Also, are there any major game makers planning on developing for the X-Box? Maybe an X-Box only type game?
Yes, lots. The Xbox site has a list of 17 game developers (Flash required).
There are many others who say they'll release Xbox games.
Maybe an X-Box only type game?
Ahh, there's the rub. If you write to DirectX 8, an Xbox game should be an easy port to a PC, so long as the PC has an similarly powerful graphics subsystem. But if you target a game for the vast range of PC configurations from Intel 815 integrated chipset to whatever the top-of-the-line NVIDIA GPU is in 2001, it's unlikely to be that special on the Xbox. I suspect Microsoft is torn -- they'd like unique "franchise" games for the Xbox, but if the game leads to Windows sales as well, the'll take it.
But, I don't think nVidia or ATI ever had a proprietary 3D API (please correct me if I'm wrong)
Back in 1995 the NV1 multimedia accelerator performed curved surface rendering. It could perform forward texturing of a quadratic surface defined by 9 control points. Unlike any current card, it could do a realistic curved tire with a dozen patches, instead of needing hundreds of triangles to avoid that caveman/combine harvester appearance. It could do an unrealistic Lara Croft breast in a single patch.
Absolutely amazing stuff, and since it was (and still is) totally unrelated to any standard 3-D API, there was an SDK which exposed the interesting programming model of the chip. It was more than the hardware registers but less than a software API.
At the time no developer wanted to write for non-standard hardware unless the hardware vendor shelled out the money. Plus, quadratic patches (parabolas) aren't supported by low-end 3-D authoring tools, and high-end tools use bicubic (NURBS) splines, which don't always degrade to parabolas well. So apart from Martin Hash's Animation Master, no 3-D authoring tool ever supported quadratic textures, which made development tricky. Plus it's pretty hard to do collision detection of curved surfaces.
I saw the future back in 1995 but the game industry wasn't interested.
I worked at Sun, I've seen Bill Joy type. He dumped entire 80-column lines of text in a fraction of a second, the nearly-simultaneous keypresses make a kllllat sound. If he made a typo he'd just press to erase the ENTIRE line and dump it out again.
Using the shift key would be shifting into neutral with your accelerator floored.
No, the problem is not "sex does not exist", the problem is a lot of poorly or weakly rated media. As others have succcintly stated, a government-imposed rating system is better than any other.
There's no problem at all with rating systems. Prince, later TAFKAP, still writes great obscene songs since the PMRC imposed their mandatory warning sticker. He just slaps the parental warning OFFENSIVE LYRICS sticker on his latest and keeps doing his thing.
And as for all the fatuous comments from people saying "Watch TV with your kids, surf the net with your kids", you have absolutely no idea about the reality of raising children. There are 24 hours in a day, parents spend many working, and kids want time alone. Sure parents should be more involved in their kids' upbringing, THEREFORE rate adult material and ban kids from acquiring adult material so that they have to ask their parents to, for example, buy "You Sexy Motherfucker" for them, get in to watch "Bigger, Longer, and Uncut", get them a bottle of Jack Daniels, or whatever else the government has (correctly!) deemed adult.
Both MSoft and Intel have to get more into the consumer game market, both to grow and to control. There's no reason hardware or software-wise for home users to go beyond Office 95 running on a Pentium 166, and these days a much faster box is free with your ISP service. So the only reason for consumers to buy a super-hot box is to play cutting-edge 3D games, and for the next 12 months most consumers will decide that box *isn't* a PC and doesn't run Windows, it's a game console. It must terrify Intel and MSoft out of their wits.
A year ago Wintel were so confident that the home PC would act as the set-top, the home controller, the videophone, the game machine, the home DVD player... It still makes sense, but it didn't happen because neither ultimately controls the hardware and the PC makers are a bunch of blind sheep.
I bet there are a lot more hardware deals like this from both Intel and Microsoft.
I did PC support at the 1984 Olympics. In 1983 and early 1984, for several THOUSAND dollars, you could equip your IBM PC with 640KB (yes, kilobytes) of RAM. We had one Lotus 1-2-3 app that needed a lot of memory, so we equipped a PC with half a dozen full-length cards stuffed with chips that were 128KB of memory each, and then used special software to access all 768KB.
