I can't believe that Rockstar fucked up like this. This is ridiculous. I really hope that this isn't some lame publicity stunt.
They knew that this game was going to be heavily scrutinized by every Chicken Little culture warrior in the world (sans Al Quaeda, who I'm willing bet don't care), and what do they do? They put porn in the game! Agggh!
Do they want federal regulation of video games? It's not as if the 1st amendment is going to shield game-makers -- there've been plenty of court cases where the judge ruled that games aren't expression and aren't protected (alright, maybe just the one, but you know what I mean). Clinton is practically shitting her pants over this, and I bet the only reason that Lieberman hasn't jumped in is because he's too busy jacking off at the thought of all the legislation he can pass now.
I mean, yeah it's kind of weird that the most troubling part of this game for people isn't the decapitations, but rather crude, fully clothed polygonal eroticism. But still! What were they thinking? And then that bullshit lie about how 3vil h4Xorz "cracked the source code", using their magic wands to just create all stuff.
Rockstar was retarded about this in two ways. First, they left it in the game. Of course some intrepid modders will find it! Hell, some people pretty much made up their own ending for KotOR2. Why couldn't they take the five minutes to just boot that shit from the code? Now they've made the ESRB look like morons (not that hard, admittedly) and gamemakers look like rapacious fiends, eagerly trying to corrupt our youth.
Second, they fucking lied about it. That's the part that gets me. That they just sat there and said nothing, and then lied until that became impossible.
Seriously, I have doubts that this is accidental. But on the other hand, this is way too stupid to be a publicity stunt. Maybe Hilary paid them off?
Why are we all of a sudden complaining about the gameplay in an id game? That's like saying that there's little characterization in George Romero film: no shit.
Carmack et al are on record as saying that games don't need story. Romero (that other one) was booted out of id after he tried to get them to focus on gameplay and design, not just graphics. Admittedly he failed spectacularly, but from that point one id was a one trick pony. They make pretty looking games where you kill zombies/cyborgs and collect keycards.
Is this behind the times in terms of gameplay? Sure. Imo, Deus Ex and System Shock 2 both beat the pants off DOOM3 (and Painkiller and Max Payne) in terms of gameplay and design. And they're more than five years old!
Frankly, DOOM was only "revolutionary" because it was the first game that really nailed how to do graphics good enough to make an FPS game work. Expecting fabulous gameplay out of id is like expecting a Terminator movie to bring you to tears.
DOOM3 is about shooting things. Period. Don't like it, okay, I can relate, but don't try to act as if this is a surprise.
"That trip to LEO would take up to nine days, but that's a good thing; for, what goes up fast, must come down fast, and speed is energy which must be bled off by either massive amounts of expensive and explosive rocket fuel, or through ablative heat transfer which has its own problems (as we have seen before)."
That's not true. It doesn't matter how fast you send something up, things will fall at the same rate, and you'll have the same problems. Using an ion drive is probably a lot more efficient than chemical rockets, but once two objects are in similar orbits they have the same potential and kinetic energy, regardless of method of delivery. And it's this energy, (mainly the potential energy) that needs to be shed to land safely on the Earth again.
I'll bet it's easy to tell if equipment is running or not. A simple diagnostic--artificially creating what they're looking for--would tell them if the thing is working or not.
Then they decide to make a more sensitive detector so that they can "not" detect at an even higher level?
Basically, yeah, that's exactly what they're doing. If they can establish some kind of upper limit on the number of WIMPs, then that is a very important result that allows physicists to see what theories worked and which were just crap.
And then, somehow, with no data, they can extrapolate more accurately how much dark matter is in the universe.
They do have data. They know that there cannot be more that a certain number of WIMPs per unit volume, because otherwise they would have detected them. To use a vaguely similar analogy, if I'm trying to find out how many people are in a building, and I look in the first floor and see no one in it, that observation is data about the number of people in the building and it tells me things about how many people I can possibly expect to find.
At any rate, failed experiments are very important to physics. For instance, the Michelson-Morley experiments failed to detect anything, thus giving strength to the wave-particle theory of light. It would really have sucked for physics if after the first time, Michelson had said, "Oh, well, our equipment must be bogus, this is a waste of money."
Then there's the fact that game graphics can't get that much more realistic (and really, they don't need to be -- the Doom 3 demo already makes my stomach turn).
Ummm, no. When a game on the scale of Vice City can run and look like the D3 screenshots, then maybe you'd have a point. But my understanding is that the D3 can only have a handful of baddies on the screen before it gets unplayable. And even then, that looks nothing like real life. Obviously games will need to look different than real-life--who wants to shoot (seemingly) real people? But regardless, games still have a long way to go until it reaches the point where the graphics are 100% mature.
Nothing you can do to a word processor will require more processing power than a current "average" machine offers.
Fair enough: I certainly don't need dual processors to write a letter to my grandma. But more computational power will open up more possibilities: voice-to-text that doesn't suck; real-time (as in >24 Hz) internet video chat; advanced data-mining; etc. I mean, if we're shooting for pure bare-bones functionality, bust our your 486s, cuz that worked fine for me.
It is a good point that there is a lag in software catching up to hardware, but it will catch up. For the past year, my 9700 Pro has basically been able to handle with ease any and all games thrown at it. But soon, with HL2, D3, and so on, it's really gonna start to chug. Another example: think of how long it takes to transfer files from a floppy to your HDD. Now think of how long it takes to rip a CD. Wouldn't you be willing to pay a pretty penny to make those two times equivalent?
To be fair, AMD has Dell by the short and curlies. Opterons blow Xeons out of the water, especially when it's a multi-processor system. Doesn't matter how much of a jerk Ruiz is, cuz Dell has to start using Opterons to remain competitive.
