From neuroscience there is very clear evidence that the human conscious experience is somehow a function the brain. The patterns in which neurons fire seem to be the key. If this is so then we should look for quantum effects in people's neurons. When you look at the way neurons work, it turns out they are remarkably reliable devices. Also, they are almost identical to the neurons found in much more primitive animals that seem to lack consciousness entirely. They incredibly resilient. For example epileptics or stroke victims suffer massive brain trauma and yet their personality and consciousness can endure them fully intact. So in light of this it is difficult to reconcile quantum effects which are minuscule in scale with the very well understood functioning of individual neurons. No one has found anything in them that "amplifies" quantum fluctuations to macroscopic scales.
Indeed consciousness is a subjective experience but the hardware of it in humans does not show any evidence of relying on quantum blurriness for its functioning.
Yes I'll chime in in favor of Python here too. It can easily do everything you need with a stock install, including unit testing, GUI, executing command-line commands, and generating web or email content. Plus it is easy to turn Python scripts into standalone executables http://www.py2exe.org/
Powershell would also get the job done, but it is not nearly as elegant.
This is "no shit" because many Slashdot readers have personally felt this effect. Since Slashdot readers are probably above average intelligence, a reasonable fraction of us probably are gifted. They remember how bored they were, how they felt constantly ignored and unchallenged. They know full well that they were wasting their time and their academic potential. The system has already failed them, so it's not as if there was not clear evidence of this problem before the study.
This is very cool technology, but imho it is a bit inflated to claim it is "the next level" beyond the Wiimote.
First of all, you have to keep the objects in view of and facing the webcam at all times. If anything blocks them, or if you are tilting them away from the camera in any way, you lose control. Another big issue which has been mentioned already is latency. Also the CPU (or GPU?) cost of image analysis is very high compared to interpreting a stream of numbers from a few accelerometers, which may not be an issue on PC's but it would be on the Wii. Finally, the Wiimote has a lot more to offer than simple motion tracking: The controllers have a built-in IR camera for pointing to the screen with rotation, there is a speaker and vibration function built-in, you can use it as a remote control to turn the Wii on and off and finally you can add attachments such as the classic gamepad, or the nunchuck.
That is not true. Our brains do not use Cellular Automata. Neural Networks is a branch of Artificial Intelligence which attempts to model biological nervous systems. There are many reasons why it is not practical to design software such as office suites or whole video games to run on neural nets. Biological networks are trained, not designed. We also have no way of building efficient artificial neural net hardware at present. Wolfram himself does mention in his book that Cellular Automata are not the alpha and the omega, they are merely visually striking simple computing systems which illustrate many of his more general points well.
People scoffed when Wolfram published his tome with some justification. They were n
ot arguing against the merit of many of his points. They were pointing out the fact that he has an arrogant tone and is blatantly plagiarising decades of established computer science, restating the ideas of many other scientists as though they were his own. That is a serious breach of scientific ethics and he deserves to be tarred and feathered for it.
It makes one wonder how much bigger this industry can become. How big was the film industry in its fourth decade? How about now? How will the games industry look in 2070?
No, it isn't. Games are a lot more than just code. Most of the work in developing a game these days is really the content. What makes a game great is a subtle thing arising out of the confluence of many diverse talents. You can't share that.
I think what is really happening is that the game industry has not reached the same level of maturity as the now 70-year-old film industry has. Games will get there, and soon. Once the bar is high enough that it really excludes little (say, less than 100 employee) studios everywhere from making mainstream games, there will be room for little studios to make independant games that are about on the scale of what we would call mainstream now.
It is not simply about how games are published. You realize that most game developers are very much dictated how to do their jobs by their publishers already? Electronic Arts just churns out the same horrible games every year because every braindead sports fan buys them. They are the MGM of Games. Vivendi Universal is also a huge publisher that operates in this way. So too are Namco, Konami, Square Enix, Capcom and others. Microsoft is getting into publishing too now. Only Valve has really shown that a mainstream game can be published by the developers through the Internet. You'll notice, however, that Valve is financially about the size of a publisher themselves, since they are rolling in the cash from the original Half-Life series of games. That, and they still got screwed around by their publisher. There were lawsuits, remember? In the end, Vivendi still put Half-Life 2 in boxes on the shelves for Valve.
Yes, code can be shared. In fact, this is common practice right now. The Doom3 engine was an investment by id Software. The game itself is probably not going to make them nearly as much money in the long run as licensing out their engine to other developers. The same is true of the Unreal engine, and the Source engine (Half-Life 2).
Content is a little more difficult to share. Objects in a game world are not really just "props". Most of the work involved in content creation is very specific to the game itself. Artists spend most of their time making the interactive objects, which aren't worth reusing in a different engine for a different game. It would often just be easier just to make them from scratch.
By having a revolutionary engine for its time. Considering that the best anyone had every seen before Doom was Wolfenstein 3D, it was a huge leap technically. That and it was the first multiplayer first-person shooter. So it was not ONLY gameplay.
Warren Spector is worried about the cost of developing games on the technical front. When it comes to game design (plot, gameplay, etc.) that's where they certainly can still compete.
The problem is that most people don't want want deep, meaningful games. Sure, there are great books out there with great plot, but not so many people read them as who watch some awful shallow hollywood special effects fest. Still there is a thriving market for literature, and it is doing better than ever.
It is not a scanline renderer. Like Pixar's PRMan, it is a REYES renderer. For parts of an image where raytracing is the best choice of algorithm, Renderman allows you to raytrace selectively. Aqsis does not support raytracing currently (you'd be surprised how little you need it), but it does support using a rayserver (such as BMRT) for that. And as you noted, raytracing with true global illumination (you can already do Ambient Occlusion) is coming soon.
