Depends. That could be argued right now with handycam copies. With screeners, you have a practically full-quality version (just lower than normal resolution). Even if there is legitimate demand, most pirates are put off by the high prices and are willing to bear a slightly lower quality as long as it's free.
Yeah, and when you visit the marketplace every single player will have the One Ring because they cloned their inventories using an old Diablo 2 exploit.
This is ridiculous. DVD is 4.7 gb but you rarely find exact copies floating around p2p. It's always a 700mb or 1.4gb rip which has been recompressed smaller. If the movie can be seen, it can be transformed into a smaller copy. Maybe you'll lose 5.1 or the far ends of the screen but it's not exactly going to stop piracy.
According to fan site Theforce.net, employees at Lucas's company Industrial Light and Magic have all been made to sign non-disclosure agreements to promise not to talk about the possibility of episode's seven, eight and nine being made.
Okay so Lucas is keeping his options open, but this seems like hype-building to me. He's going to have to announce the films as soon as they hit production, after all.
Pretty pointless considering the vast majority of movie-goers of this generation wouldn't care about a new set of Star Wars films. Bland plot, extremely good CGI, overall unenjoyable. The only real hope is that eps 7-9 would be free of the constraint to match the story up with those coming later. Lucas is pretty much free to cover any ground he wants (assuming he'll ignore the books) and produce a more enjoyable set of films.
As much as I salivate at the prospect of even more features, more weapons and larger areas, I feel that GTA is running itself into a rut now. Rockstar, obviously concerned, have started introducing features such as 'eating unhealthily makes you fat' or 'jogging frequently makes you run for longer.' This conjures up worrying memories of The Sims or even Tomb Raider's latest incarnation.
This is one of the few directions they can take the game, I guess, since the missions are going to get stale eventually. GTA3's addition of a stronger narrative and side missions really helped but even by Vice City the side missions were boring and I felt something was missing.
Not that the game wasn't fun - it was - but GTA4 obviously can't continue down this path of 'bigger is better' without adding something cool. GTA:London was the first to have an actual city, GTA2 added real gangs with different loyalties towards you, and GTA3 obviously added a whole slew of features alongside the 3D - quite ambitious and impressive, looking back at it.
I think that GTA4 should either have multiplayer (although GTA3 sorta has it) or a real gang structure, or maybe both. Imagine starting up your own gang and sending out orders, or having the police enter your territory and get shot down by your goons. You could do drugs on the side, Dope Wars-style, and arrange bribes with the cops to let it happen. Then spend the money on plastic explosives and rob a few banks.
With the asset-buying and bank-robbing side mission in VC, I definitely think this is where GTA4 is going - not just a bigger area, but more freedom as well.
I'm glad to see such a strong community that has centred around adventure games. It's hopeless commercially, it seems, with many small projects still looking for a publisher. But free games keep getting cranked out!
I think this is because there is so much fun to be had in actually making these games. There are dozens of engines that can handle virtually all of the programming work for you. What's left is the art, dialogue, story, puzzles and witty responses. For a creative group of people this kind of thing enables them to do what they do best without being boggled down in engine specifics. That's why recent games seem to reach almost LucasArts quality with much less work.
I feel that the only issue is the number of one-man projects there are. It's very hard to collaborate on these projects with no source control or commercial incentive. People have their own independent visions for how the game will come out, and most of these guys are artists or writers, not leaders. With the tools that are already there, a group of 20 or so people could apply the open source methodologies and develop a game that would even surpass LucasArts standards, and be just as long and fun to play. I think - well, I hope - that this is the way forward for adventure games, because the results would be really promising.
The most commonly used language for advanced programming is 'System RPL', or 'SysRPL'. On modern calculators, SysRPL is mostly executed by an emulated 'Saturn' processor. C on the other hand is executed directly by the ARM chip. The same program written in C will be many (up to 100) times faster then the equivalent SysRPL program.
So possibly the article miswords that the 'emulation' is simply of an older programming language. If it's a common one, I see why they'd keep using it instead of porting to C.
