Caching to the HDD is a developer's work around to shitty read speeds on the optical drive. That's why Microsoft installed a higher speed DVD drive to eliminate the need to cache to the HDD.
Okay, you're obviously an Xbox fanboy. Many, many articles were written about Oblivion caching to the HD on the 360. There's no way they could use the textures they were using due to the low read speeds of the optical drive - a DVD is never as fast as a hard drive, which is why it's not necessary to do this on the PC - the game is already installed on the drive!
In case you really doubt what I say, let's see what Bethesda has to say about the problem:
Oblivion uses the Xbox 360 hard drive extensively to cache (copy and reuse) game data. This is done to optimize all loading the game does. It has been found in rare cases on some Xbox 360s that the cached data can get overly fragmented. This exhibits itself by the game taking a long time to load anything from menus, dialogue, sounds, objects, levels, and more.
I don't know about others, but I've turned on the auto-start option so that if the console sits idle it will run this in the foreground. It might take a while to complete a work-unit but at least it's still going. Plus it looks really nice. This way I don't have to conciously start it when I'm going to walk away from the PS3 for a few hours but know I'll play it later. Also, combined with the autodownload feature I can leave the console running to download a few movie trailers (Transformers, A Bee's Story and Shrek 3 hit last night) or game demos and have Folding run as well.
-One includes a hard drive the other doesn't ---The hard drive is removable and games are required to run with or without it... so there really is no difference to developers
Nice way to gloss over the problem for developers - do we or do we not require a hard drive. That's a choice that could have been hard to make if the gimped system sold just as well or even a large percentage of the better system. Then you have to make the choice of whether it's better to make a more technically impressive game by caching to the hard drive and locking out a good chunk of users or making a less technical game with higher sales.
Sorry, I know you're the messenger, but you make this point and I have to go off on it:
Campaign messages are very tightly controlled to avoid self damage, you don't want anyone doing anything unpredictable.
That is completely what's wrong with political campaigns in America today - too many people controlling the message and the candidates just saying exactly what their talking points tell them to say. The presidential debate in 2004 was disgusting and disgraceful in my opinion. The candidates weren't even allowed to say each other's name for fear of their heads exploding. If there's anything wrong with our political process in America today, outside of the gross undermining of our constitution by all parties involved, it's that elections have turned into a puppet show with the strings being controlled by those in power and their grossly overpaid consultants.
I'd argue however that MS has an even tougher job than usual here as console users are probably often even less security-literate than PC users.
So your grandma is more computer literate than a gamer? Hmmm...I don't think so. Not to mention that while a PC is more of an open system (even MS Windows is more open than the console), the console is definitely a little harder to break into as it doesn't allow the user to have administrative rights as easily, especially for downloadable content from a store like Arcade, PSN, or whatever the Wii one is (can't remember).
I have no idea why someone marked you as a troll. You completely refute the parent's statement that MS never promised 100% BC...with links! Slashdot is going to the fanboys. The only question is who will reign supreme, 360 or Wii? I need to go do some meta-moderation.
That Sony had these issues with the hardware BC engine in the initial SKUs as well - and they patched it. FFXII specifically was cited as one game that suffered from the issue and now it runs very well. I expect them to issue at least one patch for these issues. It's obviously something the customers want and Sony is getting a bit better about adressing them.
Actually, I'm not really a fan of the Wii. I am a fan of the PS3, but I do agree with him that the SIXAXIS motion sensing is not as responsive as it should be - some kind of calibration needs to be built in I think. However, I also think that motion sensing technology is really where game design is bound to go. It's almost as interactive as the field can get.
Obviously, the guy is a legend in his own right and deserves some respect, but I'm going to take issue with the following statement:
On the motion-sensor front, I've been intimately involved in creating role-playing games. It's all I've been doing, so when I look at the RPG space, there's not a huge need for motion sensing. So I'm not that interested in that aspect of the technology. But take the 360 controller, for example, which is actually the best one that I've seen, especially the analog. And it's easy to operate, and it's really reactive, unlike the Sixaxis.
That sounds a bit narrow-sighted to me, if not overly biased. Let's avoid the "next-gen/previous-gen" feature debate - the Wii really is drawing in audiences based on the motion-sensing party games. That's what's selling the system right now. To throw out motion-sensing just because it might not pertain to your field right now is wrong, IMO. What he says and what he does are two separate things, and he might make a motion sensing RPG down the line, but the guy makes his money off the 360 so he needs to sell it well. He does give Microsoft a little criticism, namely about the marketing campaign in Japan, but I think this statement was pretty wrong in the long run.
Our company uses a proxy server that redirects you to a warning page. I think most large organizations do that nowadays if they want to block something. I doubt you can proxy your way around it since you need the proxy to get out of the firewall, so basically you can't connect through port 80 at all. Of course, attempting to go around the proxy will probably get you fired anyways, so I don't try it.
Another reason, that isn't documented here, that people would want to block external communications (AIM, GMail, whatever) would be legal requirements to document any communication with a client. This would especially include banks, security companies, etc. I know that financial institutions are required to archive all email communication forever, literally. Morgan Stanley got into huge trouble because they didn't. In order to control the flow of information, most banks just block external email services so the content is easier to control.
