better for the movement as a whole that we get a precedent in our favor on such an easy, obviously wrong case, then one that (potentially) could be more legally tenuous on down the line.
So as I said, when are we going to start the collection for SCO? I would very much like to see that aspect of the case worked through the court system.
Your friends don't want to read it. I promise. ;-)
"Despite the article's assertions, no evidence of widespread security problems"
How widespread could the problems really be? I mean... When you only have 3.2% market share, its not like the problems affect *that* many consumers.
What type of programming do you do, exactly, where the algorithm isn't the major focus of your work?
Certainly not games, and almost certainly not commercial shrinkwrap products.
I work out the algorithmic efficiency of every piece of code I write. If I didn't, my games would get bupkis for framerate.
Additionally, the statements in and of themselves are not all that strange. The article says the average machine, not the required machine.
Consider that the same thing could've been said about Windows 95 when it was first being developed (while windows 3.1 still ran on an 8 MHz 286 with a whopping 8 megs of ram!)...
A: "Yeah, they say that the average machine that will be running Windows 95 will be 100 times faster with a 1 gig of hard disk space, and a network card so that the connection to the internet can always be on!"
B: "What's the internet?"
IAAVGGP. (I am a video game graphics programmer.)
No offense intended, but you really have no idea at all what you are talking about. We're not holding on to old ideas; we're still waiting for hardware to catch up to the ideas we had 30 years ago. Almost all of the algorithms and processes used to do cutting edge rendering today are based on academic papers from the 1970s.
This actually brings up an interesting problem with the Linux development model.
Because the development group is a (relatively) rag tag bunch of people who send code in, there isn't really an organization than can countersue companies like SCO for defamation, slander and libel.
Which is what any normal company would be doing to SCO right now.
As a previous poster mentioned, 'who you know' can be as or more important than what you know.
The other question is whether or not you are willing to relocate. If you are, then its pretty easy to move up (speaking from experience). If not, then you are severely limited in your choices.
My $0.02.
... and because it didn't affect the rating in Europe, the ninjas you will be facing in Ninja Gaiden are all naked women.
You haven't developed for the PS2. Its a real bitch.
Seriously, consider the following:
1) Launch titles usually look / sound / play weak compared to games developed later for the same console. The hardware hasn't changed during that time, so what did? All of the quirks and the bottenecks have been figured out.
2) The XBox doesn't have this disadvantage, because developing for it is *very* similar to developing for the PC.
Personally, all I believe MS has to do to become successful is get someone like Squenix to develop an RPG solely for them (and clearly they have the bucks to make such a proposition) that's *really* good. For instance, if FFXIII were an XBox only title, you would see a radical jump in sales in Japan for the XBox.
You clearly have no understanding of the game development process. At all.
Hiring some "U.S. coder buddies" and some "Russian artists" is not the way to make a game that you can "sell like hotcakes." It is the way to make a game like Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing, which has the distinction of being the *only* game in the history of Gamespot to recieve a 1.0. For your reference, the developer's website is at Stellarstone.com.
There are several problems with this, but it boils down to a couple of key points:
1) Making games with today's technology is very hard in the amount of time allotted to development. Basically, you have one and a half to two years to rewrite *every component of a game.* Every time we write a new engine, we reinvent the camera. We reinvent user input, and a method of displaying that UI to the user. A new networking protocol, graphics engine, AI, physics, oh yeah, and game mechanics. Considering that there are entire companies devoted to developing each of these components, and have teams comparable or larger then we have for an entire game, one can see that it is non-trivial. Writing a typical game engine requires not one or two coders, but a team full of them (typically 10-20 for a medium to large title).
2) Making games is an iterative process. This is what *really* kills overseas development, and why I feel my job (I'm a graphics programmer) is pretty secure for at least the forseeable future. You can't plan out every aspect of your game. You can plan how you think it will work, and you can implement it. But if you don't leave time in your schedule to rework that when you are done, your game will suck. Designers and artists regularly come to my desk and ask me to help them prototype something. They need code support to try something different out in game. And they need it *now.* They can't wait 24 hours everytime they need some little piddily task completed so that they can see how something works.
You say that the common US developer is shoddy, and this I cannot disagree with. But the common US game developer is far from shoddy. We work hard, and we work smart. And we are paid well for what we can do because few others can do it (in what other IT field can you expect to make 75K with two years of experience?) Out of the 30 or so coders whom I've worked closely with on various projects, only two have been useless. And both of them have since left the game industry because it was too hard for them.
You may not believe me. After all, what do I know? But John Carmack gave a speech at GDC this year which pretty much touched on the points that I made above.
At my job, all except for one guy are college educated; and all of the programmers definitely are.
The fact of the matter is, if you don't have good fundamentals in C++ (ie, data structures, algorithms, etc); I'm not interested in hiring you.
You guys think its bad that people cheat and make it to their sixth year of CS without being able to do string comparisons or understand working directories?
My roomate in college was in a senior level Electrical Engineering class when someone tried to argue with the professor about why the result of this equation:
(3 * 2) ^ 5
was 96, and not the correct answer of 7776. (I'm simplifying the equation substantially, but the basic gist is the same).
Turns out the man had made it to his fourth year of EE without understanding order of operations.
Makes me wish there was a slashdot rating for "Sad".
You have this strange assumption that the parents are somehow any more intelligent then the children.
Its not going to make it any better if your dad is (for instance) Richard Hoagland.
Actually, another point is that in order for the "publishers to get on board," you need gamers. (Which linux is currently *very* short on.)
Additionally, developers are missing a *well* standardized graphics API. Unfortunately, Open/GL is not it.
For those of you who would like to see what the site looks like, here's a bunch of google caches.
You are assuming (incorrectly) that the publisher maintains the rights to the software that developers write for them. More importantly, you are assuming that Nintendo had any long-term rights to the code for Ninja Gaiden (this is highly unlikely as Tecmo was both the developer *and* publisher for the original series on the NES).
Tecmo developed the *code.* They owned the code, they kept the code. The code was independent of the medium (NES carts) that it was originally developed on.
So in order for them to make this code work on the XBox, they would simply remove the code specifically pertaining to the Cart and away they go.
This is actually not as true as you might believe. I am a graphics programmer, and the sad truth is that we are barely scratching the surface of the capabilities of the newer and newer cards. Sure, they have improved fill rates and higher vertex throughput, but only if you organize your data in such a way to keep the number of batches sent to the hardware very small (less then 600 per frame will get you close to 60 fps on *anything* newer than Radeon 9500, regardless of what's in the batches).
One of the main reasons that games post only slightly better results between card x and y (and the reason why even older generations of card x and y don't perform terribly worse), is because the increase in performance on the cards and CPU speeds have more or less caused us to get lazy. Rather than using insane optimization tricks to improve the performance by the linear performance imrpovement of the card; we've just gotten more linearly lazy about our data submission.
The overwhelming majority of games don't even keep the GPU busy at all. We just spin on the CPU side, submitting batches to the hardware.
If you're interested in a technical presentation on the subject, you can look here (pdf required).
Peter Molyneux was also responsible for Black & White if you recall.
Guess he learned his lesson.
Way too much exposition, in the style of some Russian epic from the 60s
What series isn't filled with way too much exposition? I mean... Have you ever seen Gundam W?
I can't believe this hasn't been modded up as funny. Made me crack up. :)
South Park is awesome.