Paper trails don't guarantee what the machine records but they provide data to match the machine's record against. If the paper trail indicates a result that differs from the result in the machine you at least know the machine has been doing something wrong instead of taking the machine's result and hoping that it's right with no way to check.
I didn't see people returning fire at Colubine. Schools don't let pupils take weapons onto their premises so only the guy who smuggles them in has them.
The PS2 is bad enough without breaking, my PS2 works fine but I still hate it. Stupid interface convention (is it/\ to cancel today? Or maybe O or X?), slow loading (takes forever before that thing is even done with its intros), low number of controller ports, no off button, only standby (SCPH-70000+), no DVD playback with an RGB cable, switches my TV to 16:9 with a SCART cable for some stupid reason, requires metal bits glued to random places in addition to the boot disc just to break the region lock, requires a network disc that gets sent to you 2 months after you set your username and password (by then most people forgot their login and stupid password restrictions prevent using some standard password). I'm sure there's more that I can't remember right now, except for the stupid hardware design that makes game development a nightmare.
Yes but this is a fighting game with all your favourite Nintendo characters, most likely with an ESRB rating of T or E. It's the kind of game mothers would expect to be perfect for children.
That's why the ones who play WoW in the online gaming community I belong to use TeamSpeak.
And that sentence doesn't give you ideas? You know, like using a third party application running on your PC so you can talk with those people you know?
I wouldn't. There's a pitiful selection of Blu-Ray movies and by the time that grows to acceptable levels Blu-Ray players will be cheaper and better than they are now. Provided the format doesn't get taken off the market before then, that is.
One issue is that cinemas have to pay most of the money they get from ticket sales to the movie's distributor. That's why they use ads and concessions, to make the money they don't get from ticket sales.
What a bountiful collection of jargon you have... it's clear that you come from a dogmatic school of 3D modeling.
I've learned that at Polycount and it matches pretty much every piece of documentation on the matter I've seen.
Texture deformation happens on the contiguous mesh, (one-piece models) though it is generally a real-time feature of the engine and not the model itself. Part of Valve's innovation was making model-animation specifics part of the engine, rather than relying on design-time parameters. Why did you not make the leap to this conclusion? Are you so steeped in static modeling that you fail to envision the model in action?
I still don't see which part of the process you call texture deformation. Intuitively I'd assume either doing something with the UV coordinates at runtime or the very process of determining what texel goes where when the scene is rendered to the screen (or buffer) but the way you use it seems to match the mesh deformation.
As to the idea that I was even referring to consoles in the first place, I didn't.
I didn't claim you did however I do claim that console use of skeletal animation does predate Half-Life and that the technique had to hit the mainstream whether Valve used it or not. Considering the amount of data vertex animation creates on models of a more modern polycount and animation numbers we'd hit hundreds of MBs of animation data per model with today's games so the use of skeletal animation by games was inevitable.
For this thoroughly unrelated claim, I have to make a mention of its inaccuracy. Half Life had plenty of UV mapping; it's now an indispensable part of 3D design!
I wasn't talking about UV mapping, I was talking about modifying those UV coordinates at runtime which is what I assumed you meant with texture deformation.
This is why I've said that the state of modern 3D-dev is thanks in part to the efforts of the Valve team.
I think we disagree on the size of that part, though.
Valve was good enough to help distribute the technique around the 3D community rather than patent and camp on it.
Considering it relied on the Biped plugin for 3dsmax for creating the data back then that'd be a bit hard to patent.
I'm not sure of your exact stance in this discussion... frankly, it's a bit troll-ish. (debating irrelevant details and trying to intimidate with barrages of so-called uber-speak)
From my position it looks a lot like you're doing that.
Not for all MMOS. Some like Second Life allow exchange between real world and ingame money (in both directions). Those should be treated like chips in a casino. If the money can only go real -> virtual it's like those coin-op arcade and pinball machines but if it can go in both directions and possibly more out than in it's gambling.
AFAIK the people who trade items for real world money dodge the EULA/TOS claims by declaring their actions as rendering a service (acquiring and transferring the items). That's taxable already even though I think most people fail to report that income.
The article sounds like this is pure speculation so I wouldn't take claims about taxation of purely ingame transfers seriously. They claim Congress will pass a law but of course that means there are no details. It's unlikely that Congress will tax purely virtual transactions and real money transactions are taxed already.
Maybe they will tax currencies like the Linden Dollar that can be easily exchanged for real money even when they aren't converted yet (since they are essentially money in an account) and maybe games using such currencies will be subject to gambling laws (gambling is not restricted to completely random games AFAIK).
Another issue for Second Life could be money laundering. Considering all the restrictions the internet money services I used so far (Moneybookers, Paypal) employ to prevent money laundering SL might need similarily strong safeguards. Maybe they're already in place, I haven't played SL.
That's usually because of a disparity between two groups within the population where one group has the power and uses it to exploit the other. The state needs its money, when the aristocracy is nice enough to the government the money will be leveraged from the plebs instead. If the aristocrats exploit the plebs to a degree where the plebs feel they cannot survive like this and wouild rather risk their lives in a revolution than take these taxes a revolution starts. We're far from the point where taxes take so much of our money that our livelyhood is threatened.
