That means my tesla coil can blow out your tesla coil. Mine is so powerful it doesn't even work, because the powerplants can't charge up that one capacitor.
This sounds like a good idea. GPUs routinely make miscalculations (try overclocking), and yet they still maintain a consistent envelope of stability (don't push it too far). It's interesting to note that they intend to rely on the graphics routines to recover from crashes. This hints of a revolution: the gap between GPUs and CPUs have narrowed somewhat (at least) with the new shader and its level of integration with the OS.
Virtualizing memory of the GPU also sounds like another step in that direction--people can play Doom 3 on Ultra Quality with a 128MB video card that has, say, 1GB of theoretical memory. I know, it still won't be anywhere as fast as 512MB onboard, but I believe, for certain applications (like having razor-sharp, as-you're-reading-this-post-right-now text appear at different angles and stuff) that will be enough.
I am bothered by the ability of the new shader to have the GPU on multiple applications. Can you imagine a popup with an extreme level of pixel shading that is taxing the hell out of your top-of-the-line ATI or NVIDIA card because you're also trying to play Doom 3? Yes, Longhorn, through its GPU integration and subsequent possibility of cool Windows graphics, also creates room for BLOATED graphics and EXPLOITS.
Driver upgrades without reboot are cool--you can have multiple drivers heavily optimized for different kinds of programs, and when you run each the appropriate driver is loaded.
The "enhanced boot experience" sounds nice. MAybe it will be highly customizable. You could have it display each dll as it's loaded all fancyful, with useful displays of RAM and virtual memory tucked in a 3D display.
And "high dynamic range lighting?" A necessity, I bet, to have different apps running at the same time.
But this all sounds very bloaty and resouce intensive. We'll definitely need those 30GHz procs running in tandem with NVIDIA's Geforce 69420...excuse in 2005 to buy a high end video card is that you want word process at 60 fps while looking at pron, quickly hiding it away from view (at 60fps).
I don't know about you, but it would be pretty hard to sort out the inconsistencies in his stories. I would not want to be this man when he explains himself. For example he would be revealing top secret CIA insta-cloning technology (to explain the kids) coupled with spaceships doing laps around pairs of superdense cosmic strings (explaining his odd timing) while running simulations on an overclocked Itanium that's being cooled by a -276Celsius (!) heatsink (explaining how the hell he gets to watch all that pron in just 3 minutes). I mean, he's got enough details in his story to confound the holographic storage space of any p-brane!
That's just too much ImplausiblePron for me to handle.
Photoshop his ass? That might get pronish!
Maybe we can photoshop just his ass with a flamethrower creatively used to obscure the pronish parts, with ominous smoke rising.
Wait, we don't want to photoshop that.
Rocksec.x obviously made goatsec.x obsolete. Get with the times! If you want you can have goats with nuclear warheads ramming into rocks. That would be some HOT action. *tongue now permanently wrapped around cheek*
I hope they step up the technolgy and use the latest nuclear warheads on teh asteroids. Come to think of it, we could detonate several of these every Fourth of July and have a video available for streaming. Would certainly be a fun way to use nuclear weapons. Although the cost is too great...:(
Or it could be privately funded and we could have real-life Asteroids (game). Mining asteroids...mmm.
Our culture has degraded. There's just no craftsmanship in art anymore, and TV shows are only one example of the arts that have taken a hit. Which is why it's good if the FCC goes censorship happy. Now, it's better to be pro-censorship. It's like how Slashdot started out unmoderated and now there are some controls in place. It's way past the time to implement these controls, on a rigorous, complete basis, cable companies be damned.
For example:
1. Paint random lines/shapes onto a canvas.
2. ???
3. Profit!
4. GOTO 1 (Damn, I'm using this joke too much. Someone shoot me.)
Now do the likewise thing for a TV show:
1. Insert boobs.
2. Insert ass.
3. Insert random bouts of angst and unnecessary violence. Call it "reality."
4. ???
