yeah cliffyb is too cool for his own good alot of the time. he is one of the more 'well known' names in game design, but he talks like a 15 year old so often it's embarassing
what's really annoying is how apologetic this article summary is. i mean who really cares HOW apple's drm has been cracked? it's a good thing no matter what. DRM is there to be broken - culture wants to be free
from what i've read, yes even normal mp3's get drm'ed
MS basically wrapping their greedy fingers around shit that they don't own or even have the right to even claim that they own.
bull-shit...
the whole 'screwing over plays-for-sure' side of the Zune is really the big story. Yet another case of partnering with Microsoft getting you sweet fuck all in the end.
>>we use Windows as a platform to run software for r
which is exactly why Vista will be a major annoyance for anyone trying to do serious work on it. I'm completely in agreeance with the parent - the flying in windows and transparency this, blar blar that are all fine and dandy for the first 5 seconds you are using Vista - it DOES look 'new-ish' and psuedo-fancy...but then try to actually get anything serious done on the OS - the way that windows 'fade' into each other is really counter-productive. When a window pops up that is an actual user-prompt, you don't want it to fade in gently so that you won't notice it (and believe me there will be many a time when you don't notice when a window has changed because of this), you want the window to pop up and say 'hey there - mr computer here, i need your input on something'
the way Vista is currently is very counter-productive to the whole production side of using a computer, period.
i'm fairly near-sighted, but with XP i can click through and navigate through most of the standard windows prompts literally without reading what they are actually saying - because the fact that i can tell when a window has changed and a dialog has popped up. with Vista, you have to focus - not only on the window that you might be working on at that particular moment, but on the entire screen at all times because you never know when another window or prompt might 'slide up' into view without you knowing...
it's a serious issue that i think is going to cause alot more eyestrain and general confusion overall.
as it stands now, basic computer users barely notice when a dialog pops up for them to do something - with vista, things won't pop at all, suddenly you'll find a window locked up because some sneaky dialog prompt has come up and stolen the focus from you. particularly for modal windows, this will be very annoying, very fast.
another major annoyance with vista are the 'security popups' - they pop up randomly but don't seem to have much point at all. how hard would it be for virus writers to spawn random mouse clicks to bypass these things? i've seen driver installers from large-scale hardware companies (yes Brother I'm looking at you) that have automated mouse-clicking in their driver installations that bypass the 'unsigned driver' prompt in XP - a major no no as far as i'm concerned...having a virus or whatever doing the same thing for these security popups won't be too hard either i'm sure.
'previous systems were tweaked to work on IE better'
this is exactly where most of the problems are going to arise - custom applications / systems that rely on IE quirks that should never have been there in the first place.
from what i've heard, this new IE is going to break most of these custom IE applications - consultants, prepare your RFP's!
Microsoft updates == consultants dream, everyone else's nightmare
mocap isn't an 'either or' solution - no matter what, with mocap there is a LOT of cleanup work involved in order to make those animations loop & production ready. it is a rare situation where you'd be able to use raw mocap data directly in a project without cleanup. automated solutions for cleanup can remove the very 'human-ness' of the animation that you were looking to achieve with the mocap in the first place.
this is like any advance in any industry - mocap provides a POTENTIAL time-saving alternative, but is not a panacea that allows you to suddenly replace traditional animators. basically your friend won't be out of a job any time soon.
going back to the original post, the 'amount of time involved' for doing face mapping from multiple pictures is fairly minimal actually - the new rainbow six game for xbox360 uses the eyetoy camera to do this kind of thing directly within the game without 'much' noticable processing.
other games have done this kind of thing in the past - while it might not be up to the matrix-level of detail, considering that you are using a 'console-specific' hardware solution (ie cheap parts, basically disposable camera), the results are pretty startling.
there are numerous researchers (http://ivizlab.sfu.ca/research/research.php) that have published works detailing systems for doing the 'dynamic emoting' capabilities without requiring massive amounts of (as in offline) processing to accomplish.
YOU Might like not being able to save anywhere...
on
Pirates Vs. Publishers
·
· Score: 1
Sure, YOU might like not being able to save anywhere, but most games that DO let you save anywhere STILL have checkpoints and autosave points throughout their levels. How is it diminishing YOUR gaming experience by eliminating a MAJOR source of annoyment and frustration from a majority of the gaming population.
My rant on the topic (caused entirely by Ghost Recon:Advanced Warfighter for PC). Great game, but the save system destroys ANY fun that I might have been having with the game. I PAID MY MONEY, let me play the fucking game already.
every software license agreement in history effectively states that the user is 'renting' the software. No true ownership in any sense of the word is ever transfered, whatsoever.
