Writer: The style list works, and doesn't have the bugs on bugs of winword.exe (if you get into styles and images, and conditionals, you will know what I mean)
Presenter: Lusciously simple! Actually easy to create a new slide, even when you know all the short cuts in powerpnt.exe you can get frustrated.
I only wish they would change the interface for writer a tad more when editing HTML, as this would be a kick ass HTML editor environment, with CSS and XHTML compliancy. Or even XML XSL natively? point? Create data sources and bind them to JSF components?
Going to far? The 'browser' as the future application interface is misleading, I disagree, as 'browser' is now any internet enabled xhtml complaint renderer on a million of devices.
I do not see any need to improve on OpenOffice for its purpose as a Document writer. With CSS and the understanding of what a document is (content and formatting), and the critical mass of people with good keybaord and word processing skills (professional layout etc.) can we finally label a word processor a commodity?
Kick out office, perhaps one of these notables who is saying this (who cares if the OS crowd are pushing them along) should start a 'Drop MS Office' campaign and have regular funny (to get people to take part) reviews of how people kicked office out of thier office.
Using this viral anti-marketting, and infact, a meme with a destructive payload (basically spreading that taking off MSOffice should be done, and suddenly it is cooler than an iPod to do it)
This will get people who would rather spend 2 minutes uninstalling, 20 minutes downloading, and 2 minutes installing OpenOffice, then open that email from thier boss lying in thier Outl... ThunderBird inbox.
o.O Alright who dunnit? Who clicked the link? You know who you are.
Oh its back.... this guy is not Authur C Clarke.
"As a science-fiction writer, my job is predicting the future."
No your job is writting science fiction. Future predictors have the job of predicting the future.
"Moore's law tells us that computing power doubles every 18 months. If that holds up -- and i believe it will,"
*switches into listen to old man rumbling on about moores 'law'* Moores law tells us that Moore though, hang on, about a year and a half ago I bought this computer that was half as good, and I remember when I was a lad...
"Can anyone guess how that much computing muscle, widely available and inexpensively priced, will affect our day-to-day lives?"
Yes, the average survival rate of Window 2014 will be about 20 minutes/128. Or it'll die just before you remove it from the polystyrene.
"tomorrow's robokitchen will have an entire hot (but low carb!) breakfast waiting for you."
s/robokitchen/wife... loser scifi writer.
wife n. pl. wives (wvz)
A woman joined to a man in marriage; a female spouse.
"but you might still have to physically go to your office. Along the way you'll take your kids to school."
How does he know I'll have kids in 2014, and if I do, they can take to robo-school-bus.
"Naturally, your electric car will drive itself"
Yeah, not running windows 2014 I hope.
s/"you will use the rest of your commute time productively, catching up on full-motion-video e-mail and reading reports (or having them read to you by totally realistic voice synthesizers)"/You will then watch the best pornography and get famous people to say naughty things to you using realistic speech synthesis.
The idea about the wall being a vast flatscreen, THAT is cool, except more cool for things like Doom 6. Unless the co-worker is hot.
"Recording your entire life will take a lot of storage, but the cost of data storage will be essentially zero by 2014, so that's no problem."
Aaaah I see GMails grand plan now.
"No standing in line, though, to check out: you'll just waltz out the front door, as the Radio Frequency ID chips in the products you've bought allow their costs to be tallied and your account automatically debited."
And if you haven't got an account chip? wooohoo utopian or orwellien?
"You might make dinner yourself, if you enjoy cooking. But if not, your automated kitchen will again take care of everything"
s/robokitchen/wife... loser scifi writer.
wife n. pl. wives (wvz)
A woman joined to a man in marriage; a female spouse.
He is slow on the uptake right?
"And you'll have a humanoid robot, too"
Aaaah for people without wives.
"your kids will be off in their rooms, enjoying fully immersive virtual reality experiences"
They are called drugs. And what happened to the jetsons utopian family life with that hot one with white hair? She was nice.
