Some of the advantages of a console from a game developers point of view have to do with the licensing model, and the stability of hardware.
My understanding of your current plans indicates that you have made the licensing model more open. Game developers don't like this as the market will be flooded with low-quality games. Their games will have a hard time getting notice, and consumers will be turned off to the platform because of quality of games.
You also plan on providing an upgrade mechanism for several components of the machine. How do you plan to do this without bringing along all of the headache game developers have on the PC platform? Compatibility is a pain. Most game developers would rather write to a slower piece of hardware that was unchanging and known, then a faster piece of hardware that was changing.
So, without a stable hardware platfrom, and a closed licensing model, you have removed the primary reason game developers like consoles. What reason is there left to develop for your system and not a PC?
I'm not so much against carding kids for buying M rated games, but look at how these games are judged.
1. Nudity and/or sexual situations.
The US culture has such a sexual phobia, that we think nudity and sex are things that children should be saved from. One could argue that sex and reproduction are the chief reason for our existince, yet we hide this fact from our children as if it were a dirty secret. Why are people worried about children seeing sex and nudity? Are they all going to become rapists?
2. Blood & Gore
Its fine to show people being killed, being masacred, or generally being oppressed. You will get a Teen rating. As soon as you start showing the consequences of these actions: blood and gore, you immediatley get slapped with an Mature rating. Isn't it better to show children the consequences of their actions rather then make them think that homicide is a nice clean action that makes the other guy fall over and disappear?
3. Animals
For some reason, the ESRB is fine if you show humans being cruel to each other, but not if you show humans being cruel to animals. Why are animals more important than humans?
The movie rating system seems to be just as bad. As the producers of South Park found, what is deemed appropriate doesn't follow any consistent pattern.
I would like to see a rating system that tries to find the intended audiences of games and movies and gives the corresponding ratings. These things should be judged on how content is presented, not with a crib sheet of bad/good things.
The average lifespan of a computer is 3 years. This law would make 2/3 of that time covered. Does this make sense?
The average lifespan of a car is something like 10 years, if we made a law that was proportional that would mean any defect in the first 6 years would have to be fixed by the manufacturer. There are almost NO cars with this kind of warranty.
There is also the question of what defective means. If you install 10 pieces of software off the net and your computer stops booting, is the manufacturer libel?
--Tom Stanis
Re:Talking so much without saying anything...
on
Nvidia Apologizes
·
· Score: 1
I don't understand. A company admits they screwed up, and wants to publicly acknowledge this, yet its still not enough for you.
What do you want, flawless execution?
People make mistakes. Corporations are mostly made of people. Doesn't it make sense that a Company might screw up once in a while.
And even so, the real thing that is important to get out of this is that they don't want reviewers signing these contracts. Isn't that the best possible outcome?
The consumer 3d market is allready moved past fully accelerating the OpenGL pipeline and into new territory. So far, the industry is doing well dealing with having outrun SGI.
The introduction of more per-pixel effects in the latest generation of cards is something that was only briefly touched by SGI, and only in extensions to OpenGL, never in the core API. Perhaps the biggest challenge facing OpenGL today is the task of re-defining itself with per-pixel based materials. Vertex based shading is fleeting.
It does seem that the industry has changed directions from chasing SGI's Infinite Reality to chasing RenderMan. Quake3 introduced the idea of using a shader language for realtime effects and this idea will continue to grow. It is a powerful way of expressing material properties and enables a new era of graphics inovation.
Remember the VGA and all its wacky hardware? Many people found things that they could do with VGA hardware that the hardware designers never thought of. Shader based graphics cards are bringing us back to these days of evil tricks.
Just a few weeks ago I read about a technique where cubic environment maps are used to normalize interpolated vertex normals across a triangle. You simply create a cubic environment map that maps a 3d direction to a normalized 3d vector in that direction. This means we can do true phong shading on consumer hardware!
Also, the hyper-z technique that ATI is hyping is not new. Check out the paper from your 1997 SIGGRAPH proceedings on "Visibility Culling using Hierarchical Occlusion Maps". I do applaud them for using a slick algorithmic technique rather then just throwing gates at the problem.
First off, EPIC will release their next generation stuff on PSX2. This certainly doesn't run Direct3D. How is this possible? Modular design...