This is exactly what i was thinking - they can come up with deflector shields for tanks these days, why not apply this to space-based craft? while they aren't technically 'shields' - at least they would suffice for protecting a craft from objects large enough to potentially damage them...if they can pick out rpg's, why not a piece of space debris...
mind you, space debris is typically flying a LOT faster than an rpg...
GRAW is a appealing to a very select audience - it's hardly the 'fast action, focus on fun' type of game that Gears of War is attempting to be. The only thing that they might have in common is the camera viewpoint and the fact that they are both for the mature audience.
GRAW is such a slow-paced, unforgiving game that it will annoy any but the most diehard fans of the tactical shooter genre.
do not confuse what valve has been doing with what could truly be done with 'episodic' content. if it takes them a year to do an 'episode' then their processes and or technology is broken. ie source is too difficult to use, they need to streamline how their games are made. talk to any modder that's used source (or in particular, their editor) and you'll get an earful on how this is true.
based on the MMO model, an ideal episodic series would have updates around every 3 months or so. just long enough to generate enough content to keep the series interesting and short eough so that people don't forget what happened in the previous serious.
telltale is a perfect example of what kinds of things that episodic content allow developers to pursue - instead of fighting tooth and nail with publishers to get 10-15 million to develop a game, an episode could probably be produced for as little as a quarter to half a million dollars if the processes and technology are right.
the number of different ideas that are produced can grow significantly, and it will allow developers to break free of the 'suits' responsible for funding crap like most of what you see on a shelf today.
we are currently in the 'first wave' of episodic games - as companies streamline their processes and figure out what works, you'll start to see alot more interesting productions start to appear.
there are 3 sides to any production: 1 - the idea 2 - the funding 3 - the technology
the bottleneck for most companies is #2 - the funding. we can begin to move towards the movie and tv style funding models (note that this doesn't mean making games more like movie or tv, just their funding models) where instead of one company holding the purse strings, the risk is spread around to 3 or more different investors. each investor spends less, and is willing to fund riskier projects as a result.
the 'big publishers' still have a place in all of this, much like the dvd aftersale market is currently for film or tv - ie bundling several episodes into a single concrete package for retail, but for the most part, the future of new IP distribution will be digital delivery.
gigabyte and multi-gigabyte?
on
IPv6 Essentials
·
· Score: 1
isn't it gigabit and multi-gigabit backbones?
gigabytes and gigabit are two completely different things
it's obviously because there is no one behind YouTube worth suing. Of course this hasn't stopped the RIAA or MPAA from shutting down thousands of other sites that host copyright material.
Not quite sure why Youtube is allowed to exist, when anyone else that sets up something similar would just get shutdown. It's very strange.
yeah this is pretty questionable. Just because they 'revived' an old series from ancient history doesn't make it 'longest running' by any sense of the term.
How do they factor this? number of episodes? number of screen minutes? I mean stargate has been running for how many years?
Just because they haven't bothered to change the actual doctor who series name (even though it's been morphed in countless other ways) is it considered the 'same series'?
exactly - the press release says that it's coming to 'every significant platform' - this whole 'anti-sony' rhetoric is becoming very annoying and tiresome. get off the PR crack and report the news. zonk, if we really wanted your opinion, post in the comments section so we can flame you properly.
anyone that discounts sony, however many missteps that the 'press' claim that they have made, they are STILL the top platform holder.
PS2 continues to outsell the Xbox in every territory EVERY MONTH. This is something that people seem to fail to recognize. The majority of the people that will be buying so-called 'next-gen' consoles will not give a crap about all of the BS about the PS3 before launch. it's all about what comes AFTER launch.
if the system was designed properly it would. xbox does NOT have backwards compatibility whatsoever. Backwards compatibility is me taking that windows 98 program that i've used for 10 years (to use an example) and running it on Xp or Vista without problems. Ie the exact same executable file.
Xbox backwards compatibility is the equivalent of using a big stick to fit a square peg into a round hole.
yeah, it's hilarious that pretty much everyone of these rules, XP violates in hideous ways, from the annoying 'notifications' on down.
i'm wary that they are encouraging developers to pop up yet more of these stupid balloon notification messages though...they're annoying enough in XP, can't wait until every 2 seconds you have a balloon popping up asking one thing or another.
the other hilarious thing is microsoft trying to tell people what 'cool' is in respect to application design. yikes
it's not 'like' - it IS because the reviews are being bought by the companies releasing the games, either by preferential treatment for said review site / magazine (early preview screenshots which sell copies, exclusive demo downloads) or straight up cash (marketing for the most part).