"So, have I got it right? Only time will tell. But, as I said at the outset, if I'm wrong, feel free to look me up in 2014 and let me know."
I thought I made a point about classifying a console. (something about a fridge?) Then all Sony have to do is call their next games machine a 'potato' and it doesn't apply to them?
In my limited roleplaying experience (mainly a few games of paranoia, and mechwarrior) I found the a good structure was excellent. The DM was intelligent enough that we were confortable with his decisions etc. It felt like a true game experience.
You had too many laughs obiviously, especially paranoia, which has an amazing atmosphere.
Take that to the PC. You have faceless people playing games, less laughs, more stats.
DnD used to be small groups of upto 12 (for Vampire games which again I joined out of interest).
MMORPG seem to have lost that element of role playing in their enormity.
How about a LMORPG? Get lots of subscribers, but play mini missions (1 week or so?) where you select a band of 5-6 other players, and really role play, and take challenges.
There should be an API for a human DM in these instances, as it is only their own mission.
League tables: Since Quake 1 (various) Barrysworld Voice communication: Counter strike (et al) Online game host services: GameSpy, Barrysworld
I am suprised they haven't patented online console credit card authorization or advertising, or just the Internet.
What kind of low life scum work at the USPO? (unless this ain't a US patent, I mean, it is Nintendo...) What kind of people have never played an online game, and couldn't see this for what it was?
'Home Game Video Systems' can mean anything from you mobile phone to your fridge is you are lucky enough to have a posh one.
The best thing we can do is uphold all these daft patents until the world demises into primordial soup again, then find the random protein like structures who think patent system abuse is a good idea, and throw them away from the lightening strike area, so they evolve into fish, and have little influence in modern day computing.
Of course, this all lends weight to the theory of Evolution...:-)
I think we are agreed then, it is the detailing and design that is now the forefront of the costing. Yes and management.
Well, if this is the case, then I find it hard to pay so much for a game.
A cinema ticket costs a couple euros. A game 10 x as much.
Go figure on that one! I guess as many people would want to buy a game as much as see a film - if the pricing was there. I think films cost more to make than games. I am sure they do.
If games would aim for the film pricing model, surely they will be reaping film revenues? Or is that bad?
Of course it gets complicated when mounting multiple partitions, and don't talk about swap drives as this can cause volumes to not want to mount anymore.
"The game won't be like a real election which is determined by a million different variables."
Heh, the election is either determined by one variable (which sways the most voters to one or the other side, thus negating all other variables), or by each voter, and I hope more than one million of the 300 million actually go and vote:-)
"were unable to reliably tell the difference between four objects placed in a row and five in the same configuration, revealed the study."
The items used were 2 mini Ipods, the new iPod, an iPaq and a miniDisc Player.
They were then asked if they preffer ATI or NVidia cards, and what FPS would you get if you enabled 4xAA on a GF3 running at 1024x768 Doom3 will full detail, demo 1.
I would like to see when of those researchers get bitten by something really wierd in the jungle, see who can find the plant that will save his life then.
Forget protecting the rain forest, how about protecting these people from the advanced of these researchers with nothing better to do than subject them to numeracy tests.
Does this overthrow the idea that we can cope with 10 items because we have ten fingers? Maybe fingers moulded the language which moulded our own capabilities. If we counted in base 100 would women finally remember their own mobile phone numbers?
So this is just a reaction to Yahoo!s already available 1GB of storage for subs.
Yahoo IMHO is one of the better email providers right now. I see little point in penis length comparison between Yahoo! and GMail, except for lack of ads (which doesn't bother me so much, sometimes colourful is nice... I don't think the extra Kb's are killing my connection)
Google is a clean interface, and searching etc. I don't search my emails - I really think people should realise that email is not a storage format, and you should increase the signal:noise by extracting pertinent information into a real format.
URLs: FireFox Browser Bookmarks Emails: Thunderbird Contacts Events: Sunbird Calendar Tasks: SunBird again? I use Rainlendar but SunBird seems to do a tasty job.