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"...quicker storage access..." Your junk gets stuck in her trunk?
I wouldn't be so hard on yourself.
Why is this being modded as "funny"? Methinks /. needs a "true dat" option.
I can't believe that Rockstar fucked up like this. This is ridiculous. I really hope that this isn't some lame publicity stunt.
They knew that this game was going to be heavily scrutinized by every Chicken Little culture warrior in the world (sans Al Quaeda, who I'm willing bet don't care), and what do they do? They put porn in the game! Agggh!
Do they want federal regulation of video games? It's not as if the 1st amendment is going to shield game-makers -- there've been plenty of court cases where the judge ruled that games aren't expression and aren't protected (alright, maybe just the one, but you know what I mean). Clinton is practically shitting her pants over this, and I bet the only reason that Lieberman hasn't jumped in is because he's too busy jacking off at the thought of all the legislation he can pass now.
I mean, yeah it's kind of weird that the most troubling part of this game for people isn't the decapitations, but rather crude, fully clothed polygonal eroticism. But still! What were they thinking? And then that bullshit lie about how 3vil h4Xorz "cracked the source code", using their magic wands to just create all stuff.
Rockstar was retarded about this in two ways. First, they left it in the game. Of course some intrepid modders will find it! Hell, some people pretty much made up their own ending for KotOR2. Why couldn't they take the five minutes to just boot that shit from the code? Now they've made the ESRB look like morons (not that hard, admittedly) and gamemakers look like rapacious fiends, eagerly trying to corrupt our youth.
Second, they fucking lied about it. That's the part that gets me. That they just sat there and said nothing, and then lied until that became impossible.
Seriously, I have doubts that this is accidental. But on the other hand, this is way too stupid to be a publicity stunt. Maybe Hilary paid them off?
Carmack et al are on record as saying that games don't need story. Romero (that other one) was booted out of id after he tried to get them to focus on gameplay and design, not just graphics. Admittedly he failed spectacularly, but from that point one id was a one trick pony. They make pretty looking games where you kill zombies/cyborgs and collect keycards.
Is this behind the times in terms of gameplay? Sure. Imo, Deus Ex and System Shock 2 both beat the pants off DOOM3 (and Painkiller and Max Payne) in terms of gameplay and design. And they're more than five years old!
Frankly, DOOM was only "revolutionary" because it was the first game that really nailed how to do graphics good enough to make an FPS game work. Expecting fabulous gameplay out of id is like expecting a Terminator movie to bring you to tears.
DOOM3 is about shooting things. Period. Don't like it, okay, I can relate, but don't try to act as if this is a surprise.
"That trip to LEO would take up to nine days, but that's a good thing; for, what goes up fast, must come down fast, and speed is energy which must be bled off by either massive amounts of expensive and explosive rocket fuel, or through ablative heat transfer which has its own problems (as we have seen before)." That's not true. It doesn't matter how fast you send something up, things will fall at the same rate, and you'll have the same problems. Using an ion drive is probably a lot more efficient than chemical rockets, but once two objects are in similar orbits they have the same potential and kinetic energy, regardless of method of delivery. And it's this energy, (mainly the potential energy) that needs to be shed to land safely on the Earth again.
Then they decide to make a more sensitive detector so that they can "not" detect at an even higher level?
Basically, yeah, that's exactly what they're doing. If they can establish some kind of upper limit on the number of WIMPs, then that is a very important result that allows physicists to see what theories worked and which were just crap.
And then, somehow, with no data, they can extrapolate more accurately how much dark matter is in the universe.
They do have data. They know that there cannot be more that a certain number of WIMPs per unit volume, because otherwise they would have detected them. To use a vaguely similar analogy, if I'm trying to find out how many people are in a building, and I look in the first floor and see no one in it, that observation is data about the number of people in the building and it tells me things about how many people I can possibly expect to find.
At any rate, failed experiments are very important to physics. For instance, the Michelson-Morley experiments failed to detect anything, thus giving strength to the wave-particle theory of light. It would really have sucked for physics if after the first time, Michelson had said, "Oh, well, our equipment must be bogus, this is a waste of money."
Ummm, no. When a game on the scale of Vice City can run and look like the D3 screenshots, then maybe you'd have a point. But my understanding is that the D3 can only have a handful of baddies on the screen before it gets unplayable. And even then, that looks nothing like real life. Obviously games will need to look different than real-life--who wants to shoot (seemingly) real people? But regardless, games still have a long way to go until it reaches the point where the graphics are 100% mature.
Nothing you can do to a word processor will require more processing power than a current "average" machine offers.
Fair enough: I certainly don't need dual processors to write a letter to my grandma. But more computational power will open up more possibilities: voice-to-text that doesn't suck; real-time (as in >24 Hz) internet video chat; advanced data-mining; etc. I mean, if we're shooting for pure bare-bones functionality, bust our your 486s, cuz that worked fine for me.
It is a good point that there is a lag in software catching up to hardware, but it will catch up. For the past year, my 9700 Pro has basically been able to handle with ease any and all games thrown at it. But soon, with HL2, D3, and so on, it's really gonna start to chug. Another example: think of how long it takes to transfer files from a floppy to your HDD. Now think of how long it takes to rip a CD. Wouldn't you be willing to pay a pretty penny to make those two times equivalent?
To be fair, AMD has Dell by the short and curlies. Opterons blow Xeons out of the water, especially when it's a multi-processor system. Doesn't matter how much of a jerk Ruiz is, cuz Dell has to start using Opterons to remain competitive.