Fileplanet is the worst of this crew.
The worst part about this whole self-perpetuating scam is that in many publisher contracts, developer bonuses are specifically linked to their games recieving good reviews on gamerankings.com (ie an average of the major review sites).
nintendo has about a 3 month backlog for printing DS cartridges. games that weren't done a month or so ago have pretty much zero chance of being on the shelves by christmas, so this is not likely, unless bioware have created a time machine division along with this new handheld division.
disturbingly high numbers of people that get student loans to attend college & university default on their loans.
I think it's something like 65% or higher in canada for students that attend private colleges like the many 'IT' or 'New Media' colleges that are sprouting up.
i could see having a 30-50k (or even higher) debt hanging over your head being enough to make most people go postal.
we are expo vendors and have been for a few years (very small booth) - the expo is pretty much the 'ugly duckling' of the entire GDC. The najority of GDC is about presentations & sessions, the expo component is a very minor sideshow, however large the conference floor is.
I think that CMP is trying to improve the visibility of the expo to try and drive more people there - the expo is very small, traffic-wise, compared to any of the other events. While the conference / sessions are pretty much packed throughout, the expo is pretty much empty friday.
Having said this, getting more eyeballs & traffic through the event would be nice, but are they really customers that we want to spend the time communicating with?
The majority of the booths at GDC are middleware developers - providing technology that is licensed for thousands of dollars (millions in some cases). All an influx of people with no ability to do anything but gawk will do is force more companies to go the 'private booth' type of setup like Epic did this year with Unreal 3 engine.
They had a good sized booth space, but it was all behind closed doors. If the general public wants to come into an expo full of private booths that they can't get into, then sure, turn GDC into the next E3.
---------
On the OTHER side of the stick, there are a number of smaller companies like my own that market specifically to Indie developers, so an influx of the general public for us would be a great thing.
dunno, either way, the expo is pretty expensive to exhibit at - I'm personally of the opinion that the more people the better. But as I mentioned above, I'm a little biased;}
Slashdot Mirror
It's all for naught...trying to get proper spelling on slashdot that is ;}
astronaut / cosmonaut
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronaut
yeah cliffyb is too cool for his own good alot of the time. he is one of the more 'well known' names in game design, but he talks like a 15 year old so often it's embarassing
what's really annoying is how apologetic this article summary is. i mean who really cares HOW apple's drm has been cracked? it's a good thing no matter what. DRM is there to be broken - culture wants to be free
from what i've read, yes even normal mp3's get drm'ed
MS basically wrapping their greedy fingers around shit that they don't own or even have the right to even claim that they own.
bull-shit...
the whole 'screwing over plays-for-sure' side of the Zune is really the big story. Yet another case of partnering with Microsoft getting you sweet fuck all in the end.
>>we use Windows as a platform to run software for r
which is exactly why Vista will be a major annoyance for anyone trying to do serious work on it. I'm completely in agreeance with the parent - the flying in windows and transparency this, blar blar that are all fine and dandy for the first 5 seconds you are using Vista - it DOES look 'new-ish' and psuedo-fancy...but then try to actually get anything serious done on the OS - the way that windows 'fade' into each other is really counter-productive. When a window pops up that is an actual user-prompt, you don't want it to fade in gently so that you won't notice it (and believe me there will be many a time when you don't notice when a window has changed because of this), you want the window to pop up and say 'hey there - mr computer here, i need your input on something'
the way Vista is currently is very counter-productive to the whole production side of using a computer, period.
i'm fairly near-sighted, but with XP i can click through and navigate through most of the standard windows prompts literally without reading what they are actually saying - because the fact that i can tell when a window has changed and a dialog has popped up. with Vista, you have to focus - not only on the window that you might be working on at that particular moment, but on the entire screen at all times because you never know when another window or prompt might 'slide up' into view without you knowing...
it's a serious issue that i think is going to cause alot more eyestrain and general confusion overall.
as it stands now, basic computer users barely notice when a dialog pops up for them to do something - with vista, things won't pop at all, suddenly you'll find a window locked up because some sneaky dialog prompt has come up and stolen the focus from you. particularly for modal windows, this will be very annoying, very fast.
another major annoyance with vista are the 'security popups' - they pop up randomly but don't seem to have much point at all. how hard would it be for virus writers to spawn random mouse clicks to bypass these things? i've seen driver installers from large-scale hardware companies (yes Brother I'm looking at you) that have automated mouse-clicking in their driver installations that bypass the 'unsigned driver' prompt in XP - a major no no as far as i'm concerned...having a virus or whatever doing the same thing for these security popups won't be too hard either i'm sure.