5. Profit!
6. GOTO 1
And THIS is mainstream? God help us. The FCC can do lots to stem the tide of shallowness by censoring the offending programs. Sure, shock tactics worked for a while...but today they have it the other way around. It's shocking NOT to display a scene of violence or sex used to fill out the $6.99 script. Real TV shows that are good (not "reality" shows, which reflect reality as well as a media CEO reflects speeding bullets) are the exception. This kind of TV also does nothing to stop the inherent rot in American culture, maintaining a recursive cycle.
And music? Sure, that remains as one of the last bastions of craftsmanship. You can't stick T&A into a guitar riff or piano solo. However, the first cracks are beginning to show there too.
Take one noise that you synthesized by adding 200dB to the Imp growling sound from Doom, distorting it, applying multiple audiofilters (# of filters = level of skill apparently) and looping it for God knows how many times, and you get "good dance/house/techno." Oh and slap on a cookie cutter rhythm while you're at it, because it will make all the Cool Dudes bounce and wiggle (NOT dance) to it and think it's "phat."
Whatever happened to making techno that had depth in its rhythm? Is the popular techno these days really what I think it is?
Whatever happened to learning how to play an instrument? And I don't mean "jamming on the guitar," because most of the mainstream music these days shouldn't be mainstream. Top 40 singers routinely get their voices pitch-corrected and filtered up to make you think they sing well. Pop singers who can hit notes (!) do an extreme amount of pitch bending in their songs so they don't so much as hit a note as swipe past it.
We do not know and do not care if the real thing is exactly as the theory says it is; but we need our theoretical models to accurately predict realworld data. If getting to that point entails, say, creating a whole bunch of otehr crazy particles that almost step over the line of logic, then so be it.
When did that take 5 seconds? It could be something as subtle as "Game saved" with no frame hit, or a big frame hit that maybe lasts for 2-3 seconds. 5 seconds doesn't sound like saving games these days. You have a good point, though--perhaps there can be code to stop the autosave timer when the player is firing or running and 5 seconds after he finishes firing or running. You could also have the game autosave whenever the player stops for a while.
Your insightful corrections to my idiomatic usages are rigorous, well-researched, and...amazing! You rule dude, thx.
However, I must object to some of your more heated flames:
An auto-quicksave can be something as simple as the autosaving feature in 3d studio max, where a timer varaiable counts down to zero, executes the autosave, and resets the timer and gets it going again. Easier said than done? If I just keep on "saying" it, "done" is a trivial matter. I think these solutions would be obvious to non-hardcore-programmer people like me, it it just bullshit that developers don't take the time to do these things. It's not a lack of expertise, it is a lack of caring; and that autosave mechanism would certainly help in case of a crash. Robust netcode is easily done, because the nontrivial things have been done already (Quake 2). Follow their model, or improve on their model. "Easier said than done" would be more like reinventing something.
I have to say though, your commentary on my horribly incorrect usage was useful, irrelevant as it was. I am tempted to invoke my own array of "who cares," but I believe you get the idea now.
*** Wow, maybe 5 patches later it might make it into the main menu! ***
Having that in the console, or in some obscure spot in the menu structure, is inexcusable. It's not so much the lack of a quiksave--it's that they CAN implement a quicksave, with the appropriate menus and everything--but they are lame enough not to do a complete job.
Hi Nano: It's TFR!
I would like to contirbute the following to this conversation:
So, what do you think of that sunspot? It's a natural sun-dwelling alien blocking out the sun, of course.
He's not a Uber-Nerd yet, because he hasn't speculated on the possibiltiy of introducing smaller death stars within that indentation in the death star, to create a fractal death star that has a theoretically infinite line of sight.
Oh, and he hasn't said whether the dish is spherical or parabolic--lots of engineering things to consider: Spherical indentations make the most sense for combining multiple laser beams, but parabolic dishes will help you assimilate jamming waves and add signal power.
*runs*
First I'll get Doom 3, so I can make Independence War 3 with the engine. Gawd, with the design doc I wrote so far it's going to take forever and a day.
Then I'll get BloodRayne 2, just to stare at the bondage chick and not get busted for pron...
Then I'll get Half Life 2, just to see what would happen if you used the manipulator gun on someone's crotch.
