Adobe cares about the folks buying expensive site and server licenses. Those guys don't really care about you because there aren't enough of ya to have much impact on their website's success, so why should adobe invest in your platform, besides the bare minimum quality implementation as a hedge in case desktop linux becomes more important some day. There's no economic incentive.
no good, creates potential for huge losses on legitimate bulk mail. (even if it didn't happen just from people ignoring mail they signed up for, consider the possibility of a malicious user with bots).
There's been a lot of real bad-looking games on the 360. The problem isn't that the hardware is bad or even that there's something wrong with the engines: it's that everyone is making ugly games. Take, for example, saint's row: it's good at drawing lots of shiny objects with very many polygons and shadows, at high resolution even. But the artwork is bland, completely devoid of charm and magic (well, a game like that could probably use more grit than anything, but it doesn't even have that - compare to the atmosphere of, say, Max Payne). Ditto for Dead Rising and Perfect Dark. The reason everyone has a boner for that PS3 demo is not that it's really doing anything technically that the 360 couldn't probably pull off, it's that the animation is fluid, the environment is beautifully designed, it just has good aesthetic sense.
Graphical superiority is basically equivalent to artistic superiority. If you want better looking games, you really good artists and designers more than you do better hardware.
Ok, obviously I meant negligible relative to the benefits of each bulb. (energy savings - negligible overhead) x millions would be a more appropriate formula.
FTA a $3 swirl pays for itself in lower electric bills in about five months
well, they don't sell the things at a loss, and the bulbs last up to ten years, so I guess that amount of energy is negligible.
I've only used DirectX so I don't know how the graphics capabilities compare, but the reason I picked DirectX in the first place was that there's a managed version, which can be used with C#. I'm more of a hobbyist than anything, so I'm more interested in being able to get stuff done quickly than that little bit of extra performance (there is only very small extra overhead for DX API calls).
As for why big commercial games use DirectX, though, that's another question...
That is pretty rough, but I wouldn't say things haven't changed at all: these days they're giving away a version of Visual Studio.NET that ought to be adequate for most hobbyist projects.
Procedural texture generation is good for noisy stuff and stuff that can easily be described mathematically, but you wouldn't use it for a brick wall or scratchy gunmetal - it wouldn't be easy to find a formula for those things simpler and smaller than a compressed bitmap, and even if you did you would have wasted development time doing it. It also sucks up GPU time that could be put to better use. Moreover, I don't know what kkreiger -you- were looking at, but the one I played isn't anywhere near on par with the XBox 360.
Here's a crazy idea - if you can't stuff all the textures you want on one DVD, use two discs. I really don't see disc storage being a serious limiting factor for video games any time soon.
Might still need WINE for some games, though. I develop with Managed DirectX, which uses.NET, but it's just a wrapper around the unmanaged version. There might be other similar libraries that would need re-implementation in unmanaged code to work.
Still, I think the prospects are great. It would be wonderful to have that compile once, run anywhere feature to C#, which has been my favorite language to work in for a couple years now. It would be a pretty big blow to java too, I suspect, since IMO that's the main edge it has over C# for application development.
What most of those games really awesome was being really different than what came before. Fans always ask for more of the same, but it's better to encourage experimentation and deviation with the faith that someone will come up with something entirely new and entertaining that we had never thought of ourselves. The fun of books, films, and video games alike is having someone put new ideas in your head, not having things repeated that are already there.
While I agree that the opinion of elitists and critics should not be taken too seriously, we should ask more of video games than what makes a big profit - snobs and philistines are equally obnoxious. I rarely find the top-selling movies and music satisfying at all, because to my tastes they are repetitive fluff. I want something deeper than what most people are currently shelling out tons of money for, and I'm sad to say that currently video games seldom offer it. I don't share Ebert's skepticism, though. I find what I want in music and film usually in independent work, and I think that, given time, games will catch up. I suspect he is not ideally suited to understand exactly what the limitations of video games are.
People today have easy access to a broader cultural experience than ever before. People who in the past could not afford to spend a lot of money taking chances on esoteric music can just take it now, whether or not the artist wants them to. The legal and moral implications are another debate entirely, but there's no question that the average person can now have more diverse music than ever before. There are entire genres that I never would have gotten into if not for the internet. That's a lot of CDs and concert tickets that wouldn't have been sold, albeit not by the folks that are handing out subpoenas.