Just because EPIC isn't going to write OpenGL and Glide drivers doesn't mean that it isn't architected in such a way that this would be easy to do.
I don't understand where you get the idea that writing something to DirectX makes it impossible to port. Bad engine design can make things impossible to port, but not the 3d API that was choosen.
Also, where are you getting the idea that EPIC is having a hard time financially? Unreal Tournament was #10 on the best seller list last week.
I tried to start a software company straight out of college. Big mistake. I had no idea what I was doing, and I didn't understand what "commercial software development" means. Its a lot different than open source development. You have contracts and partners to worry about. You have deadlines to meet, and investors watching from above.
Before you start your own buisness, go out and work in the real world for a while. It is very educational to go work for someone else's startup and see how they do things and what they do right and wrong.
Someone recently asked Brian Hook, a well known name in the game world, whether he wanted to start his own development firm. He said absolutley, but that he needed more experience before he jumped into it. I totally agree.
Some day I will revisit that startup idea I had right after college, when I have more experience. Then I will have connections throught the industry, an understanding of Venture Capital, and knowledge about how to run a buisness.
DGA has been around for years. It's analogous to DirectX minus Direct3D. It's used in vmware, and emulators such as vice and UAE, as well as games that use SDL on linux.
As a person that has used DGA and DirectDraw for many years, this is simply not true. DGA lacks a feature which is key to fast graphics: Hardware accelerated blting. DirectDraw does this nicely and even allows surfaces to be in VRAM for even faster blting. I am happy to say that this is being fixed in Xfree86 4. Both of these still lack blending support, but you can now just relly on the 3d hardware on most card to do that.
DRI is in XFree 4.0. It's analogous to Direct3D
DRI is a way for software to talk to hardware without going through the X server. Direct3D is a HAL, and an API, and a library. These are totally different.
This is very cool, and comes from the SGI high-end graphical workstation world, and is not something that's easy on windows (to do it on windows, you have to use X on windows - I think Hummingbird Exceed X server supports GLX. I might be wrong.)
Remote display with OpenGL is something that was built into OpenGL. It could easily be implemented on windows, as the line between client and server is well defined in the specification. --Tom
This book review was a waste of time for me. It told me nothing about the contents of the book and how relevant they might be to me. The author spends most of his time complaining about structure and little time explaining the material covered.
Are there any insightfull ideas or algorithms discussed in this book? What topics are covered and how well? Is this book simply a rehashing of a college algorithms class, or does it discuss issues about implementation complexity and efficency? Is the process of algorithm construction addressed by the book?
I picked up The Practice of Programming a while ago, and have found it to be an interesting treatise on the major problems and solutions in programming. If this book is anything like it I might consider reading it, but this review gave me little insight.
Several things about this article left a bad taste in my mouth. The author (Hargreaves) attempts to sterotype game programmers and game programming. Hargreaves claims that all game programmers:
1. Don't care about quality, only ego. 2. Produce poor, quick, hackey code. 3. Don't understand scripting languages. 4. Are less usefull than Artists/Designers
He also goes on to say that
5. 3d engines are trivial to program.
Although these stereotypes may exist in the game programmer community, I believe that this is a romantisized view and is not grounded in reality. Here are my rebuttles.
1 and 2. If game programmers didn't care about quality, then most of the titles that ship wouldn't have the level of polish that they do. When you buy a game off the shelf at best buy, take it home, and play it, you usually don't have to worry about whether you have the correct libraries or fear that it will crash. Also, if game programmers produce such low quality code, why is 3d engine licensing so prevalant? Not just Id, but also Unreal, Monolith and friends.
3. At GDC this year, there were several talks about scripting languages that I found quite interesting. Nihilistic is using an embedded java interpreter for their scripting language. Why would the open source community be better at this?
4. There are plenty of titles out there with bad art that are still a lot of fun to play. I wouldn't say that nettrek or xpilot have particularly good art, but a lot of people find these games more fun than the latest stylized buggy games. Programmers are just as important if not more because they implement, rather than simply adding spice.
5. If 3d engines were trivial to develop, why is the industry in a licensing frenzy? Please remember that 3d engine != 3d API. An engine has much more responsibility than simple triangle texture mapping.
Finally, I don't see how such a money driven industry can profit from open source. RAD and other companies like it make all of there money licensing game engine utilities, and would have no source of income if they opensourced their products.
