The only claim I made is that the DS sales got a huge boost from Nintendogs (which sells out as fast as the Labrador & Friends version ships). The data is very clear on that in Japan, press releases say the same is true for North America and Europe.
There's no reliable data on the PSP or DS for NA (NPD stopped the public release of these figures), there are quite detailled graphs for Japan, though:
Valve its going down and you know it since counter strike source yes it has all the graphical stuff but someone even my gramma can make headshots on that.
MY gramma(r) committed suicide after reading this sentence.
Doom 3 uses normalmaps (aka dot3 bumpmaps), textures that describe the difference between the interpolated vertex normals and the normals of the highpoly model surface. For that you need two different models, one at "movie resolution" (high poly) and one at game resolution. Many games either don't use normalmaps at all or use handpainted ones (Halo 2). For those there is no need for a high poly model of the ingame assets and normalmapping is a rather recent technology, while it'll be more common next gen (and is becoming standard with PC games), very few current gen console titles use it.
Either way, for normalmaps most people build the lowpoly mesh by hand because the end result is MUCH better than using a modifier for that (remember the complaints about Doom 3's triangle craniums?). And you'd have to clean up the modifier result anyway so it might even befaster to start from scratch.
Current as of June 19??? Hello, we have December now, there've been a few major releases since then. GTA:LCS, Nintendogs, Mario Kart DS, etc. The DS got a huge sales boost in all territories just from Nintendogs.
That car looks pretty wasteful to me, too many verts that do nothing. I mean, why the hell are there vertices in the side of the rear spoiler? Why do all those loops continue around the model? Why are there straight lines that have fifty vertices defining them? Is that really the ingame model? Was there not enough time to optimize the mesh?
I don't need tutorials, I'm doing 3d art for roughly five years now. Talked with plenty of industry folks. Never have I heard of anyone doing a highpoly first when they're working on something that's meant for ingame and doesn't use normalmaps (and some even make the lowpoly first when working with normalmaps!). The optimizer modifier is pretty useless when you're chopping off more than maybe 30% of the triangle count since it neither knows what details you consider necessary nor how you'd like the meshflow or where additional loops for deformation go, Silo's topology brush is probably the best way to generate a lowpoly from a highpoly without completely rebuilding from scratch. Never mind that it takes MUCH longer (maybe even ten times as long) to build a highpoly mesh than a lowpoly one. Not even promotional art always gets highpoly meshes, often it's an ingame asset with a meshsmooth slapped on and a few tweaks in Photoshop (I think most of the From Russia With Love promo material was made this way).
Normalmaps aside, Messiah is the only game I've heard of that actually uses highpoly assets and scales them down for ingame use.
Ideally you don't want an art degree at all. Get a degree in electroengineering or something. A game art degree is useless (may impress the HR dude but the art director who does the final selection doesn't give a fuck, he's seen enough incompetent people with degrees, your portfolio and experience matters), a general art degree is useless when applying to a games company. Your degree should have a worth when you quit the games industry and get a less exhausting (and better paid) job after the almost inevitable burnout.
Seymour, second (?) reincarnation, in the snowy area after the catmen mountain. Right after a looooooooooong path without branches or points of interest, random encounters every five steps (which I ran from after an hour or so of being annoyed and bored, that was half a dungeon, shouldn't have made enough of a difference that I'd survive his attacks, I'd need almost twice as many HP) and a fifteen minute (when skipping as much as possible) cutscene before the boss fight. That was the point where I decided that this game isn't meant to be finished, it exists only to piss the user off.
Meet my friend Mister., he'll gladly take over for that ! boy you're overworking there.
I think we should all just be happy that MS raised the bar on what to expect in the future of gaming, and if it had been up to Sony or Nintendo the next-gen may have only been XBOX one status visuals or who knows!
Nintendo? Perhaps. Sony? No. Freaking. Way. They rely on graphics just as much as Microsoft and they will not accept anything less than or even equal to the XCircle.
Why don't we talk about this more often I mean what do you guys think the future of games would have been if it were just Nintendo and Sony?
You mean like before the XBox was released? PS1/N64 gen, early PS2 gen? Seemed to work allright and I don't see anything big we'd have missed out on without Microsoft. Sure, there'd be no XBox Live but that doesn't seem to matter to many people as the low adoption rates show.
My belief is that for one the Nex-gen would not of started until 2008 or even 10
And? What's wrong with that? There's nothing wrong with the current hardware and I don't see a reason to replace it yet. There's no compelling reason for a new console hardware generation right now because, as we can see from the x360's launch lineup, it doesn't offer much of an improvement upon the old hardware. Sure, prettier graphics and all but not a big step forward for gameplay.