Today's mass media and psychology knowledge as well as immediate feedback on the population's oppinion allows politicians to do their thing in the way that causes the least unrest and as such I doubt we'll see a revolution in a modern country unless the government becomes too arrogant and makes mistakes in their decisions. Instead of taxing the poor directly they raise taxes across the board and then give tax cuts that reduce especially the taxes that benefit the aristocracy (in a modern political system that would be the personal friends of the government bigwhigs and of course the lobbyists). Want to gain more power? Don't just go out and grab it, set up an atmosphere where the public will think giving you new power is the best way to handle the situation.
Hitler managed to install a despotic government by instilling fear and making the public believe that granting him dictatorial powers was necessary to defend against the Polish menace.
I know of the consoles of the era. Vertex interpolation (which is necessary for inter-frame blending when you're using vertex animation) was just too costly for those processors which is why they used those segments. I'm pretty sure those developers on the old systems would have loved to make contiguous meshes but if it wasn't possible...
Skeletal animation only means the model uses a skeleton, i.e. a hierarchy of transformations and each part of the model gets assigned to one or more of these transformations. Whether you have a contiguous mesh or lots of small segments assigned to these transformations does not matter. If you decide to store vertex transformations instead you don't have skeletal animation. But I don't see why Virtua Fighter shouldn't count as skeletal animation. SKA allows interchangeable meshes that use the same skeleton, VF does that with Dural.
I don't know what you mean with texture deformation, AFAIK Half-Life didn't make much use of manipulating UV coordinates. Do you mean their "reflective" surfaces (sphere environment mapping)?
And what game other than Wanted uses NURBS? Those things aren't practical for realtime use since they are just a higher order description of the mesh and in realtime environments you don't need those outside of terrain. NURBS just mean you can't put the polygons where you want them and we haven't reached polygon numbers where placing those polygons by hand would be impractical. Hell, even with those we'd probably use subdivision modeling and ZBrush or Mudbox.
Slashdot Mirror
Paper trails don't guarantee what the machine records but they provide data to match the machine's record against. If the paper trail indicates a result that differs from the result in the machine you at least know the machine has been doing something wrong instead of taking the machine's result and hoping that it's right with no way to check.
You would think a nation like Germany would have learned the lesson better than any other.
The nation does but you're demanding reasonable thoughts from a politician, especially one trying to get voters on his side.
I didn't see people returning fire at Colubine. Schools don't let pupils take weapons onto their premises so only the guy who smuggles them in has them.
I think you mean on his Z3 and you're greatly overestimating its clock frequency.
The PS2 is bad enough without breaking, my PS2 works fine but I still hate it. Stupid interface convention (is it /\ to cancel today? Or maybe O or X?), slow loading (takes forever before that thing is even done with its intros), low number of controller ports, no off button, only standby (SCPH-70000+), no DVD playback with an RGB cable, switches my TV to 16:9 with a SCART cable for some stupid reason, requires metal bits glued to random places in addition to the boot disc just to break the region lock, requires a network disc that gets sent to you 2 months after you set your username and password (by then most people forgot their login and stupid password restrictions prevent using some standard password). I'm sure there's more that I can't remember right now, except for the stupid hardware design that makes game development a nightmare.
Sony has ALWAYS has great hardware.
You don't have anything from the Playstation product line I take it?
Yes but this is a fighting game with all your favourite Nintendo characters, most likely with an ESRB rating of T or E. It's the kind of game mothers would expect to be perfect for children.
That's why the ones who play WoW in the online gaming community I belong to use TeamSpeak.
And that sentence doesn't give you ideas? You know, like using a third party application running on your PC so you can talk with those people you know?
I wouldn't. There's a pitiful selection of Blu-Ray movies and by the time that grows to acceptable levels Blu-Ray players will be cheaper and better than they are now. Provided the format doesn't get taken off the market before then, that is.
So this is why the Xbox division lost billions over the life of the original Xbox?
Yes because they couldn't sell enough games. To be fair, they'd probably have to sell like 50 games per console to break even.
Wait, there was Half Life for the Nomad?
One issue is that cinemas have to pay most of the money they get from ticket sales to the movie's distributor. That's why they use ads and concessions, to make the money they don't get from ticket sales.
Yes, coincidence. He picked the 42 at random because he thought it had no special meaning.
What a bountiful collection of jargon you have... it's clear that you come from a dogmatic school of 3D modeling.
I've learned that at Polycount and it matches pretty much every piece of documentation on the matter I've seen.
Texture deformation happens on the contiguous mesh, (one-piece models) though it is generally a real-time feature of the engine and not the model itself. Part of Valve's innovation was making model-animation specifics part of the engine, rather than relying on design-time parameters. Why did you not make the leap to this conclusion? Are you so steeped in static modeling that you fail to envision the model in action?
I still don't see which part of the process you call texture deformation. Intuitively I'd assume either doing something with the UV coordinates at runtime or the very process of determining what texel goes where when the scene is rendered to the screen (or buffer) but the way you use it seems to match the mesh deformation.