Tell me that GMail search is better than using real tools with real semantic data - it just isn't.
Internet search is tricky. Your own searching is harder because you *know* what you want, you have to find it, not a reference to it, or something relevant to it.
Email has two components, communication and documents. Communcation can contain document information - like a rough draft, which you can copy paste into a word processor. [OpenOffice].
Documents again should be stored in a file system, not a POP3 or IMAP (or web interface) system. it should allow for collaboration and permissions and backups. (and saving back to the document).
Communication contains triggers such as 'Do this' or 'Here is my sexy pic'
You should either: create a task (or remember it) or save the jpg into your private folder, or a USB drive...
Then delete the email. Email is like a file transfer/IM bastard child that never goes away, always leaves a ghost 'transfer 100% complete' dialogue and never cleans its logs.
Well, I am bothered, I wanted to at least login and look around.
I don't think I will have a GMail account. It feels wrong.
Voice communication. You talk, you remember, unless it is recorded, wappo, gone.
Letters: Throw them away, 1gb of snail mail entropy would be a major fire hazard.
SMS: Delete delete delete (unelss it is a funny one with a nudie woman!)
MMS: See above
Email: Difficult. It is a communiucation *and* a file transfer technology. It is easy to leave them there. But I think it weighs us down!
I started claening out and aggressively deleting emails, if necessary extracting the informaiton contained therein into a useful form (if it is a contact, sotre as a contact, if an appointment, store as an appointment, if it is a task, store as a task)
Email is being overloaded with uses. Dump it. In fact, send email with a document definition, and let your client handle the filing into a real app that deals with it (or a viewer plugin, semantics etc)
Re:It is more a case of terminals
on
Semper WiFi
·
· Score: 1
"barely secure enough to read email and surf the web reliably"
"that doesn't even account for the problems of signal range"
WiFi is a simple solution so remove wireless connecitons, hence it's name. If it was for long range, secure comminucations it would be called LoRaSeCo or something daft.
The point is we are asserting that nothing more sensitive that a saucey shot of thier missus is gonna be transmitted.
Also my point actually was - why the heck hasn't the military budgeted for this.
It is like an airline without those nice meals with plastic forks (I feel so ashamed my company doesn't send me business/first class - but migling with the commoners has its advantages re: Traveling swedish students:-):-):-) )
I am waiting for the demo, I am patient I guess (or not patient to wait for 1.5gb on a 256 line...:D
*cough*
ahem. No you see, the demo is enough for me. bf1942 - I heard good things, but busy as I am, I guess it is lucky for me that I haven't played it.
Basically your point is, release timely demo versions so we can try before we buy, else we might pirate to not get our finger burnt (playing a mast. mode)
Graphics are no longer the biggest part of the equation. Perhaps in the last few years. Now they are too easy to develop. Game engines are available for little cost. There isn't a rule that says you need cutting edge.
Also OpenGL programming is getting to the point (shaders et al) that you can create a realitic engine that is suited for your game environment with ease.
Also, whereas before game engines used to be 'outdoor' or 'indoor' with the billions of polygons being flashed in front of our eyes every.01 of a second, you can be more lax.
I think the greatest costs would be in actors, scripting, polish etc. Perhaps films used to blow budgets on special effects before, but now the costs of the sfx are reducing (even though they are trying more abitious things) and they are saving money by using virtual cars instead of real ones.
Now it is naive to think that you can pick up an open source engine and make a commercial success, but the biggest improvements to the half life code recently was Havok physics, even thought the graphics are fantastic.
Developing graphics in the Quake1, Unreal age was about money, now you can use 20 lines of tutorial code to load a mesh, and texture it, and env texture it, and shadow it.
The game demo scene is sadly lacking. This is the movie trailer equiv. Very few trailers i see, and go, I *have* to watch that, but if I do think that, then I see it opening night.
Usually the trailer only showed the 30 seconds of decent footage, in which case I don't get it on DVD.
Good trailer + good film = DVD.