And besides, Sony would have started the next gen when Blu-Ray comes out, no matter what happens. They want to use the PS3 to bring Bluray into more homes and win the format war against HDDVD.
Let's just give it some time and all be happy were experiencing the new generation now instead of later and I mean years later!
Why? I'm not happy that I have to buy new hardware within the next few years if I want to keep playing new console releases. Hardware is costy, takes up space and means another box plus controllers under my TV. If that new hardware brought any big advances, games that just wouldn't have been possible before (and I'm not talking about adding normalmaps or something), a reason for new hardware, I might appreciate the next generation. Maybe if the Revolution is all it's hyped up to be I'll welcome it.
Does he have a 52" HDTV and a 600+ watt sound system on his TV? I have a TV that's very blurry (free antialiasing!), not significantly larger than my computer monitor and uses the built-in speakers. Can the x360 be plugged into a computer monitor? Does it do 72Hz?
Um, what? Definitely not because you pretty much have to rebuild a model from scratch when you're downrezzing from highpoly to ingame. Highpoly assets are only built if absolutely required (for movies, normalmaps or perhaps promotional purposes) because they are time-consuming as hell and follow different construction rules than ingame assets (e.g. on a hipoly model you'd model the belt, on an ingame model you'd paint it on). Textures are painted at the highest resolution that could occur in the game (but not always, severe downscaling might need some parts painted differently) but usually not that large if you're dealing with a PS2 game.
The question I have is why those "demo" units here only have videos on them? I'm certainly not buying a system just because of a pretty video (especially not a faked one like most of these obviously are) and the console is right there, why aren't there any games on it?
If you're a follower of Freud you'd say it's all related to sex in some way. The "in some way" qualifier means that even an absurd explaination will be accepted and I'd call that useless. It's like saying "everything is in some way related to the number 23". Sure, there are always some strange ways of computing that number but when the way there becomes too complicated it might be worth questioning whether that is really the point.
games themselves are not necessarily art, at least not in the same way as a painting or a film.
Well, obviously. Neither is a book or a musical piece. Each medium has its own "language" and it's obviously futile to expect another medium to use the same language. Games convey messages completely different than movies do. A game can nudge you into a direction and make you see the message while thinking you thought it up yourself. A book can do the same but a book does so in a different way. Games also interact with the user (art can be interactive, modern theatre often is to a certain degree), which prompts completely new ways of conveying a message. You can, to a certain degree, react towards the user's thoughts.
Of course games aren't made to be art. Movies, books, music, etc isn't made to be art but to entertain the audience and convey a message. What were Shakespeare's plays during his lifetime? Entertainment! To argue that art should be more important than entertainment is stupid, the master will weave both into each other and never lose sight of the primary purpose of his work (entertainment), which is why those works are regarded as great. For games that means the game has to be fun to play. A fool would make "art" by putting lots of conventional art into a game without thinking about the user experience, a master will make a fun game AND a work of art in one piece, defining and using a "language" unique to games. Movies didn't have their own language at first, they were basically filmed theatre acts. Now they have their own distinct language to convey a message in.
Xenosaga (2, at least) is rather low on prerendered videos, most of the stuff seems to be realtime. You may remember that game as being one of the largest games this generation.
From what I've heard, GTA:SA hits the limits of the format as well and it doesn't seem to use much video, either.
I think he meant for games to use since so far MS is saying that HDDVD support won't include games to avoid compatibility issues. Perhaps they'll change that once the HDDVD versions hit the market (because telling people any earlier will make them stop buying, obviously), maybe they won't.
A game like GTA:SA has to fit on one DVD (since you can't tell the user to change discs if your game streams data, that would require a choke point the player has to pass to get from one half of the map to the other and at each pass he has to swap discs. Apparently the devs had quite a few problems fitting all that data on one disc.
Slashdot Mirror
The only claim I made is that the DS sales got a huge boost from Nintendogs (which sells out as fast as the Labrador & Friends version ships). The data is very clear on that in Japan, press releases say the same is true for North America and Europe.
t ory=7231l
There's no reliable data on the PSP or DS for NA (NPD stopped the public release of these figures), there are quite detailled graphs for Japan, though:
In hardware sales, there was again little change, with the Nintendo DS enjoying a 40.72 percent market share with 48,342 unit sales. The PSP was next with a 26.18 percent market share and 31,078 unit sales http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?s
complete chart: http://www.codepoetsolutions.com/myth/dsvspsp.htm
Valve its going down and you know it since counter strike source yes it has all the graphical stuff but someone even my gramma can make headshots on that.