If you think there isn't any good music being made today, either you're ridiculously picky or you just aren't looking. Yes, 90% of the music sold in America is (in my opinion mostly bland) pop put out by just four record labels. The breadth of the rest of it is astounding.
But if quantum computers are millions of times faster, is it that big of a deal for encryption? Can't you exponentially increase the difficulty of breaking encryption just by adding bits to the key? Because in that case, 20 extra bits would do the trick.
Even if Nintendo platforms did only have brightly-colored family friendly games, it would still be a stupid argument. Games like, say, Halo aren't more "mature," they're more violent. I know the ESRB sticks an "M" on them, but it pretty obviously doesn't mean you're an older or more sophisticated person if you play them. I don't know when the two terms got equated, but it is a little bit irritating when people who just like violent games consider their pastime superior. Obviously, if I'm not shooting something, I'm engaging in some sort of absurd, childish activity. When you start spending your time sipping tea and reading classics instead of yelling "faggot" at strangers over the internet while attempting to obtain their flag, you can talk down to me.
Not that I don't appreciate the subject matter, but it's a little odd that they should pick images with far fewer than 18 megapixels of detail in them to show off an 18 megapixel projector:)
Tantalizing as it is, I really don't think spreading FUD about DRM is really an ethical thing to do. Moreover, manipulating people by giving them misinformation about computers seems likely to backfire down the line - big corporations can be manipulative, too (how hard do you think it'd be to just rebrand DRM?), and probably all you're going to do is make dumber computer users. I think the average user is bound to run into DRM sooner or later and get pissed off when he can't do whatever it is he's trying to do, legit or not. You won't need to convince anyone that it's annoying.
Ok, so what would you do with it if you could go infinitely fast? My point is that a 3D video game artist can't tell the exact camera angle, zoom, lighting, placement, etc. that the rendering would take place in. Post-processing can add things like filters and special effects, but I don't see how you could use it to make sure that each model as it is projected onto the screen results in an exact arrangement of pixels created by the artist - if you had that exact arrangement of pixels already, then you'd be doing 2D rendering, not 3D. This is a very simple distinction: basic 2D sprite rendering just involves taking a bunch of pictures and displaying them on the screen exactly as the artist drew them, pixel-for-pixel. A 3D model can end up represented on screen in an infinite number of ways, so it's not the same since it's impossible for literally all of them to be the immediate result of deliberate action on the artist's part.
3D graphics that get rendered in real-time are a lot different from a musical recording, which plays back the same every time and, though it may vary in quality from one sound system to another, can generally be reproduced pretty exactly as far as an average pair of ears can tell on commodity hardware (good god, I'm sure I've just accidentally engaged some obsessive audiophile in an argument). Even 2D video game graphics, while they may be arranged differently on the screen from one play through to another, are still just bitmaps that get blitted to the screen pretty exactly. In 3D games, though, the artist can only indirectly manipulate the actual pixels that end up on your screen by working in the world they're projected from. HDR is about making that final image a well-composed representation of that world, a visual experience closer to the one we have with the much broader range of brightnesses real life offers. That may not be appropriate for all games. Those games should just...not use HDR.
Why would you buy these "points" in advance? One of my friends was planning to buy XBox 360 games before the system came out - I thought that was stupid enough, but I guess the idea is to make sure the game doesn't sell out before he gets it? But these points are a purely digital construct. It's not like Microsoft can run out of them. So why are people so eager to buy something they can't even use? Why do they want to hand their money over earlier than they have to?
I'm guessing you've never used the reference rasterizer.
If you're rendering a very simple object on a fast CPU, you'll get a few FPS maybe. Throw in basic shaders, you're down to 1 FPS. Add decent lighting (circa 2000 level) and enough polygons to form a meaningful scene, something you might actually want to render in an application, and you're looking at more like 0.1 FPS. (If you'd like proof, go download the DirectX SDK and try their samples). So basically, this thing might be better than normal software graphics,
I'm sure this thing has some real applications, or else they probably wouldn't have made it. I'm just saying, it seems like an absurdly niche thing - it's for running really low-fi 3D applications on relatively new computers that, for whatever reason, have no hardware rendering capability at all.