As for hard disk storage, the IBM XT with built-in 10MB hard drive was just appearing. So you wrote your dBase II and Basic apps to run on one floppy and store data on another floppy in the other floppy drive.
Human Resources had a 10MB hard drive. It was so valuable that they used ArcServe and thick cables to share its vast contents with several PC's at once.
Digital Resources CP/M was still prevalent in 1983, but in 1984 MSoft's MS-DOS (hastily repackaged operating system from another company -- Pacific Systems?)was quickly becoming the standard O/S for the PC. Mice were a specialized add-on for graphic artists -- the 4-color EGA screen was pretty rare.
So when the Apple Mac came out, it was so far ahead it was hard to compute for most users. (Then again the earlier Apple Lisa was in some ways even more advanced!) VisiOn for Windows was another WIMP system. But in an average 256KB (or 128KB for the Mac) of memory, it was hard to run more than one real program, so few users could see the point of mousing or copying and pasting. And MSoft pre-announced a downright weird-looking Windows, with tiled non-overlapping windows and menus at the bottom.
William Gibson wrote Neuromancer in 1984 and he freely admits he knew nothing about computers at the time. Put those facts together and his conception of cyberspace is a fantastic achievement. The Sprawl series of books are packed with ideas, some of which are dated, but many are still to come true. Much of the VR in Neal Stephenson's "Snow Crash" is anticipated in a single off-hand remark in "Count Zero" about the mercenary Jaylene Slide doing all her socializing in cyberspace as a neon avatar.
As for the style, back in 1984 nearly all SF was the all-knowing scientists in a great future. Gibson and the other so-called cyberpunk writers (collected in Bruce Sterling's "Mirrorshaded") rebelled against that. These days everyone expects the future to be grimy and street-wise and vaguely dystopian, but that's because of the impact of the book (and of course "Blade Runner"). Gibson's quote "The street finds its own uses for technology" has become a cliche, but he wrote it.
As for the lack of action, surely the ringing phones from wintermute made the hair on the back of your neck stand on end? Or try out the last brief quote here
I maintain the complete bibliography, so I'm biased, but the Nebula, Hugo, Philip K. Dick, Seiun, and Ditmar awards for Neuromancer mean something.
Gibson's later work is weak, but for most readers Burning Chrome - Neuromancer - Count Zero - Mona Lisa Overdrive is a sensational ride.
As for the movie, who knows. Neuromancer is a pretty resilient story and worked well as an audiobook and graphic novel, but there's a lot of ways they could screw it up.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, lots. The Xbox site has a list of 17 game developers (Flash required).
There are many others who say they'll release Xbox games.
Maybe an X-Box only type game?
Ahh, there's the rub. If you write to DirectX 8, an Xbox game should be an easy port to a PC, so long as the PC has an similarly powerful graphics subsystem. But if you target a game for the vast range of PC configurations from Intel 815 integrated chipset to whatever the top-of-the-line NVIDIA GPU is in 2001, it's unlikely to be that special on the Xbox. I suspect Microsoft is torn -- they'd like unique "franchise" games for the Xbox, but if the game leads to Windows sales as well, the'll take it.
Back in 1995 the NV1 multimedia accelerator performed curved surface rendering. It could perform forward texturing of a quadratic surface defined by 9 control points. Unlike any current card, it could do a realistic curved tire with a dozen patches, instead of needing hundreds of triangles to avoid that caveman/combine harvester appearance. It could do an unrealistic Lara Croft breast in a single patch.
Absolutely amazing stuff, and since it was (and still is) totally unrelated to any standard 3-D API, there was an SDK which exposed the interesting programming model of the chip. It was more than the hardware registers but less than a software API.
At the time no developer wanted to write for non-standard hardware unless the hardware vendor shelled out the money. Plus, quadratic patches (parabolas) aren't supported by low-end 3-D authoring tools, and high-end tools use bicubic (NURBS) splines, which don't always degrade to parabolas well. So apart from Martin Hash's Animation Master, no 3-D authoring tool ever supported quadratic textures, which made development tricky. Plus it's pretty hard to do collision detection of curved surfaces.
I saw the future back in 1995 but the game industry wasn't interested.
And it's made in Flash
--
I worked at Sun, I've seen Bill Joy type.
He dumped entire 80-column lines of text in
a fraction of a second, the nearly-simultaneous keypresses make a kllllat sound. If he made a typo he'd just press to erase the ENTIRE line and dump it out again.