As to the idea that I was even referring to consoles in the first place, I didn't.
I didn't claim you did however I do claim that console use of skeletal animation does predate Half-Life and that the technique had to hit the mainstream whether Valve used it or not. Considering the amount of data vertex animation creates on models of a more modern polycount and animation numbers we'd hit hundreds of MBs of animation data per model with today's games so the use of skeletal animation by games was inevitable.
For this thoroughly unrelated claim, I have to make a mention of its inaccuracy. Half Life had plenty of UV mapping; it's now an indispensable part of 3D design!
I wasn't talking about UV mapping, I was talking about modifying those UV coordinates at runtime which is what I assumed you meant with texture deformation.
This is why I've said that the state of modern 3D-dev is thanks in part to the efforts of the Valve team.
I think we disagree on the size of that part, though.
Valve was good enough to help distribute the technique around the 3D community rather than patent and camp on it.
Considering it relied on the Biped plugin for 3dsmax for creating the data back then that'd be a bit hard to patent.
I'm not sure of your exact stance in this discussion... frankly, it's a bit troll-ish. (debating irrelevant details and trying to intimidate with barrages of so-called uber-speak)
From my position it looks a lot like you're doing that.
Not for all MMOS. Some like Second Life allow exchange between real world and ingame money (in both directions). Those should be treated like chips in a casino. If the money can only go real -> virtual it's like those coin-op arcade and pinball machines but if it can go in both directions and possibly more out than in it's gambling.
Death does not exempt you from taxes.
Well argued claims and logical conclusions.
Yes but banks are subject to banking laws so a bank account is not equal to an MMO account. The latter is more like chips from a casino.
AFAIK the people who trade items for real world money dodge the EULA/TOS claims by declaring their actions as rendering a service (acquiring and transferring the items). That's taxable already even though I think most people fail to report that income.
The article sounds like this is pure speculation so I wouldn't take claims about taxation of purely ingame transfers seriously. They claim Congress will pass a law but of course that means there are no details. It's unlikely that Congress will tax purely virtual transactions and real money transactions are taxed already.
Maybe they will tax currencies like the Linden Dollar that can be easily exchanged for real money even when they aren't converted yet (since they are essentially money in an account) and maybe games using such currencies will be subject to gambling laws (gambling is not restricted to completely random games AFAIK).
Another issue for Second Life could be money laundering. Considering all the restrictions the internet money services I used so far (Moneybookers, Paypal) employ to prevent money laundering SL might need similarily strong safeguards. Maybe they're already in place, I haven't played SL.
That's usually because of a disparity between two groups within the population where one group has the power and uses it to exploit the other. The state needs its money, when the aristocracy is nice enough to the government the money will be leveraged from the plebs instead. If the aristocrats exploit the plebs to a degree where the plebs feel they cannot survive like this and wouild rather risk their lives in a revolution than take these taxes a revolution starts. We're far from the point where taxes take so much of our money that our livelyhood is threatened.
Today's mass media and psychology knowledge as well as immediate feedback on the population's oppinion allows politicians to do their thing in the way that causes the least unrest and as such I doubt we'll see a revolution in a modern country unless the government becomes too arrogant and makes mistakes in their decisions. Instead of taxing the poor directly they raise taxes across the board and then give tax cuts that reduce especially the taxes that benefit the aristocracy (in a modern political system that would be the personal friends of the government bigwhigs and of course the lobbyists). Want to gain more power? Don't just go out and grab it, set up an atmosphere where the public will think giving you new power is the best way to handle the situation.
Hitler managed to install a despotic government by instilling fear and making the public believe that granting him dictatorial powers was necessary to defend against the Polish menace.
It kept recommending the Bible.
It was a static HTML page containing the bibliography of Dan Brown.
What happens when you answer "Yes, this is Mark, what do you want?"?
I know of the consoles of the era. Vertex interpolation (which is necessary for inter-frame blending when you're using vertex animation) was just too costly for those processors which is why they used those segments. I'm pretty sure those developers on the old systems would have loved to make contiguous meshes but if it wasn't possible...
Skeletal animation only means the model uses a skeleton, i.e. a hierarchy of transformations and each part of the model gets assigned to one or more of these transformations. Whether you have a contiguous mesh or lots of small segments assigned to these transformations does not matter. If you decide to store vertex transformations instead you don't have skeletal animation. But I don't see why Virtua Fighter shouldn't count as skeletal animation. SKA allows interchangeable meshes that use the same skeleton, VF does that with Dural.
I don't know what you mean with texture deformation, AFAIK Half-Life didn't make much use of manipulating UV coordinates. Do you mean their "reflective" surfaces (sphere environment mapping)?
And what game other than Wanted uses NURBS? Those things aren't practical for realtime use since they are just a higher order description of the mesh and in realtime environments you don't need those outside of terrain. NURBS just mean you can't put the polygons where you want them and we haven't reached polygon numbers where placing those polygons by hand would be impractical. Hell, even with those we'd probably use subdivision modeling and ZBrush or Mudbox.
If you look at the linked Wikipedia article, it says that the retrieval method is "fuzzy"
An overworked intern that hadn't had a shave for two months?