MY gramma(r) committed suicide after reading this sentence.
Doom 3 uses normalmaps (aka dot3 bumpmaps), textures that describe the difference between the interpolated vertex normals and the normals of the highpoly model surface. For that you need two different models, one at "movie resolution" (high poly) and one at game resolution. Many games either don't use normalmaps at all or use handpainted ones (Halo 2). For those there is no need for a high poly model of the ingame assets and normalmapping is a rather recent technology, while it'll be more common next gen (and is becoming standard with PC games), very few current gen console titles use it.
Either way, for normalmaps most people build the lowpoly mesh by hand because the end result is MUCH better than using a modifier for that (remember the complaints about Doom 3's triangle craniums?). And you'd have to clean up the modifier result anyway so it might even befaster to start from scratch.
Current as of June 19??? Hello, we have December now, there've been a few major releases since then. GTA:LCS, Nintendogs, Mario Kart DS, etc. The DS got a huge sales boost in all territories just from Nintendogs.
I'm playing Gradius you insensitive clod!
That car looks pretty wasteful to me, too many verts that do nothing. I mean, why the hell are there vertices in the side of the rear spoiler? Why do all those loops continue around the model? Why are there straight lines that have fifty vertices defining them? Is that really the ingame model? Was there not enough time to optimize the mesh?
But it can become the centre of your home entertainment unit
You mean I'm supposed to put it into my PC?
I don't need tutorials, I'm doing 3d art for roughly five years now. Talked with plenty of industry folks. Never have I heard of anyone doing a highpoly first when they're working on something that's meant for ingame and doesn't use normalmaps (and some even make the lowpoly first when working with normalmaps!). The optimizer modifier is pretty useless when you're chopping off more than maybe 30% of the triangle count since it neither knows what details you consider necessary nor how you'd like the meshflow or where additional loops for deformation go, Silo's topology brush is probably the best way to generate a lowpoly from a highpoly without completely rebuilding from scratch. Never mind that it takes MUCH longer (maybe even ten times as long) to build a highpoly mesh than a lowpoly one. Not even promotional art always gets highpoly meshes, often it's an ingame asset with a meshsmooth slapped on and a few tweaks in Photoshop (I think most of the From Russia With Love promo material was made this way).
Normalmaps aside, Messiah is the only game I've heard of that actually uses highpoly assets and scales them down for ingame use.
Ideally you don't want an art degree at all. Get a degree in electroengineering or something. A game art degree is useless (may impress the HR dude but the art director who does the final selection doesn't give a fuck, he's seen enough incompetent people with degrees, your portfolio and experience matters), a general art degree is useless when applying to a games company. Your degree should have a worth when you quit the games industry and get a less exhausting (and better paid) job after the almost inevitable burnout.
Seymour, second (?) reincarnation, in the snowy area after the catmen mountain. Right after a looooooooooong path without branches or points of interest, random encounters every five steps (which I ran from after an hour or so of being annoyed and bored, that was half a dungeon, shouldn't have made enough of a difference that I'd survive his attacks, I'd need almost twice as many HP) and a fifteen minute (when skipping as much as possible) cutscene before the boss fight. That was the point where I decided that this game isn't meant to be finished, it exists only to piss the user off.
Meet my friend Mister ., he'll gladly take over for that ! boy you're overworking there.
I think we should all just be happy that MS raised the bar on what to expect in the future of gaming, and if it had been up to Sony or Nintendo the next-gen may have only been XBOX one status visuals or who knows!
Nintendo? Perhaps. Sony? No. Freaking. Way. They rely on graphics just as much as Microsoft and they will not accept anything less than or even equal to the XCircle.
Why don't we talk about this more often I mean what do you guys think the future of games would have been if it were just Nintendo and Sony?
You mean like before the XBox was released? PS1/N64 gen, early PS2 gen? Seemed to work allright and I don't see anything big we'd have missed out on without Microsoft. Sure, there'd be no XBox Live but that doesn't seem to matter to many people as the low adoption rates show.
My belief is that for one the Nex-gen would not of started until 2008 or even 10
And? What's wrong with that? There's nothing wrong with the current hardware and I don't see a reason to replace it yet. There's no compelling reason for a new console hardware generation right now because, as we can see from the x360's launch lineup, it doesn't offer much of an improvement upon the old hardware. Sure, prettier graphics and all but not a big step forward for gameplay.