Slashdot Mirror
Some of the advantages of a console from a game developers point of view have to do with the licensing model, and the stability of hardware.
My understanding of your current plans indicates that you have made the licensing model more open. Game developers don't like this as the market will be flooded with low-quality games. Their games will have a hard time getting notice, and consumers will be turned off to the platform because of quality of games.
You also plan on providing an upgrade mechanism for several components of the machine. How do you plan to do this without bringing along all of the headache game developers have on the PC platform? Compatibility is a pain. Most game developers would rather write to a slower piece of hardware that was unchanging and known, then a faster piece of hardware that was changing.
So, without a stable hardware platfrom, and a closed licensing model, you have removed the primary reason game developers like consoles. What reason is there left to develop for your system and not a PC?
--Tom Stanis
I'm not so much against carding kids for buying M rated games, but look at how these games are judged.
1. Nudity and/or sexual situations.
The US culture has such a sexual phobia, that we think nudity and sex are things that children should be saved from. One could argue that sex and reproduction are the chief reason for our existince, yet we hide this fact from our children as if it were a dirty secret. Why are people worried about children seeing sex and nudity? Are they all going to become rapists?
2. Blood & Gore
Its fine to show people being killed, being masacred, or generally being oppressed. You will get a Teen rating. As soon as you start showing the consequences of these actions: blood and gore, you immediatley get slapped with an Mature rating. Isn't it better to show children the consequences of their actions rather then make them think that homicide is a nice clean action that makes the other guy fall over and disappear?
3. Animals
For some reason, the ESRB is fine if you show humans being cruel to each other, but not if you show humans being cruel to animals. Why are animals more important than humans?
The movie rating system seems to be just as bad. As the producers of South Park found, what is deemed appropriate doesn't follow any consistent pattern.
I would like to see a rating system that tries to find the intended audiences of games and movies and gives the corresponding ratings. These things should be judged on how content is presented, not with a crib sheet of bad/good things.
--Tom Stanis
The average lifespan of a computer is 3 years. This law would make 2/3 of that time covered. Does this make sense?
The average lifespan of a car is something like 10 years, if we made a law that was proportional that would mean any defect in the first 6 years would have to be fixed by the manufacturer. There are almost NO cars with this kind of warranty.
There is also the question of what defective means. If you install 10 pieces of software off the net and your computer stops booting, is the manufacturer libel?
--Tom Stanis
I don't understand. A company admits they screwed up, and wants to publicly acknowledge this, yet its still not enough for you.
What do you want, flawless execution?
People make mistakes. Corporations are mostly made of people. Doesn't it make sense that a Company might screw up once in a while.
And even so, the real thing that is important to get out of this is that they don't want reviewers signing these contracts. Isn't that the best possible outcome?
The consumer 3d market is allready moved past fully accelerating the OpenGL pipeline and into new territory. So far, the industry is doing well dealing with having outrun SGI.
The introduction of more per-pixel effects in the latest generation of cards is something that was only briefly touched by SGI, and only in extensions to OpenGL, never in the core API. Perhaps the biggest challenge facing OpenGL today is the task of re-defining itself with per-pixel based materials. Vertex based shading is fleeting.
It does seem that the industry has changed directions from chasing SGI's Infinite Reality to chasing RenderMan. Quake3 introduced the idea of using a shader language for realtime effects and this idea will continue to grow. It is a powerful way of expressing material properties and enables a new era of graphics inovation.
Remember the VGA and all its wacky hardware? Many people found things that they could do with VGA hardware that the hardware designers never thought of. Shader based graphics cards are bringing us back to these days of evil tricks.
Just a few weeks ago I read about a technique where cubic environment maps are used to normalize interpolated vertex normals across a triangle. You simply create a cubic environment map that maps a 3d direction to a normalized 3d vector in that direction. This means we can do true phong shading on consumer hardware!
Also, the hyper-z technique that ATI is hyping is not new. Check out the paper from your 1997 SIGGRAPH proceedings on "Visibility Culling using Hierarchical Occlusion Maps". I do applaud them for using a slick algorithmic technique rather then just throwing gates at the problem.
--Tom Stanis
First off, EPIC will release their next generation stuff on PSX2. This certainly doesn't run Direct3D. How is this possible? Modular design...