'previous systems were tweaked to work on IE better'
this is exactly where most of the problems are going to arise - custom applications / systems that rely on IE quirks that should never have been there in the first place.
from what i've heard, this new IE is going to break most of these custom IE applications - consultants, prepare your RFP's!
Microsoft updates == consultants dream, everyone else's nightmare
sounds like it is about as good as the ati linux driver!
mocap isn't an 'either or' solution - no matter what, with mocap there is a LOT of cleanup work involved in order to make those animations loop & production ready. it is a rare situation where you'd be able to use raw mocap data directly in a project without cleanup. automated solutions for cleanup can remove the very 'human-ness' of the animation that you were looking to achieve with the mocap in the first place.
this is like any advance in any industry - mocap provides a POTENTIAL time-saving alternative, but is not a panacea that allows you to suddenly replace traditional animators. basically your friend won't be out of a job any time soon.
going back to the original post, the 'amount of time involved' for doing face mapping from multiple pictures is fairly minimal actually - the new rainbow six game for xbox360 uses the eyetoy camera to do this kind of thing directly within the game without 'much' noticable processing.
other games have done this kind of thing in the past - while it might not be up to the matrix-level of detail, considering that you are using a 'console-specific' hardware solution (ie cheap parts, basically disposable camera), the results are pretty startling.
there are numerous researchers (http://ivizlab.sfu.ca/research/research.php) that have published works detailing systems for doing the 'dynamic emoting' capabilities without requiring massive amounts of (as in offline) processing to accomplish.
Sure, YOU might like not being able to save anywhere, but most games that DO let you save anywhere STILL have checkpoints and autosave points throughout their levels. How is it diminishing YOUR gaming experience by eliminating a MAJOR source of annoyment and frustration from a majority of the gaming population.
h ing-that-jack-thompson-should-really-fight-about/
My rant on the topic (caused entirely by Ghost Recon:Advanced Warfighter for PC). Great game, but the save system destroys ANY fun that I might have been having with the game. I PAID MY MONEY, let me play the fucking game already.
http://www.gekidoslair.com/2006/10/10/heres-somet
every software license agreement in history effectively states that the user is 'renting' the software. No true ownership in any sense of the word is ever transfered, whatsoever.
telling yourself otherwise is delusion.
This is exactly what i was thinking - they can come up with deflector shields for tanks these days, why not apply this to space-based craft? while they aren't technically 'shields' - at least they would suffice for protecting a craft from objects large enough to potentially damage them...if they can pick out rpg's, why not a piece of space debris...
mind you, space debris is typically flying a LOT faster than an rpg...
GRAW is a appealing to a very select audience - it's hardly the 'fast action, focus on fun' type of game that Gears of War is attempting to be. The only thing that they might have in common is the camera viewpoint and the fact that they are both for the mature audience.
GRAW is such a slow-paced, unforgiving game that it will annoy any but the most diehard fans of the tactical shooter genre.
do not confuse what valve has been doing with what could truly be done with 'episodic' content. if it takes them a year to do an 'episode' then their processes and or technology is broken. ie source is too difficult to use, they need to streamline how their games are made. talk to any modder that's used source (or in particular, their editor) and you'll get an earful on how this is true.
based on the MMO model, an ideal episodic series would have updates around every 3 months or so. just long enough to generate enough content to keep the series interesting and short eough so that people don't forget what happened in the previous serious.
telltale is a perfect example of what kinds of things that episodic content allow developers to pursue - instead of fighting tooth and nail with publishers to get 10-15 million to develop a game, an episode could probably be produced for as little as a quarter to half a million dollars if the processes and technology are right.
the number of different ideas that are produced can grow significantly, and it will allow developers to break free of the 'suits' responsible for funding crap like most of what you see on a shelf today.
we are currently in the 'first wave' of episodic games - as companies streamline their processes and figure out what works, you'll start to see alot more interesting productions start to appear.
there are 3 sides to any production:
1 - the idea
2 - the funding
3 - the technology
the bottleneck for most companies is #2 - the funding. we can begin to move towards the movie and tv style funding models (note that this doesn't mean making games more like movie or tv, just their funding models) where instead of one company holding the purse strings, the risk is spread around to 3 or more different investors. each investor spends less, and is willing to fund riskier projects as a result.
the 'big publishers' still have a place in all of this, much like the dvd aftersale market is currently for film or tv - ie bundling several episodes into a single concrete package for retail, but for the most part, the future of new IP distribution will be digital delivery.
isn't it gigabit and multi-gigabit backbones?
gigabytes and gigabit are two completely different things
it's obviously because there is no one behind YouTube worth suing. Of course this hasn't stopped the RIAA or MPAA from shutting down thousands of other sites that host copyright material.