And besides, Sony would have started the next gen when Blu-Ray comes out, no matter what happens. They want to use the PS3 to bring Bluray into more homes and win the format war against HDDVD.
Let's just give it some time and all be happy were experiencing the new generation now instead of later and I mean years later!
Why? I'm not happy that I have to buy new hardware within the next few years if I want to keep playing new console releases. Hardware is costy, takes up space and means another box plus controllers under my TV. If that new hardware brought any big advances, games that just wouldn't have been possible before (and I'm not talking about adding normalmaps or something), a reason for new hardware, I might appreciate the next generation. Maybe if the Revolution is all it's hyped up to be I'll welcome it.
Does he have a 52" HDTV and a 600+ watt sound system on his TV? I have a TV that's very blurry (free antialiasing!), not significantly larger than my computer monitor and uses the built-in speakers. Can the x360 be plugged into a computer monitor? Does it do 72Hz?
Make that 20 Euros if you live in Europe, the x360 game prices are outrageous. Same goes for Quake 4 and Gun, by the way.
Um, what? Definitely not because you pretty much have to rebuild a model from scratch when you're downrezzing from highpoly to ingame. Highpoly assets are only built if absolutely required (for movies, normalmaps or perhaps promotional purposes) because they are time-consuming as hell and follow different construction rules than ingame assets (e.g. on a hipoly model you'd model the belt, on an ingame model you'd paint it on). Textures are painted at the highest resolution that could occur in the game (but not always, severe downscaling might need some parts painted differently) but usually not that large if you're dealing with a PS2 game.
Most english speakers would say "begs the question" therefore "begs the question" is correct in informal English.
The question I have is why those "demo" units here only have videos on them? I'm certainly not buying a system just because of a pretty video (especially not a faked one like most of these obviously are) and the console is right there, why aren't there any games on it?
Before I left the game industry a few years ago, Nintendo starting being more helpful
Was that when or shortly after their management changed, perchance?
That's boring. Let's play a game of Global Thermonuclear War.
If you're a follower of Freud you'd say it's all related to sex in some way. The "in some way" qualifier means that even an absurd explaination will be accepted and I'd call that useless. It's like saying "everything is in some way related to the number 23". Sure, there are always some strange ways of computing that number but when the way there becomes too complicated it might be worth questioning whether that is really the point.
That doesn't explain why I'm stuck at a boss in FFX that can wipe my party with one attack because I didn't level enough.
games themselves are not necessarily art, at least not in the same way as a painting or a film.
Well, obviously. Neither is a book or a musical piece. Each medium has its own "language" and it's obviously futile to expect another medium to use the same language. Games convey messages completely different than movies do. A game can nudge you into a direction and make you see the message while thinking you thought it up yourself. A book can do the same but a book does so in a different way. Games also interact with the user (art can be interactive, modern theatre often is to a certain degree), which prompts completely new ways of conveying a message. You can, to a certain degree, react towards the user's thoughts.
Of course games aren't made to be art. Movies, books, music, etc isn't made to be art but to entertain the audience and convey a message. What were Shakespeare's plays during his lifetime? Entertainment! To argue that art should be more important than entertainment is stupid, the master will weave both into each other and never lose sight of the primary purpose of his work (entertainment), which is why those works are regarded as great. For games that means the game has to be fun to play. A fool would make "art" by putting lots of conventional art into a game without thinking about the user experience, a master will make a fun game AND a work of art in one piece, defining and using a "language" unique to games. Movies didn't have their own language at first, they were basically filmed theatre acts. Now they have their own distinct language to convey a message in.
Xenosaga (2, at least) is rather low on prerendered videos, most of the stuff seems to be realtime. You may remember that game as being one of the largest games this generation.
From what I've heard, GTA:SA hits the limits of the format as well and it doesn't seem to use much video, either.
Texture compression was avaliable on both the Gamecube and XBox (not sure about the PS2). That doesn't do enough.
I think he meant for games to use since so far MS is saying that HDDVD support won't include games to avoid compatibility issues. Perhaps they'll change that once the HDDVD versions hit the market (because telling people any earlier will make them stop buying, obviously), maybe they won't.
A game like GTA:SA has to fit on one DVD (since you can't tell the user to change discs if your game streams data, that would require a choke point the player has to pass to get from one half of the map to the other and at each pass he has to swap discs. Apparently the devs had quite a few problems fitting all that data on one disc.