Just because EPIC isn't going to write OpenGL and Glide drivers doesn't mean that it isn't architected in such a way that this would be easy to do.
I don't understand where you get the idea that writing something to DirectX makes it impossible to port. Bad engine design can make things impossible to port, but not the 3d API that was choosen.
Also, where are you getting the idea that EPIC is having a hard time financially? Unreal Tournament was #10 on the best seller list last week.
I tried to start a software company straight out of college. Big mistake. I had no idea what I was doing, and I didn't understand what "commercial software development" means. Its a lot different than open source development. You have contracts and partners to worry about. You have deadlines to meet, and investors watching from above.
Before you start your own buisness, go out and work in the real world for a while. It is very educational to go work for someone else's startup and see how they do things and what they do right and wrong.
Someone recently asked Brian Hook, a well known name in the game world, whether he wanted to start his own development firm. He said absolutley, but that he needed more experience before he jumped into it. I totally agree.
Some day I will revisit that startup idea I had right after college, when I have more experience. Then I will have connections throught the industry, an understanding of Venture Capital, and knowledge about how to run a buisness.
--Tom
DGA has been around for years. It's analogous to DirectX minus Direct3D. It's used in vmware, and emulators such as vice and UAE, as well as games that use SDL on linux.
As a person that has used DGA and DirectDraw for many years, this is simply not true. DGA lacks a feature which is key to fast graphics: Hardware accelerated blting. DirectDraw does this nicely and even allows surfaces to be in VRAM for even faster blting. I am happy to say that this is being fixed in Xfree86 4. Both of these still lack blending support, but you can now just relly on the 3d hardware on most card to do that.
DRI is in XFree 4.0. It's analogous to Direct3D
DRI is a way for software to talk to hardware without going through the X server. Direct3D is a HAL, and an API, and a library. These are totally different.
This is very cool, and comes from the SGI high-end graphical workstation world, and is not something that's easy on windows (to do it on windows, you have to use X on windows - I think Hummingbird Exceed X server supports GLX. I might be wrong.)
Remote display with OpenGL is something that was built into OpenGL. It could easily be implemented on windows, as the line between client and server is well defined in the specification. --Tom
Are there any insightfull ideas or algorithms discussed in this book? What topics are covered and how well? Is this book simply a rehashing of a college algorithms class, or does it discuss issues about implementation complexity and efficency? Is the process of algorithm construction addressed by the book?
I picked up The Practice of Programming a while ago, and have found it to be an interesting treatise on the major problems and solutions in programming. If this book is anything like it I might consider reading it, but this review gave me little insight.
--Tom
Several things about this article left a bad taste in my mouth. The author (Hargreaves) attempts to sterotype game programmers and game programming. Hargreaves claims that all game programmers:
1. Don't care about quality, only ego.
2. Produce poor, quick, hackey code.
3. Don't understand scripting languages.
4. Are less usefull than Artists/Designers
He also goes on to say that
5. 3d engines are trivial to program.
Although these stereotypes may exist in the game programmer community, I believe that this is a romantisized view and is not grounded in reality. Here are my rebuttles.
1 and 2. If game programmers didn't care about quality, then most of the titles that ship wouldn't have the level of polish that they do. When you buy a game off the shelf at best buy, take it home, and play it, you usually don't have to worry about whether you have the correct libraries or fear that it will crash. Also, if game programmers produce such low quality code, why is 3d engine licensing so prevalant? Not just Id, but also Unreal, Monolith and friends.
3. At GDC this year, there were several talks about scripting languages that I found quite interesting. Nihilistic is using an embedded java interpreter for their scripting language. Why would the open source community be better at this?
4. There are plenty of titles out there with bad art that are still a lot of fun to play. I wouldn't say that nettrek or xpilot have particularly good art, but a lot of people find these games more fun than the latest stylized buggy games. Programmers are just as important if not more because they implement, rather than simply adding spice.
5. If 3d engines were trivial to develop, why is the industry in a licensing frenzy? Please remember that 3d engine != 3d API. An engine has much more responsibility than simple triangle texture mapping.
Finally, I don't see how such a money driven industry can profit from open source. RAD and other companies like it make all of there money licensing game engine utilities, and would have no source of income if they opensourced their products.
--Tom