Gaming is different. I am looking forward to the Doom3 demo.
Why? I will not buy Doom3! But if they release a demo, I get to look at those graphics on my machine.
Like the article says about bigger games, how you 'weigh' a game is different per game.
I weigh Doom3 purley on Graphics. Therefore I will play just the demo.
Just a demo of FF7 (I never really played that game) or a game that is really compelling (GTA [1-4]) can get away with a demo - usually time limited.
Demos can make cracking easier (see recent/. story), but after playing the XIII demo, I paid for it, and I was glad I did!
Slashdot Mirror
Something that detects radar strength and tells you to slow down because of a speed trap.
:-)
Sounds like someone driving a thunderbird would buy such a thing.
OpenOffice does everything, and even better.
Writer: The style list works, and doesn't have the bugs on bugs of winword.exe (if you get into styles and images, and conditionals, you will know what I mean)
Presenter: Lusciously simple! Actually easy to create a new slide, even when you know all the short cuts in powerpnt.exe you can get frustrated.
I only wish they would change the interface for writer a tad more when editing HTML, as this would be a kick ass HTML editor environment, with CSS and XHTML compliancy. Or even XML XSL natively? point? Create data sources and bind them to JSF components?
Going to far? The 'browser' as the future application interface is misleading, I disagree, as 'browser' is now any internet enabled xhtml complaint renderer on a million of devices.
I do not see any need to improve on OpenOffice for its purpose as a Document writer. With CSS and the understanding of what a document is (content and formatting), and the critical mass of people with good keybaord and word processing skills (professional layout etc.) can we finally label a word processor a commodity?
Kick out office, perhaps one of these notables who is saying this (who cares if the OS crowd are pushing them along) should start a 'Drop MS Office' campaign and have regular funny (to get people to take part) reviews of how people kicked office out of thier office.
Using this viral anti-marketting, and infact, a meme with a destructive payload (basically spreading that taking off MSOffice should be done, and suddenly it is cooler than an iPod to do it)
This will get people who would rather spend 2 minutes uninstalling, 20 minutes downloading, and 2 minutes installing OpenOffice, then open that email from thier boss lying in thier Outl... ThunderBird inbox.
His site seems to have gone down inexplicably.
... this guy is not Authur C Clarke.
/You will then watch the best pornography and get famous people to say naughty things to you using realistic speech synthesis.
o.O Alright who dunnit? Who clicked the link? You know who you are.
Oh its back.
"As a science-fiction writer, my job is predicting the future."
No your job is writting science fiction. Future predictors have the job of predicting the future.
"Moore's law tells us that computing power doubles every 18 months. If that holds up -- and i believe it will,"
*switches into listen to old man rumbling on about moores 'law'* Moores law tells us that Moore though, hang on, about a year and a half ago I bought this computer that was half as good, and I remember when I was a lad...
"Can anyone guess how that much computing muscle, widely available and inexpensively priced, will affect our day-to-day lives?"
Yes, the average survival rate of Window 2014 will be about 20 minutes/128. Or it'll die just before you remove it from the polystyrene.
"tomorrow's robokitchen will have an entire hot (but low carb!) breakfast waiting for you."
s/robokitchen/wife... loser scifi writer.
wife n. pl. wives (wvz)
A woman joined to a man in marriage; a female spouse.
"but you might still have to physically go to your office. Along the way you'll take your kids to school."
How does he know I'll have kids in 2014, and if I do, they can take to robo-school-bus.
"Naturally, your electric car will drive itself"
Yeah, not running windows 2014 I hope.
s/"you will use the rest of your commute time productively, catching up on full-motion-video e-mail and reading reports (or having them read to you by totally realistic voice synthesizers)"
The idea about the wall being a vast flatscreen, THAT is cool, except more cool for things like Doom 6. Unless the co-worker is hot.
"Recording your entire life will take a lot of storage, but the cost of data storage will be essentially zero by 2014, so that's no problem."
Aaaah I see GMails grand plan now.
