In this movie, it's incredibly clear that not only does the device work, but Metroid Hunters actually has more PC like control than any console based FPS I've seen - essentially, the stylus acts as the mouselook, and the d-pad works like your standard WASD keys.
I'm convinced; that's all it comes down to. I can also see things like Flight sims, which, with the stylus, will now have enough area for complete controls, and can do more than one plane.
For more "innovative" games, I'm sure we can rely on Sega and Nintendo, but I'm happy if this is what we get.
System Shock, along with the Thief series and the first Deus Ex, is pretty much one of my favorite games ever.
There was just something amazing about the atmosphere, but even more, slowly piecing the plot together from the emails of now dead crewmembers was just amazing. There's a reason Doom III pretty much lifted it intact; it worked great in SS2.
The GBA screen is dimmer than the GBC screen, but it doesn't have anything to do with power saving; on a TFT, it takes about the same amount of power to switch a pixel to yellow as it does to brown.
The problem is that the pixel density is higher on the GBA, meaning that each pixel is slightly smaller - ergo, less reflective surface per pixel.
The overall effect of this is that the screen is dimmer. I still played the GBA just fine, and think the complaint was overblown, but there's no question that the GBA is dimmer.
There would be downsides to such an amendment; for example, most people who post here are probably guilty of some felony crime via new copyright laws.
I'm not making any judgement on those laws, but I do have to say that if it was that easy to bar people from office - by making virtually everyone guilty of some criminal offence - it would be incredibly simple to control what laws were passed, or to keep those with dissenting opinions out of office.
No, but you could still be vulnerable - as the letter points out, many third party programs distribute dll's that are potential vectors, and the Windows/Office update sites will not find those.
Indeed, I run a 9600XT and there have been no real improvements - sure a memory leak fixed here, a minor change to this or that, but when your drivers are at 10% of where they should be, moving to 10.5 doesn't impress me.
They are not using DX9. That's absurd. The "heat wave" and other distortion effects can be done with shaders in Open GL, and that's what they're doing.
Actually, it's not the economics. It's been mentioned by Carmack that it's basically driver issues that are holding back the release. NVidia's are fine, but ATI's drivers have no chance in hell of running Doom III under linux right now.
Similarly, the OSX port is basically done, but the performance just isn't good on most macs.
It's a pretty good book; I was able to do a basic calendar app quite easily. The only problem I had with the book is that it's based on a fairly old copy of Mozilla, but it's still completely useable.
That's completely fair; Winamp and a few others do support the feature.
I just meant to point out that Windows current support wasn't really fully featured, and isn't done in a comparable way to what the new X server does.
No, you're seeing people get excited about the API and core architecture changes you just mentioned.
Right now, they're being used to do drop shadows and transparency - but the same extensions can also be used to reduce network bandwidth required for remote sessions or create a 3D desktop.
Composite, Damage, and the other new extensions are exactly the fundamental changes you claim are needed - the fact that the quickest way to show them off gives us some neat eye candy is just icing on the cake.
Also, Windows does not currently support this type of window compositing - it has basic alpha channel support, but there's a lot things these new extensions can do that Windows cannot, and won't until Avalon.
We're not offended by reality, but by the unfounded claim.
OSX most definitely has hardware accelerated compositing - it's a terrific example of the GUI backend done right. It's also not available for anything but Apple hardware.
Windows does not have hardware accelerated compositing. Even it's alpha-channel support is quite flakey - have you ever seen a program with a partially transparent window? With some applications, you can set an entire window transparent, but this quite often leads to corruption of parts of the window - there's a reason Windows doesn't have built in, supported transparency settings in the display manager.
When Avalon becomes part of Windows in 2006 or 2007, it will finally meet (and possibly exceed) the features of X.Org. But I also don't expect the X developers to just sit around waiting for that to happen.
The X server features this is demonstrating aren't "a tiny feature". While hardware accelerated composition is currently being used for transparency and drop shadows, it can also be used to accelerate a 3D desktop a la looking glass - it depends on whatever the composition manager can do. It's revolutionary because this is just the tip of the iceberg.
Actually, once things are updated to take advantage of the Damage extension, this could potentially speed up remote sessions greatly.
With Damage, only parts of windows that have been changed since the last redraw have to be sent across the network, so there is at least potential for remote sessions to actually be faster with this X Server.
The eye candy - shadows, transparency, etc, can essentially be done client side, so it shouldn't be a problem - also, it's easy to disable if you don't have accelerated support for it, so for things like remote sessions, it probably wouldn't even factor in.
It's not layers, per se; each window is rendered to a separate area of memory, and the composition manager builds the final screen from the various windows. In addition, XDamage allows the composition manager to know which parts of the window need to be redrawn, so rather than having the entire window redrawn (as is the case traditionally), only the part that was "damaged" needs to be redrawn.
True transparency means that it's truly based on alpha values and computed as the window is drawn; current ways of "faking" transparency - in Konsole or XChat, for example - essentially take a capture of the background wallpaper and use that as the background of the window. If you move the window, you can see that it takes a moment for the background to adjust; with apps that are aware of and use the new X server features, this would be done as the window moved, and would also show windows and icons behind the currently focused window.