And on Christmas I'll download Real Life version ??.??.?? I'm not sure what it's like 'outside' yet but (omg) I may check! Life SEEMS good.
In other news, Red Star outsells Half Life 2 by an order of magnitude.
Thus, I predict the end of the world at approximately 4:20 PM Februrary 32, 2005 as I download Marijuana v4.20
The point is, if there is a good game out, we would buy it! None of this "holiday release" crap--leave that stuff to the under-10 crowd. If your game is good it will sell well no matter how bad the timing is.
I'm a working gamer myself, before I go next fall to the real-life Doom 3 that is Caltech. In the time I get to play games, I want to receive varied, enriching experiences: I recently bought a Geforce 6800, quite an upgrade from the 5200 I had earlier (pretty much 10x draw rate). The card came with Far Cry, so I checked it out.
Damn, what a drag. Far Cry's checkpoint system is a Console Evil, designed for 5 year olds with literally too much time on their hands. I spent 30 minutes sneaking through a level, making sure to pay every place a visit, when right near the end I am ungloriously gunned down and forced to replay that entire 30 minutes. I ended up playing the thing over Rambo style, taking a jeep and making a beeline for the place I last died, which took 10 minutes and was 1/10 as engaging as my last play. I've pretty much summed up the gameplay in Far Cry:
n = 1; 1. Walk. 2. Turn on nightvision. 3. Walk. 4. Turn on nightvision. See heat signature. 5. Go prone. 6. Unload all munitions at heat signature. 7. ??? 8. Profit! 9. Find out you didn't really profit because 1 second later, one of those giant mutated bullet (and rocket propelled grenade) tampons walked up behind you and blasted you to hell. 10. n++; GOTO 1;
There you have it, the design document for the ULTIMATE FAR CRY SINGLEPLAYER BOT. Yes, that's who you and I are when we're playing games like that: bots. I have a hunch that it would work just as well in multiplayer.
Yes, I know developers and publishers want you to spend time on their games. But stuff like checkpoints and repetitive gameplay like in Far Cry destroy goodwill and create dollars for other, more creative developers. Sure, I know they implemented a quicksave--but that was after the entire populace, awash with rage, found the emperor naked, so to speak. This stuff doesn't have to be taught by hard PR lessons; it should be in the basic rulebook of game design, where it belongs.
All games should have: An autosave that activates when you quit. A restore in case of a computer crash. Robust netcode. Programmers that have more than the customary two-neuron-one-of-which-is-inhibitory brain.
Simply put, the PC game industry would be so much better if there wasn't as much sexing between the PC and console developers.
You know those Chevron cars? Those toy and clay model ones that they use in the commercials and you can buy at gas stations? Well, that's what I think is going to happen. I am going to be laughing my ass off and on during my entire commute if this thing was introduced heavily into the market. As such, it is important to provide safety controls for the drivers and passengers laughing their heads off and not concentrating on the road.
I propose that along with the car that has the expressions, when they get introduced into the general car population deep enough, that each be provided with a driver laughing restraint system, such as a swift kick in the balls by actuating the gas pedal or something.
In other news, a car gets indicted for sexual harrassment.
Sex suddenly reaches new heights (or lows). I can imagine:
A couple is going at it in the bedroom. Then, suddenly, the wife slaps the husband in mid-sex, as she finds out that 90% of his husband's video rendering resources were put towards the Hottie in the Office...
That's why you have to download the latest ZoneAlarm BS Detector Pro, for a nominal fee of 300 floating point operations per second stolen from your brain for nefarious world domination purposes.
an HUD of Slashdot? God forbid, the absentee ratio of Slashdotters just seriously drops. Then everyone is posting on Slashdot constantly, with auto-algorithms that post your thoughts automatically as a reply or parent to the appropriate topic.
Slashdot Mirror
That means my tesla coil can blow out your tesla coil. Mine is so powerful it doesn't even work, because the powerplants can't charge up that one capacitor.
I give it 3 years. By then, GPUs will be so fast that 3D desktops are a requirement; you will fry your balls if you render anything 2D.