Slashdot Mirror
These are some very good points.
From neuroscience there is very clear evidence that the human conscious experience is somehow a function the brain. The patterns in which neurons fire seem to be the key. If this is so then we should look for quantum effects in people's neurons. When you look at the way neurons work, it turns out they are remarkably reliable devices. Also, they are almost identical to the neurons found in much more primitive animals that seem to lack consciousness entirely. They incredibly resilient. For example epileptics or stroke victims suffer massive brain trauma and yet their personality and consciousness can endure them fully intact. So in light of this it is difficult to reconcile quantum effects which are minuscule in scale with the very well understood functioning of individual neurons. No one has found anything in them that "amplifies" quantum fluctuations to macroscopic scales.
Indeed consciousness is a subjective experience but the hardware of it in humans does not show any evidence of relying on quantum blurriness for its functioning.
Yes I'll chime in in favor of Python here too. It can easily do everything you need with a stock install, including unit testing, GUI, executing command-line commands, and generating web or email content. Plus it is easy to turn Python scripts into standalone executables http://www.py2exe.org/ Powershell would also get the job done, but it is not nearly as elegant.
This is "no shit" because many Slashdot readers have personally felt this effect. Since Slashdot readers are probably above average intelligence, a reasonable fraction of us probably are gifted. They remember how bored they were, how they felt constantly ignored and unchallenged. They know full well that they were wasting their time and their academic potential. The system has already failed them, so it's not as if there was not clear evidence of this problem before the study.
This is very cool technology, but imho it is a bit inflated to claim it is "the next level" beyond the Wiimote. First of all, you have to keep the objects in view of and facing the webcam at all times. If anything blocks them, or if you are tilting them away from the camera in any way, you lose control. Another big issue which has been mentioned already is latency. Also the CPU (or GPU?) cost of image analysis is very high compared to interpreting a stream of numbers from a few accelerometers, which may not be an issue on PC's but it would be on the Wii. Finally, the Wiimote has a lot more to offer than simple motion tracking: The controllers have a built-in IR camera for pointing to the screen with rotation, there is a speaker and vibration function built-in, you can use it as a remote control to turn the Wii on and off and finally you can add attachments such as the classic gamepad, or the nunchuck.
That is not true. Our brains do not use Cellular Automata. Neural Networks is a branch of Artificial Intelligence which attempts to model biological nervous systems. There are many reasons why it is not practical to design software such as office suites or whole video games to run on neural nets. Biological networks are trained, not designed. We also have no way of building efficient artificial neural net hardware at present. Wolfram himself does mention in his book that Cellular Automata are not the alpha and the omega, they are merely visually striking simple computing systems which illustrate many of his more general points well.
People scoffed when Wolfram published his tome with some justification. They were not arguing against the merit of many of his points. They were pointing out the fact that he has an arrogant tone and is blatantly plagiarising decades of established computer science, restating the ideas of many other scientists as though they were his own. That is a serious breach of scientific ethics and he deserves to be tarred and feathered for it.
It makes one wonder how much bigger this industry can become. How big was the film industry in its fourth decade? How about now? How will the games industry look in 2070?
No, it isn't. Games are a lot more than just code. Most of the work in developing a game these days is really the content. What makes a game great is a subtle thing arising out of the confluence of many diverse talents. You can't share that.
I think what is really happening is that the game industry has not reached the same level of maturity as the now 70-year-old film industry has. Games will get there, and soon. Once the bar is high enough that it really excludes little (say, less than 100 employee) studios everywhere from making mainstream games, there will be room for little studios to make independant games that are about on the scale of what we would call mainstream now.
It is not simply about how games are published. You realize that most game developers are very much dictated how to do their jobs by their publishers already? Electronic Arts just churns out the same horrible games every year because every braindead sports fan buys them. They are the MGM of Games. Vivendi Universal is also a huge publisher that operates in this way. So too are Namco, Konami, Square Enix, Capcom and others. Microsoft is getting into publishing too now. Only Valve has really shown that a mainstream game can be published by the developers through the Internet. You'll notice, however, that Valve is financially about the size of a publisher themselves, since they are rolling in the cash from the original Half-Life series of games. That, and they still got screwed around by their publisher. There were lawsuits, remember? In the end, Vivendi still put Half-Life 2 in boxes on the shelves for Valve.
Yes, code can be shared. In fact, this is common practice right now. The Doom3 engine was an investment by id Software. The game itself is probably not going to make them nearly as much money in the long run as licensing out their engine to other developers. The same is true of the Unreal engine, and the Source engine (Half-Life 2). Content is a little more difficult to share. Objects in a game world are not really just "props". Most of the work involved in content creation is very specific to the game itself. Artists spend most of their time making the interactive objects, which aren't worth reusing in a different engine for a different game. It would often just be easier just to make them from scratch.
By having a revolutionary engine for its time. Considering that the best anyone had every seen before Doom was Wolfenstein 3D, it was a huge leap technically. That and it was the first multiplayer first-person shooter. So it was not ONLY gameplay. Warren Spector is worried about the cost of developing games on the technical front. When it comes to game design (plot, gameplay, etc.) that's where they certainly can still compete. The problem is that most people don't want want deep, meaningful games. Sure, there are great books out there with great plot, but not so many people read them as who watch some awful shallow hollywood special effects fest. Still there is a thriving market for literature, and it is doing better than ever.
It is not a scanline renderer. Like Pixar's PRMan, it is a REYES renderer. For parts of an image where raytracing is the best choice of algorithm, Renderman allows you to raytrace selectively. Aqsis does not support raytracing currently (you'd be surprised how little you need it), but it does support using a rayserver (such as BMRT) for that. And as you noted, raytracing with true global illumination (you can already do Ambient Occlusion) is coming soon.
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Blender
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