"No standing in line, though, to check out: you'll just waltz out the front door, as the Radio Frequency ID chips in the products you've bought allow their costs to be tallied and your account automatically debited."
And if you haven't got an account chip? wooohoo utopian or orwellien?
"You might make dinner yourself, if you enjoy cooking. But if not, your automated kitchen will again take care of everything"
s/robokitchen/wife... loser scifi writer.
wife n. pl. wives (wvz)
A woman joined to a man in marriage; a female spouse.
He is slow on the uptake right?
"And you'll have a humanoid robot, too"
Aaaah for people without wives.
"your kids will be off in their rooms, enjoying fully immersive virtual reality experiences"
They are called drugs. And what happened to the jetsons utopian family life with that hot one with white hair? She was nice.
"So, have I got it right? Only time will tell. But, as I said at the outset, if I'm wrong, feel free to look me up in 2014 and let me know."
No, and you will be dead by then I hope. Sod off.
Sorry, had to, just had to.
I don't go to the cinema to watch a film more than once.
:-)
Blimey. (Except if a friend wanted to see it, and I saw it with someone else, and they are sulking like a bitch
s/friend/girlfriend
ahem.
I thought I made a point about classifying a console. (something about a fridge?) Then all Sony have to do is call their next games machine a 'potato' and it doesn't apply to them?
In my limited roleplaying experience (mainly a few games of paranoia, and mechwarrior) I found the a good structure was excellent. The DM was intelligent enough that we were confortable with his decisions etc. It felt like a true game experience.
You had too many laughs obiviously, especially paranoia, which has an amazing atmosphere.
Take that to the PC. You have faceless people playing games, less laughs, more stats.
DnD used to be small groups of upto 12 (for Vampire games which again I joined out of interest).
MMORPG seem to have lost that element of role playing in their enormity.
How about a LMORPG? Get lots of subscribers, but play mini missions (1 week or so?) where you select a band of 5-6 other players, and really role play, and take challenges.
There should be an API for a human DM in these instances, as it is only their own mission.
Just a couple of eurocents.
"the first filing date, in this case April 1999"
I am pretty sure the concept of playing games online was well established in 1999, even voice (on lan gaming).
So how does this even have a chance, other than to say, look, it'll cost you either way.
Microsoft are filing 3000 patents a Year, that is 8.21 a day, and each one can take MONTHS to work over. How big is the patent office?
Perhaps the patent office should have a commitee of representative consumers who can veto patents?
League tables: Since Quake 1 (various) Barrysworld
Voice communication: Counter strike (et al)
Online game host services: GameSpy, Barrysworld
I am suprised they haven't patented online console credit card authorization or advertising, or just the Internet.
What kind of low life scum work at the USPO? (unless this ain't a US patent, I mean, it is Nintendo...) What kind of people have never played an online game, and couldn't see this for what it was?
'Home Game Video Systems' can mean anything from you mobile phone to your fridge is you are lucky enough to have a posh one.
The best thing we can do is uphold all these daft patents until the world demises into primordial soup again, then find the random protein like structures who think patent system abuse is a good idea, and throw them away from the lightening strike area, so they evolve into fish, and have little influence in modern day computing.
Of course, this all lends weight to the theory of Evolution...
I think we are agreed then, it is the detailing and design that is now the forefront of the costing. Yes and management.
Well, if this is the case, then I find it hard to pay so much for a game.
A cinema ticket costs a couple euros. A game 10 x as much.
Go figure on that one! I guess as many people would want to buy a game as much as see a film - if the pricing was there. I think films cost more to make than games. I am sure they do.
If games would aim for the film pricing model, surely they will be reaping film revenues? Or is that bad?
Y! IM tells me when I have mail - on that account...
:-)
Gee even I am sick of me trying to debunk GMail as unecessary
I just wonder why I installed it - considering I have yet to have an account. Perhaps I want to see the icon it uses?
*polite cough*
Linux users don't deserve email notifications now do they? Oh, you mean they spend all day compulsively checking? Oh well, you are excused.