This sounds like a good idea. GPUs routinely make miscalculations (try overclocking), and yet they still maintain a consistent envelope of stability (don't push it too far). It's interesting to note that they intend to rely on the graphics routines to recover from crashes. This hints of a revolution: the gap between GPUs and CPUs have narrowed somewhat (at least) with the new shader and its level of integration with the OS. Virtualizing memory of the GPU also sounds like another step in that direction--people can play Doom 3 on Ultra Quality with a 128MB video card that has, say, 1GB of theoretical memory. I know, it still won't be anywhere as fast as 512MB onboard, but I believe, for certain applications (like having razor-sharp, as-you're-reading-this-post-right-now text appear at different angles and stuff) that will be enough. I am bothered by the ability of the new shader to have the GPU on multiple applications. Can you imagine a popup with an extreme level of pixel shading that is taxing the hell out of your top-of-the-line ATI or NVIDIA card because you're also trying to play Doom 3? Yes, Longhorn, through its GPU integration and subsequent possibility of cool Windows graphics, also creates room for BLOATED graphics and EXPLOITS. Driver upgrades without reboot are cool--you can have multiple drivers heavily optimized for different kinds of programs, and when you run each the appropriate driver is loaded. The "enhanced boot experience" sounds nice. MAybe it will be highly customizable. You could have it display each dll as it's loaded all fancyful, with useful displays of RAM and virtual memory tucked in a 3D display. And "high dynamic range lighting?" A necessity, I bet, to have different apps running at the same time. But this all sounds very bloaty and resouce intensive. We'll definitely need those 30GHz procs running in tandem with NVIDIA's Geforce 69420...excuse in 2005 to buy a high end video card is that you want word process at 60 fps while looking at pron, quickly hiding it away from view (at 60fps).
Oh yes. Diablo 2 mysteriously saved the game--even after crashing. No Save and Exit needed.
I don't know about you, but it would be pretty hard to sort out the inconsistencies in his stories. I would not want to be this man when he explains himself. For example he would be revealing top secret CIA insta-cloning technology (to explain the kids) coupled with spaceships doing laps around pairs of superdense cosmic strings (explaining his odd timing) while running simulations on an overclocked Itanium that's being cooled by a -276Celsius (!) heatsink (explaining how the hell he gets to watch all that pron in just 3 minutes). I mean, he's got enough details in his story to confound the holographic storage space of any p-brane! That's just too much ImplausiblePron for me to handle.
Wait a minute. Are you sure it's not just Duke Nukem Forever coming 3 lines of code closer to alpha stage and we're witnessing the fallout?
Photoshop his ass? That might get pronish! Maybe we can photoshop just his ass with a flamethrower creatively used to obscure the pronish parts, with ominous smoke rising. Wait, we don't want to photoshop that.
Rocksec.x obviously made goatsec.x obsolete. Get with the times! If you want you can have goats with nuclear warheads ramming into rocks. That would be some HOT action. *tongue now permanently wrapped around cheek*
I hope they step up the technolgy and use the latest nuclear warheads on teh asteroids. Come to think of it, we could detonate several of these every Fourth of July and have a video available for streaming. Would certainly be a fun way to use nuclear weapons. Although the cost is too great...:(
Or it could be privately funded and we could have real-life Asteroids (game). Mining asteroids...mmm.
Our culture has degraded. There's just no craftsmanship in art anymore, and TV shows are only one example of the arts that have taken a hit. Which is why it's good if the FCC goes censorship happy. Now, it's better to be pro-censorship. It's like how Slashdot started out unmoderated and now there are some controls in place. It's way past the time to implement these controls, on a rigorous, complete basis, cable companies be damned.
For example:
1. Paint random lines/shapes onto a canvas.
2. ???
3. Profit!
4. GOTO 1
(Damn, I'm using this joke too much. Someone shoot me.)
Now do the likewise thing for a TV show:
1. Insert boobs.
2. Insert ass.
3. Insert random bouts of angst and unnecessary violence. Call it "reality."
4. ???