Slashdot Mirror
Adobe cares about the folks buying expensive site and server licenses. Those guys don't really care about you because there aren't enough of ya to have much impact on their website's success, so why should adobe invest in your platform, besides the bare minimum quality implementation as a hedge in case desktop linux becomes more important some day. There's no economic incentive.
no good, creates potential for huge losses on legitimate bulk mail. (even if it didn't happen just from people ignoring mail they signed up for, consider the possibility of a malicious user with bots).
pfft, more like underly critical guy.
http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/spacepen.asp
Well, it's excreted back into the environment within a few hours, so...no, I don't think it will.
There's been a lot of real bad-looking games on the 360. The problem isn't that the hardware is bad or even that there's something wrong with the engines: it's that everyone is making ugly games. Take, for example, saint's row: it's good at drawing lots of shiny objects with very many polygons and shadows, at high resolution even. But the artwork is bland, completely devoid of charm and magic (well, a game like that could probably use more grit than anything, but it doesn't even have that - compare to the atmosphere of, say, Max Payne). Ditto for Dead Rising and Perfect Dark. The reason everyone has a boner for that PS3 demo is not that it's really doing anything technically that the 360 couldn't probably pull off, it's that the animation is fluid, the environment is beautifully designed, it just has good aesthetic sense.
Graphical superiority is basically equivalent to artistic superiority. If you want better looking games, you really good artists and designers more than you do better hardware.
Ok, obviously I meant negligible relative to the benefits of each bulb. (energy savings - negligible overhead) x millions would be a more appropriate formula.
...which religion is best.
FTA a $3 swirl pays for itself in lower electric bills in about five months well, they don't sell the things at a loss, and the bulbs last up to ten years, so I guess that amount of energy is negligible.
Does having multiple cores do anything about the memory bottleneck? Does this make the machine balance better or worse?
I've only used DirectX so I don't know how the graphics capabilities compare, but the reason I picked DirectX in the first place was that there's a managed version, which can be used with C#. I'm more of a hobbyist than anything, so I'm more interested in being able to get stuff done quickly than that little bit of extra performance (there is only very small extra overhead for DX API calls). As for why big commercial games use DirectX, though, that's another question...
That is pretty rough, but I wouldn't say things haven't changed at all: these days they're giving away a version of Visual Studio .NET that ought to be adequate for most hobbyist projects.
Procedural texture generation is good for noisy stuff and stuff that can easily be described mathematically, but you wouldn't use it for a brick wall or scratchy gunmetal - it wouldn't be easy to find a formula for those things simpler and smaller than a compressed bitmap, and even if you did you would have wasted development time doing it. It also sucks up GPU time that could be put to better use. Moreover, I don't know what kkreiger -you- were looking at, but the one I played isn't anywhere near on par with the XBox 360.
Here's a crazy idea - if you can't stuff all the textures you want on one DVD, use two discs. I really don't see disc storage being a serious limiting factor for video games any time soon.
Might still need WINE for some games, though. I develop with Managed DirectX, which uses .NET, but it's just a wrapper around the unmanaged version. There might be other similar libraries that would need re-implementation in unmanaged code to work.
Still, I think the prospects are great. It would be wonderful to have that compile once, run anywhere feature to C#, which has been my favorite language to work in for a couple years now. It would be a pretty big blow to java too, I suspect, since IMO that's the main edge it has over C# for application development.
What most of those games really awesome was being really different than what came before. Fans always ask for more of the same, but it's better to encourage experimentation and deviation with the faith that someone will come up with something entirely new and entertaining that we had never thought of ourselves. The fun of books, films, and video games alike is having someone put new ideas in your head, not having things repeated that are already there.
While I agree that the opinion of elitists and critics should not be taken too seriously, we should ask more of video games than what makes a big profit - snobs and philistines are equally obnoxious. I rarely find the top-selling movies and music satisfying at all, because to my tastes they are repetitive fluff. I want something deeper than what most people are currently shelling out tons of money for, and I'm sad to say that currently video games seldom offer it. I don't share Ebert's skepticism, though. I find what I want in music and film usually in independent work, and I think that, given time, games will catch up. I suspect he is not ideally suited to understand exactly what the limitations of video games are.
People today have easy access to a broader cultural experience than ever before. People who in the past could not afford to spend a lot of money taking chances on esoteric music can just take it now, whether or not the artist wants them to. The legal and moral implications are another debate entirely, but there's no question that the average person can now have more diverse music than ever before. There are entire genres that I never would have gotten into if not for the internet. That's a lot of CDs and concert tickets that wouldn't have been sold, albeit not by the folks that are handing out subpoenas.