Using the shift key would be shifting into neutral with your accelerator floored.
No, the problem is not "sex does not exist", the problem is a lot of poorly or weakly rated media. As others have succcintly stated, a government-imposed rating system is better than any other.
There's no problem at all with rating systems. Prince, later TAFKAP, still writes great obscene songs since the PMRC imposed their mandatory warning sticker. He just slaps the parental warning OFFENSIVE LYRICS sticker on his latest and keeps doing his thing.
And as for all the fatuous comments from people saying "Watch TV with your kids, surf the net with your kids", you have absolutely no idea about the reality of raising children. There are 24 hours in a day, parents spend many working, and kids want time alone. Sure parents should be more involved in their kids' upbringing, THEREFORE rate adult material and ban kids from acquiring adult material so that they have to ask their parents to, for example, buy "You Sexy Motherfucker" for them, get in to watch "Bigger, Longer, and Uncut", get them a bottle of Jack Daniels, or whatever else the government has (correctly!) deemed adult.
You got that right.
Both MSoft and Intel have to get more into the consumer game market, both to grow and to control. There's no reason hardware or software-wise for home users to go beyond Office 95 running on a Pentium 166, and these days a much faster box is free with your ISP service. So the only reason for consumers to buy a super-hot box is to play cutting-edge 3D games, and for the next 12 months most consumers will decide that box *isn't* a PC and doesn't run Windows, it's a game console. It must terrify Intel and MSoft out of their wits.
A year ago Wintel were so confident that the home PC would act as the set-top, the home controller, the videophone, the game machine, the home DVD player... It still makes sense, but it didn't happen because neither ultimately controls the hardware and the PC makers are a bunch of blind sheep.
I bet there are a lot more hardware deals like this from both Intel and Microsoft.
Uh, a 1MB chip was science fiction back then.
I did PC support at the 1984 Olympics. In 1983 and early 1984, for several THOUSAND dollars, you could
equip your IBM PC with 640KB (yes, kilobytes) of RAM. We had one Lotus 1-2-3 app that needed a lot of memory, so we equipped a PC with half a dozen full-length cards stuffed with chips that were 128KB of memory each, and then used special software to access all 768KB.
As for hard disk storage, the IBM XT with built-in 10MB hard drive was just appearing. So you wrote your dBase II and Basic apps to run on one floppy and store data on another floppy in the other floppy drive.
Human Resources had a 10MB hard drive. It was so valuable that they used ArcServe and thick cables to share its vast contents with several PC's at once.
Digital Resources CP/M was still prevalent in 1983, but in 1984 MSoft's MS-DOS (hastily repackaged operating system from another company -- Pacific Systems?)was quickly becoming the standard O/S for the PC. Mice were a specialized add-on for graphic artists -- the 4-color EGA screen was pretty rare.
So when the Apple Mac came out, it was so far ahead it was hard to compute for most users. (Then again the earlier Apple Lisa was in some ways even more advanced!) VisiOn for Windows was another WIMP system. But in an average 256KB (or 128KB for the Mac) of memory, it was hard to run more than one real program, so few users could see the point of mousing or copying and pasting. And MSoft pre-announced a downright weird-looking Windows, with tiled non-overlapping windows and menus at the bottom.
I could go on...
As for the style, back in 1984 nearly all SF was the all-knowing scientists in a great future. Gibson and the other so-called cyberpunk writers (collected in Bruce Sterling's "Mirrorshaded") rebelled against that. These days everyone expects the future to be grimy and street-wise and vaguely dystopian, but that's because of the impact of the book (and of course "Blade Runner"). Gibson's quote "The street finds its own uses for technology" has become a cliche, but he wrote it.
As for the lack of action, surely the ringing phones from wintermute made the hair on the back of your neck stand on end? Or try out the last brief quote here
I maintain the complete bibliography, so I'm biased, but the Nebula, Hugo, Philip K. Dick, Seiun, and Ditmar awards for Neuromancer mean something.
Gibson's later work is weak, but for most readers Burning Chrome - Neuromancer - Count Zero - Mona Lisa Overdrive is a sensational ride.
As for the movie, who knows. Neuromancer is a pretty resilient story and worked well as an audiobook and graphic novel, but there's a lot of ways they could screw it up.