5. Profit!
6. GOTO 1
And THIS is mainstream? God help us. The FCC can do lots to stem the tide of shallowness by censoring the offending programs. Sure, shock tactics worked for a while...but today they have it the other way around. It's shocking NOT to display a scene of violence or sex used to fill out the $6.99 script. Real TV shows that are good (not "reality" shows, which reflect reality as well as a media CEO reflects speeding bullets) are the exception. This kind of TV also does nothing to stop the inherent rot in American culture, maintaining a recursive cycle.
And music? Sure, that remains as one of the last bastions of craftsmanship. You can't stick T&A into a guitar riff or piano solo. However, the first cracks are beginning to show there too.
Take one noise that you synthesized by adding 200dB to the Imp growling sound from Doom, distorting it, applying multiple audiofilters (# of filters = level of skill apparently) and looping it for God knows how many times, and you get "good dance/house/techno." Oh and slap on a cookie cutter rhythm while you're at it, because it will make all the Cool Dudes bounce and wiggle (NOT dance) to it and think it's "phat."
Whatever happened to making techno that had depth in its rhythm? Is the popular techno these days really what I think it is?
Whatever happened to learning how to play an instrument? And I don't mean "jamming on the guitar," because most of the mainstream music these days shouldn't be mainstream. Top 40 singers routinely get their voices pitch-corrected and filtered up to make you think they sing well. Pop singers who can hit notes (!) do an extreme amount of pitch bending in their songs so they don't so much as hit a note as swipe past it.
And your tech support is from India.
We do not know and do not care if the real thing is exactly as the theory says it is; but we need our theoretical models to accurately predict realworld data. If getting to that point entails, say, creating a whole bunch of otehr crazy particles that almost step over the line of logic, then so be it.
But can it be overclocked?
When did that take 5 seconds? It could be something as subtle as "Game saved" with no frame hit, or a big frame hit that maybe lasts for 2-3 seconds. 5 seconds doesn't sound like saving games these days. You have a good point, though--perhaps there can be code to stop the autosave timer when the player is firing or running and 5 seconds after he finishes firing or running. You could also have the game autosave whenever the player stops for a while.
Your insightful corrections to my idiomatic usages are rigorous, well-researched, and...amazing! You rule dude, thx.
However, I must object to some of your more heated flames:
An auto-quicksave can be something as simple as the autosaving feature in 3d studio max, where a timer varaiable counts down to zero, executes the autosave, and resets the timer and gets it going again. Easier said than done? If I just keep on "saying" it, "done" is a trivial matter. I think these solutions would be obvious to non-hardcore-programmer people like me, it it just bullshit that developers don't take the time to do these things. It's not a lack of expertise, it is a lack of caring; and that autosave mechanism would certainly help in case of a crash. Robust netcode is easily done, because the nontrivial things have been done already (Quake 2). Follow their model, or improve on their model. "Easier said than done" would be more like reinventing something.
I have to say though, your commentary on my horribly incorrect usage was useful, irrelevant as it was. I am tempted to invoke my own array of "who cares," but I believe you get the idea now.
*** Wow, maybe 5 patches later it might make it into the main menu! *** Having that in the console, or in some obscure spot in the menu structure, is inexcusable. It's not so much the lack of a quiksave--it's that they CAN implement a quicksave, with the appropriate menus and everything--but they are lame enough not to do a complete job.
Hi Nano: It's TFR! I would like to contirbute the following to this conversation: So, what do you think of that sunspot? It's a natural sun-dwelling alien blocking out the sun, of course.
He's not a Uber-Nerd yet, because he hasn't speculated on the possibiltiy of introducing smaller death stars within that indentation in the death star, to create a fractal death star that has a theoretically infinite line of sight. Oh, and he hasn't said whether the dish is spherical or parabolic--lots of engineering things to consider: Spherical indentations make the most sense for combining multiple laser beams, but parabolic dishes will help you assimilate jamming waves and add signal power. *runs*
Eternal Darkness? That's a good choice of words, like other words such as black, pot,, and kettle
First I'll get Doom 3, so I can make Independence War 3 with the engine. Gawd, with the design doc I wrote so far it's going to take forever and a day.