I would have thought they would write this for the platform they are using initially, but I guess they wrote it for the majority of their user base.
Not much to write one that works over http though.
Of course it gets complicated when mounting multiple partitions, and don't talk about swap drives as this can cause volumes to not want to mount anymore.
o.O Must be the British humour. 'Shag' is too British a word, I should have used 'fsck' or:
:-) aaah well, Flamebait it is. :-/
unzip
fsck
sleep
" he sat opposite an individual and laid out a random number of familiar objects, including batteries"
I think we may have already gone to far... must be using them to power their HP RPN calculators that they need now they realise what dunces they are.
"The game won't be like a real election which is determined by a million different variables."
:-)
Heh, the election is either determined by one variable (which sways the most voters to one or the other side, thus negating all other variables), or by each voter, and I hope more than one million of the 300 million actually go and vote
But, yeah, fair point!
"were unable to reliably tell the difference between four objects placed in a row and five in the same configuration, revealed the study."
The items used were 2 mini Ipods, the new iPod, an iPaq and a miniDisc Player.
They were then asked if they preffer ATI or NVidia cards, and what FPS would you get if you enabled 4xAA on a GF3 running at 1024x768 Doom3 will full detail, demo 1.
I would like to see when of those researchers get bitten by something really wierd in the jungle, see who can find the plant that will save his life then.
Forget protecting the rain forest, how about protecting these people from the advanced of these researchers with nothing better to do than subject them to numeracy tests.
1 dangerous animal, 2 dangerous animal, lots, run!
You see, don't need more than that.
Does this overthrow the idea that we can cope with 10 items because we have ten fingers? Maybe fingers moulded the language which moulded our own capabilities. If we counted in base 100 would women finally remember their own mobile phone numbers?
Is this game going to be updated every election? New dirty tricks?
I don't know who would buy such a game, but whoever does, shouldn't be allowed to run a campaign!
I just know that both sides will buy a copy and even 'playfully' see what tactics might influence the voters.
It is so stupid and unlikely that you just have that feeling it *will* happen.
Graphics look quirky.
I always suspected that the native name of your town, and the local features affected your accent (explains Liverpool and Stoke)
Perhaps they are not used to takss involving more than 3 items because usually it goes like this:
Hunt
Kill
Eat
Bang over head
Shag it
Sleep
Now I think some of thier ways of going about business is even more refined than ours.
CanErmweI{insertDon'tpoliticalThinkdirtyItrick}Und erstandlike {politician}?
So this is just a reaction to Yahoo!s already available 1GB of storage for subs.
Yahoo IMHO is one of the better email providers right now. I see little point in penis length comparison between Yahoo! and GMail, except for lack of ads (which doesn't bother me so much, sometimes colourful is nice... I don't think the extra Kb's are killing my connection)
Google is a clean interface, and searching etc. I don't search my emails - I really think people should realise that email is not a storage format, and you should increase the signal:noise by extracting pertinent information into a real format.
URLs: FireFox Browser Bookmarks
Emails: Thunderbird Contacts
Events: Sunbird Calendar
Tasks: SunBird again? I use Rainlendar but SunBird seems to do a tasty job.
Tell me that GMail search is better than using real tools with real semantic data - it just isn't.
Internet search is tricky. Your own searching is harder because you *know* what you want, you have to find it, not a reference to it, or something relevant to it.
Email has two components, communication and documents. Communcation can contain document information - like a rough draft, which you can copy paste into a word processor. [OpenOffice].
Documents again should be stored in a file system, not a POP3 or IMAP (or web interface) system. it should allow for collaboration and permissions and backups. (and saving back to the document).
Communication contains triggers such as 'Do this' or 'Here is my sexy pic'
You should either: create a task (or remember it) or save the jpg into your private folder, or a USB drive...
Then delete the email. Email is like a file transfer/IM bastard child that never goes away, always leaves a ghost 'transfer 100% complete' dialogue and never cleans its logs.
Keep the internet tidy, delete your email.