If you think there isn't any good music being made today, either you're ridiculously picky or you just aren't looking. Yes, 90% of the music sold in America is (in my opinion mostly bland) pop put out by just four record labels. The breadth of the rest of it is astounding.
But if quantum computers are millions of times faster, is it that big of a deal for encryption? Can't you exponentially increase the difficulty of breaking encryption just by adding bits to the key? Because in that case, 20 extra bits would do the trick.
Even if Nintendo platforms did only have brightly-colored family friendly games, it would still be a stupid argument. Games like, say, Halo aren't more "mature," they're more violent. I know the ESRB sticks an "M" on them, but it pretty obviously doesn't mean you're an older or more sophisticated person if you play them. I don't know when the two terms got equated, but it is a little bit irritating when people who just like violent games consider their pastime superior. Obviously, if I'm not shooting something, I'm engaging in some sort of absurd, childish activity. When you start spending your time sipping tea and reading classics instead of yelling "faggot" at strangers over the internet while attempting to obtain their flag, you can talk down to me.
Not that I don't appreciate the subject matter, but it's a little odd that they should pick images with far fewer than 18 megapixels of detail in them to show off an 18 megapixel projector :)
Tantalizing as it is, I really don't think spreading FUD about DRM is really an ethical thing to do. Moreover, manipulating people by giving them misinformation about computers seems likely to backfire down the line - big corporations can be manipulative, too (how hard do you think it'd be to just rebrand DRM?), and probably all you're going to do is make dumber computer users. I think the average user is bound to run into DRM sooner or later and get pissed off when he can't do whatever it is he's trying to do, legit or not. You won't need to convince anyone that it's annoying.
Ok, so what would you do with it if you could go infinitely fast? My point is that a 3D video game artist can't tell the exact camera angle, zoom, lighting, placement, etc. that the rendering would take place in. Post-processing can add things like filters and special effects, but I don't see how you could use it to make sure that each model as it is projected onto the screen results in an exact arrangement of pixels created by the artist - if you had that exact arrangement of pixels already, then you'd be doing 2D rendering, not 3D. This is a very simple distinction: basic 2D sprite rendering just involves taking a bunch of pictures and displaying them on the screen exactly as the artist drew them, pixel-for-pixel. A 3D model can end up represented on screen in an infinite number of ways, so it's not the same since it's impossible for literally all of them to be the immediate result of deliberate action on the artist's part.
3D graphics that get rendered in real-time are a lot different from a musical recording, which plays back the same every time and, though it may vary in quality from one sound system to another, can generally be reproduced pretty exactly as far as an average pair of ears can tell on commodity hardware (good god, I'm sure I've just accidentally engaged some obsessive audiophile in an argument). Even 2D video game graphics, while they may be arranged differently on the screen from one play through to another, are still just bitmaps that get blitted to the screen pretty exactly. In 3D games, though, the artist can only indirectly manipulate the actual pixels that end up on your screen by working in the world they're projected from. HDR is about making that final image a well-composed representation of that world, a visual experience closer to the one we have with the much broader range of brightnesses real life offers. That may not be appropriate for all games. Those games should just...not use HDR.
Why would you buy these "points" in advance? One of my friends was planning to buy XBox 360 games before the system came out - I thought that was stupid enough, but I guess the idea is to make sure the game doesn't sell out before he gets it? But these points are a purely digital construct. It's not like Microsoft can run out of them. So why are people so eager to buy something they can't even use? Why do they want to hand their money over earlier than they have to?
I'm guessing you've never used the reference rasterizer.
If you're rendering a very simple object on a fast CPU, you'll get a few FPS maybe. Throw in basic shaders, you're down to 1 FPS. Add decent lighting (circa 2000 level) and enough polygons to form a meaningful scene, something you might actually want to render in an application, and you're looking at more like 0.1 FPS. (If you'd like proof, go download the DirectX SDK and try their samples). So basically, this thing might be better than normal software graphics,
I'm sure this thing has some real applications, or else they probably wouldn't have made it. I'm just saying, it seems like an absurdly niche thing - it's for running really low-fi 3D applications on relatively new computers that, for whatever reason, have no hardware rendering capability at all.