As long as the composition manager has good hardware acceleration (something which is already the case with NVidia, but not so much with ATI), this combined with a double or triple buffered desktop could well provide a Linux/Unix desktop on par with OSX, at least technically.
Of course, it's up to the window manager to really take advantage of these added features; metacity can already support window borders with alpha values, for true transparency.
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I'm also left handed; they have. You can also use the 4 buttons on the right as a d-pad, and use R to fire.
Gamespot Movie
In this movie, it's incredibly clear that not only does the device work, but Metroid Hunters actually has more PC like control than any console based FPS I've seen - essentially, the stylus acts as the mouselook, and the d-pad works like your standard WASD keys. I'm convinced; that's all it comes down to. I can also see things like Flight sims, which, with the stylus, will now have enough area for complete controls, and can do more than one plane. For more "innovative" games, I'm sure we can rely on Sega and Nintendo, but I'm happy if this is what we get.
System Shock, along with the Thief series and the first Deus Ex, is pretty much one of my favorite games ever. There was just something amazing about the atmosphere, but even more, slowly piecing the plot together from the emails of now dead crewmembers was just amazing. There's a reason Doom III pretty much lifted it intact; it worked great in SS2.
Only a cynic would mistake cynicism for realism.
The problem is that the pixel density is higher on the GBA, meaning that each pixel is slightly smaller - ergo, less reflective surface per pixel.
The overall effect of this is that the screen is dimmer. I still played the GBA just fine, and think the complaint was overblown, but there's no question that the GBA is dimmer.
There would be downsides to such an amendment; for example, most people who post here are probably guilty of some felony crime via new copyright laws. I'm not making any judgement on those laws, but I do have to say that if it was that easy to bar people from office - by making virtually everyone guilty of some criminal offence - it would be incredibly simple to control what laws were passed, or to keep those with dissenting opinions out of office.
Well, considering PictoChat is built into the device, I'd say it's coming whether you want it or no.
No, but you could still be vulnerable - as the letter points out, many third party programs distribute dll's that are potential vectors, and the Windows/Office update sites will not find those.
Indeed, I run a 9600XT and there have been no real improvements - sure a memory leak fixed here, a minor change to this or that, but when your drivers are at 10% of where they should be, moving to 10.5 doesn't impress me.
Sorry; I was referring only to Direct3D. My apologies.
They are not using DX9. That's absurd. The "heat wave" and other distortion effects can be done with shaders in Open GL, and that's what they're doing.
Actually, it's not the economics. It's been mentioned by Carmack that it's basically driver issues that are holding back the release. NVidia's are fine, but ATI's drivers have no chance in hell of running Doom III under linux right now. Similarly, the OSX port is basically done, but the performance just isn't good on most macs.
It's a pretty good book; I was able to do a basic calendar app quite easily. The only problem I had with the book is that it's based on a fairly old copy of Mozilla, but it's still completely useable.
That's completely fair; Winamp and a few others do support the feature. I just meant to point out that Windows current support wasn't really fully featured, and isn't done in a comparable way to what the new X server does.
Right now, they're being used to do drop shadows and transparency - but the same extensions can also be used to reduce network bandwidth required for remote sessions or create a 3D desktop.
Composite, Damage, and the other new extensions are exactly the fundamental changes you claim are needed - the fact that the quickest way to show them off gives us some neat eye candy is just icing on the cake.
Also, Windows does not currently support this type of window compositing - it has basic alpha channel support, but there's a lot things these new extensions can do that Windows cannot, and won't until Avalon.
OSX most definitely has hardware accelerated compositing - it's a terrific example of the GUI backend done right. It's also not available for anything but Apple hardware.
Windows does not have hardware accelerated compositing. Even it's alpha-channel support is quite flakey - have you ever seen a program with a partially transparent window? With some applications, you can set an entire window transparent, but this quite often leads to corruption of parts of the window - there's a reason Windows doesn't have built in, supported transparency settings in the display manager.
When Avalon becomes part of Windows in 2006 or 2007, it will finally meet (and possibly exceed) the features of X.Org. But I also don't expect the X developers to just sit around waiting for that to happen.
The X server features this is demonstrating aren't "a tiny feature". While hardware accelerated composition is currently being used for transparency and drop shadows, it can also be used to accelerate a 3D desktop a la looking glass - it depends on whatever the composition manager can do. It's revolutionary because this is just the tip of the iceberg.
The eye candy - shadows, transparency, etc, can essentially be done client side, so it shouldn't be a problem - also, it's easy to disable if you don't have accelerated support for it, so for things like remote sessions, it probably wouldn't even factor in.
True transparency means that it's truly based on alpha values and computed as the window is drawn; current ways of "faking" transparency - in Konsole or XChat, for example - essentially take a capture of the background wallpaper and use that as the background of the window. If you move the window, you can see that it takes a moment for the background to adjust; with apps that are aware of and use the new X server features, this would be done as the window moved, and would also show windows and icons behind the currently focused window.
As long as the composition manager has good hardware acceleration (something which is already the case with NVidia, but not so much with ATI), this combined with a double or triple buffered desktop could well provide a Linux/Unix desktop on par with OSX, at least technically.
Of course, it's up to the window manager to really take advantage of these added features; metacity can already support window borders with alpha values, for true transparency.