This has been a public service announcement.
I traced the story to theinquirer.net/?article=17949 and there is no utterence as to the validity of the story.
/.
This may be a way of theinquirer.net getting some advertising out of
Well, I am bothered, I wanted to at least login and look around.
I don't think I will have a GMail account. It feels wrong.
Voice communication. You talk, you remember, unless it is recorded, wappo, gone.
Letters: Throw them away, 1gb of snail mail entropy would be a major fire hazard.
SMS: Delete delete delete (unelss it is a funny one with a nudie woman!)
MMS: See above
Email: Difficult. It is a communiucation *and* a file transfer technology. It is easy to leave them there. But I think it weighs us down!
I started claening out and aggressively deleting emails, if necessary extracting the informaiton contained therein into a useful form (if it is a contact, sotre as a contact, if an appointment, store as an appointment, if it is a task, store as a task)
Email is being overloaded with uses. Dump it. In fact, send email with a document definition, and let your client handle the filing into a real app that deals with it (or a viewer plugin, semantics etc)
"barely secure enough to read email and surf the web reliably"
:-) :-) :-) )
:-)
"that doesn't even account for the problems of signal range"
WiFi is a simple solution so remove wireless connecitons, hence it's name. If it was for long range, secure comminucations it would be called LoRaSeCo or something daft.
The point is we are asserting that nothing more sensitive that a saucey shot of thier missus is gonna be transmitted.
Also my point actually was - why the heck hasn't the military budgeted for this.
It is like an airline without those nice meals with plastic forks (I feel so ashamed my company doesn't send me business/first class - but migling with the commoners has its advantages re: Traveling swedish students
ok, I will shut up
You pirated the game so you could try it.
:D
I am waiting for the demo, I am patient I guess (or not patient to wait for 1.5gb on a 256 line...
*cough*
ahem. No you see, the demo is enough for me. bf1942 - I heard good things, but busy as I am, I guess it is lucky for me that I haven't played it.
Basically your point is, release timely demo versions so we can try before we buy, else we might pirate to not get our finger burnt (playing a mast. mode)
Graphics are no longer the biggest part of the equation. Perhaps in the last few years. Now they are too easy to develop. Game engines are available for little cost. There isn't a rule that says you need cutting edge.
.01 of a second, you can be more lax.
Also OpenGL programming is getting to the point (shaders et al) that you can create a realitic engine that is suited for your game environment with ease.
Also, whereas before game engines used to be 'outdoor' or 'indoor' with the billions of polygons being flashed in front of our eyes every
I think the greatest costs would be in actors, scripting, polish etc. Perhaps films used to blow budgets on special effects before, but now the costs of the sfx are reducing (even though they are trying more abitious things) and they are saving money by using virtual cars instead of real ones.
Now it is naive to think that you can pick up an open source engine and make a commercial success, but the biggest improvements to the half life code recently was Havok physics, even thought the graphics are fantastic.
Developing graphics in the Quake1, Unreal age was about money, now you can use 20 lines of tutorial code to load a mesh, and texture it, and env texture it, and shadow it.
You don't have to know the math behind it.
The game demo scene is sadly lacking. This is the movie trailer equiv. Very few trailers i see, and go, I *have* to watch that, but if I do think that, then I see it opening night.
/. story), but after playing the XIII demo, I paid for it, and I was glad I did!
Usually the trailer only showed the 30 seconds of decent footage, in which case I don't get it on DVD.
Good trailer + good film = DVD.
Gaming is different. I am looking forward to the Doom3 demo.
Why? I will not buy Doom3! But if they release a demo, I get to look at those graphics on my machine.
Like the article says about bigger games, how you 'weigh' a game is different per game.
I weigh Doom3 purley on Graphics. Therefore I will play just the demo.
Just a demo of FF7 (I never really played that game) or a game that is really compelling (GTA [1-4]) can get away with a demo - usually time limited.
Demos can make cracking easier (see recent
Commandos also had a great demo.
More demos!