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Depends. That could be argued right now with handycam copies. With screeners, you have a practically full-quality version (just lower than normal resolution). Even if there is legitimate demand, most pirates are put off by the high prices and are willing to bear a slightly lower quality as long as it's free.
Yeah, and when you visit the marketplace every single player will have the One Ring because they cloned their inventories using an old Diablo 2 exploit.
This is ridiculous. DVD is 4.7 gb but you rarely find exact copies floating around p2p. It's always a 700mb or 1.4gb rip which has been recompressed smaller. If the movie can be seen, it can be transformed into a smaller copy. Maybe you'll lose 5.1 or the far ends of the screen but it's not exactly going to stop piracy.
From the article:
According to fan site Theforce.net, employees at Lucas's company Industrial Light and Magic have all been made to sign non-disclosure agreements to promise not to talk about the possibility of episode's seven, eight and nine being made.
Okay so Lucas is keeping his options open, but this seems like hype-building to me. He's going to have to announce the films as soon as they hit production, after all.
Pretty pointless considering the vast majority of movie-goers of this generation wouldn't care about a new set of Star Wars films. Bland plot, extremely good CGI, overall unenjoyable. The only real hope is that eps 7-9 would be free of the constraint to match the story up with those coming later. Lucas is pretty much free to cover any ground he wants (assuming he'll ignore the books) and produce a more enjoyable set of films.
As much as I salivate at the prospect of even more features, more weapons and larger areas, I feel that GTA is running itself into a rut now. Rockstar, obviously concerned, have started introducing features such as 'eating unhealthily makes you fat' or 'jogging frequently makes you run for longer.' This conjures up worrying memories of The Sims or even Tomb Raider's latest incarnation.
This is one of the few directions they can take the game, I guess, since the missions are going to get stale eventually. GTA3's addition of a stronger narrative and side missions really helped but even by Vice City the side missions were boring and I felt something was missing.
Not that the game wasn't fun - it was - but GTA4 obviously can't continue down this path of 'bigger is better' without adding something cool. GTA:London was the first to have an actual city, GTA2 added real gangs with different loyalties towards you, and GTA3 obviously added a whole slew of features alongside the 3D - quite ambitious and impressive, looking back at it.
I think that GTA4 should either have multiplayer (although GTA3 sorta has it) or a real gang structure, or maybe both. Imagine starting up your own gang and sending out orders, or having the police enter your territory and get shot down by your goons. You could do drugs on the side, Dope Wars-style, and arrange bribes with the cops to let it happen. Then spend the money on plastic explosives and rob a few banks.
With the asset-buying and bank-robbing side mission in VC, I definitely think this is where GTA4 is going - not just a bigger area, but more freedom as well.
I'm glad to see such a strong community that has centred around adventure games. It's hopeless commercially, it seems, with many small projects still looking for a publisher. But free games keep getting cranked out!
I think this is because there is so much fun to be had in actually making these games. There are dozens of engines that can handle virtually all of the programming work for you. What's left is the art, dialogue, story, puzzles and witty responses. For a creative group of people this kind of thing enables them to do what they do best without being boggled down in engine specifics. That's why recent games seem to reach almost LucasArts quality with much less work.
I feel that the only issue is the number of one-man projects there are. It's very hard to collaborate on these projects with no source control or commercial incentive. People have their own independent visions for how the game will come out, and most of these guys are artists or writers, not leaders. With the tools that are already there, a group of 20 or so people could apply the open source methodologies and develop a game that would even surpass LucasArts standards, and be just as long and fun to play. I think - well, I hope - that this is the way forward for adventure games, because the results would be really promising.
From the site:
The most commonly used language for advanced programming is 'System RPL', or 'SysRPL'. On modern calculators, SysRPL is mostly executed by an emulated 'Saturn' processor. C on the other hand is executed directly by the ARM chip. The same program written in C will be many (up to 100) times faster then the equivalent SysRPL program.
So possibly the article miswords that the 'emulation' is simply of an older programming language. If it's a common one, I see why they'd keep using it instead of porting to C.