Not quite sure why Youtube is allowed to exist, when anyone else that sets up something similar would just get shutdown. It's very strange.
yeah this is pretty questionable. Just because they 'revived' an old series from ancient history doesn't make it 'longest running' by any sense of the term.
How do they factor this? number of episodes? number of screen minutes? I mean stargate has been running for how many years?
Just because they haven't bothered to change the actual doctor who series name (even though it's been morphed in countless other ways) is it considered the 'same series'?
dunno, seems like a pile of crap to me.
exactly - the press release says that it's coming to 'every significant platform' - this whole 'anti-sony' rhetoric is becoming very annoying and tiresome. get off the PR crack and report the news. zonk, if we really wanted your opinion, post in the comments section so we can flame you properly.
anyone that discounts sony, however many missteps that the 'press' claim that they have made, they are STILL the top platform holder.
PS2 continues to outsell the Xbox in every territory EVERY MONTH. This is something that people seem to fail to recognize. The majority of the people that will be buying so-called 'next-gen' consoles will not give a crap about all of the BS about the PS3 before launch. it's all about what comes AFTER launch.
indeed - it's all irrelevant anyways, because all anyone would ever need is 640kb ram anyways, right?
if the system was designed properly it would. xbox does NOT have backwards compatibility whatsoever. Backwards compatibility is me taking that windows 98 program that i've used for 10 years (to use an example) and running it on Xp or Vista without problems. Ie the exact same executable file.
Xbox backwards compatibility is the equivalent of using a big stick to fit a square peg into a round hole.
no kidding - this is the most naive assumption i've seen in a while.
big corporations having a clue about anything to do with the internet? not likely.
yeah, it's hilarious that pretty much everyone of these rules, XP violates in hideous ways, from the annoying 'notifications' on down.
i'm wary that they are encouraging developers to pop up yet more of these stupid balloon notification messages though...they're annoying enough in XP, can't wait until every 2 seconds you have a balloon popping up asking one thing or another.
the other hilarious thing is microsoft trying to tell people what 'cool' is in respect to application design. yikes
it's not 'like' - it IS because the reviews are being bought by the companies releasing the games, either by preferential treatment for said review site / magazine (early preview screenshots which sell copies, exclusive demo downloads) or straight up cash (marketing for the most part).
Fileplanet is the worst of this crew.
The worst part about this whole self-perpetuating scam is that in many publisher contracts, developer bonuses are specifically linked to their games recieving good reviews on gamerankings.com (ie an average of the major review sites).
nintendo has about a 3 month backlog for printing DS cartridges. games that weren't done a month or so ago have pretty much zero chance of being on the shelves by christmas, so this is not likely, unless bioware have created a time machine division along with this new handheld division.
strangely enough, you might have a point.
disturbingly high numbers of people that get student loans to attend college & university default on their loans.
I think it's something like 65% or higher in canada for students that attend private colleges like the many 'IT' or 'New Media' colleges that are sprouting up.
i could see having a 30-50k (or even higher) debt hanging over your head being enough to make most people go postal.
it's a two-sided stick.
;}
we are expo vendors and have been for a few years (very small booth) - the expo is pretty much the 'ugly duckling' of the entire GDC. The najority of GDC is about presentations & sessions, the expo component is a very minor sideshow, however large the conference floor is.
I think that CMP is trying to improve the visibility of the expo to try and drive more people there - the expo is very small, traffic-wise, compared to any of the other events. While the conference / sessions are pretty much packed throughout, the expo is pretty much empty friday.
Having said this, getting more eyeballs & traffic through the event would be nice, but are they really customers that we want to spend the time communicating with?
The majority of the booths at GDC are middleware developers - providing technology that is licensed for thousands of dollars (millions in some cases). All an influx of people with no ability to do anything but gawk will do is force more companies to go the 'private booth' type of setup like Epic did this year with Unreal 3 engine.
They had a good sized booth space, but it was all behind closed doors. If the general public wants to come into an expo full of private booths that they can't get into, then sure, turn GDC into the next E3.
---------
On the OTHER side of the stick, there are a number of smaller companies like my own that market specifically to Indie developers, so an influx of the general public for us would be a great thing.
dunno, either way, the expo is pretty expensive to exhibit at - I'm personally of the opinion that the more people the better. But as I mentioned above, I'm a little biased