Then I'll get BloodRayne 2, just to stare at the bondage chick and not get busted for pron...
Then I'll get Half Life 2, just to see what would happen if you used the manipulator gun on someone's crotch.
And on Christmas I'll download Real Life version ??.??.?? I'm not sure what it's like 'outside' yet but (omg) I may check! Life SEEMS good.
In other news, Red Star outsells Half Life 2 by an order of magnitude.
Thus, I predict the end of the world at approximately 4:20 PM Februrary 32, 2005 as I download Marijuana v4.20
The point is, if there is a good game out, we would buy it! None of this "holiday release" crap--leave that stuff to the under-10 crowd. If your game is good it will sell well no matter how bad the timing is.
I'm a working gamer myself, before I go next fall to the real-life Doom 3 that is Caltech. In the time I get to play games, I want to receive varied, enriching experiences: I recently bought a Geforce 6800, quite an upgrade from the 5200 I had earlier (pretty much 10x draw rate). The card came with Far Cry, so I checked it out.
Damn, what a drag. Far Cry's checkpoint system is a Console Evil, designed for 5 year olds with literally too much time on their hands. I spent 30 minutes sneaking through a level, making sure to pay every place a visit, when right near the end I am ungloriously gunned down and forced to replay that entire 30 minutes. I ended up playing the thing over Rambo style, taking a jeep and making a beeline for the place I last died, which took 10 minutes and was 1/10 as engaging as my last play. I've pretty much summed up the gameplay in Far Cry:
n = 1;
1. Walk.
2. Turn on nightvision.
3. Walk.
4. Turn on nightvision. See heat signature.
5. Go prone.
6. Unload all munitions at heat signature.
7. ???
8. Profit!
9. Find out you didn't really profit because 1 second later, one of those giant mutated bullet (and rocket propelled grenade) tampons walked up behind you and blasted you to hell.
10. n++; GOTO 1;
There you have it, the design document for the ULTIMATE FAR CRY SINGLEPLAYER BOT. Yes, that's who you and I are when we're playing games like that: bots. I have a hunch that it would work just as well in multiplayer.
Yes, I know developers and publishers want you to spend time on their games. But stuff like checkpoints and repetitive gameplay like in Far Cry destroy goodwill and create dollars for other, more creative developers. Sure, I know they implemented a quicksave--but that was after the entire populace, awash with rage, found the emperor naked, so to speak. This stuff doesn't have to be taught by hard PR lessons; it should be in the basic rulebook of game design, where it belongs.
All games should have:
An autosave that activates when you quit.
A restore in case of a computer crash.
Robust netcode.
Programmers that have more than the customary two-neuron-one-of-which-is-inhibitory brain.
Simply put, the PC game industry would be so much better if there wasn't as much sexing between the PC and console developers.
You know those Chevron cars? Those toy and clay model ones that they use in the commercials and you can buy at gas stations? Well, that's what I think is going to happen. I am going to be laughing my ass off and on during my entire commute if this thing was introduced heavily into the market. As such, it is important to provide safety controls for the drivers and passengers laughing their heads off and not concentrating on the road.
I propose that along with the car that has the expressions, when they get introduced into the general car population deep enough, that each be provided with a driver laughing restraint system, such as a swift kick in the balls by actuating the gas pedal or something.
In other news, a car gets indicted for sexual harrassment.
Isn't the same thing wrong with Open Source? Or not wrong with it? This heralds a great new age of inhumanity! :)
Sex suddenly reaches new heights (or lows). I can imagine: A couple is going at it in the bedroom. Then, suddenly, the wife slaps the husband in mid-sex, as she finds out that 90% of his husband's video rendering resources were put towards the Hottie in the Office...
That's why you have to download the latest ZoneAlarm BS Detector Pro, for a nominal fee of 300 floating point operations per second stolen from your brain for nefarious world domination purposes.
an HUD of Slashdot? God forbid, the absentee ratio of Slashdotters just seriously drops. Then everyone is posting on Slashdot constantly, with auto-algorithms that post your thoughts automatically as a reply or parent to the appropriate topic.