Actually, the rumor on the Internets is that singleplayer just didn't work out well at all, and wasn't fun. I'd rather they cut it then give us a crappy version of it. I'm also completely confused on why it's going to be a Blu-ray title. It sounds like the game is going to be smaller than expected, so why go the full out retail route? I think that's going to hurt sales.
They have promised a demo for late spring. If that plays out well, then it might justify the retail release I guess. The game looks fun from videos, but I haven't seen enough of the ground combat to determine whether the videos are an accurate representation of gameplay.
I wrote the article summary. I probably meant famous but for some reason infamous sounds better in my head. I will point out that maybe SETI@Home can be considered infamous in that so many people used it on their computers and it never really accomplished anything. It was billed as the first large-scale distributed programming project, but it probably was one of the most pointless applications ever. Not to mention I could never understand the interface or believe that you were actually doing anything. This, I can buy more into - we know how finite the human gene is.
I don't think the delay was primarily DX10. I think between both next gen consoles and DX10 migration, they had their hands full. They had to develop code for both the hardware and the network for each console, which takes a pretty long time. They figured that it'd probably take them a while to put this one out, but they figured that after this they had the channels set up to deploy episodes much more quickly for the next gen products.
The Gamespot around the corner from my apartment told me that Nintendo is guaranteeing consistent shipments by the end of April I think. It might have been March, but that sounds awfully close.
I bet they're going to revise it too, but they won't officially comment because people will stop buying in anticipation of the new release later this year. I don't think they'll make it too much smaller, and I'm not exactly sure how they'd get the load times faster unless they revise the UMD drive somehow. However, I bet they might upgrade the wireless card to handle the anticipated release of their video/music platform and HOME for the PSP in the fall. The wireless is okay right now, but it's range is lower and speeds are slower than most laptops now due to the fact it's 802.11b. 8GB of built-in flash doesn't really make sense seeing as one of the nicest things about the PSP/PS3 combo is the ability to transfer files via the card, and read/writes aren't exactly slow. However, one of the biggest problems with the web browser is that it constantly runs out of memory when loading large pages so maybe a small upgrade of the internal cache could improve performance.
Yes, early adopters will have to go out and buy another $50/$60 controller inorder to get rumble in their games...
Actually that's not guaranteed yet. As IGN points out, Splitfish has developed technology that is both an addon and could be added to the existing design internally. So it's up in the air as Sony hasn't said word about whether they'll go with Immersion or Splitfish. And it's possible that even if Sony does go with Immersion for internal workings, Splitfish might figure out a way to get their rumble pack to be compatible with the Immersion technology. Long story short, it's way to early to call it at this point.
Actually, Sarbanes-Oxley would still apply as long as they are a publicly traded company on a US Exchange. I believe it only would cease to apply if they delisted from the NYSE and listed in an international market. The whole reason why fewer foreign companies are listing in American Exchange is that they'd be subject to SOX rules, even though they're located in another country.
I just wanted to say that you should take the document with a grain of salt...it's obviously been handed over to the marketing department to sell the product.
This document wasn't made for public consumption, although neither the summary nor the linked article state this. It was designed to pitch HOME to Developers and Publishers of games (note that the document's URL is "Third Party Relations.pdf" and on the SCE Developers website). If you want to get a business to sign onto something, you have to show them how to make money. That explains the hyped advertising talk.
Sony is not a communist organization. They need to make money to keep the shareholders happy. If they want something to be free to their users, they have to pay for it somehow. Advertising is the most obvious way. I don't think I'll mind the adverts as long as the service remains free. And they really won't want to charge for a service that is so core to their console especially after they've pledged to keep it free. I bet the cost of operating HOME outweighs the cost of a low subscription fee ala XBox Live.
I think the fact that they're going to make it available on PSP and Mobile Devices like Cell Phones says that's it's less an advertising vehicle and more of an attempt to create a kind of Portal specifically for Sony products and worlds. It might even be possible for them to integrate this into their other electronics lines at some point, although televisions might defeat the purpose of a PS3 I guess...
Not before Sony. It's simple business sense - if you're making money and selling well, why do you need to drop your price? Why increase the loss you have on your console? I don't see any need for Microsoft to drop their price any time soon. Sony will move first, and it won't be for a while. I'd stop holding onto the hope that a price drop is coming if I were you.
Slashdot Mirror
Caching to the HDD is a developer's work around to shitty read speeds on the optical drive. That's why Microsoft installed a higher speed DVD drive to eliminate the need to cache to the HDD.
Okay, you're obviously an Xbox fanboy. Many, many articles were written about Oblivion caching to the HD on the 360. There's no way they could use the textures they were using due to the low read speeds of the optical drive - a DVD is never as fast as a hard drive, which is why it's not necessary to do this on the PC - the game is already installed on the drive!
In case you really doubt what I say, let's see what Bethesda has to say about the problem:
Oblivion uses the Xbox 360 hard drive extensively to cache (copy and reuse) game data. This is done to optimize all loading the game does. It has been found in rare cases on some Xbox 360s that the cached data can get overly fragmented. This exhibits itself by the game taking a long time to load anything from menus, dialogue, sounds, objects, levels, and more.
Sorry, wrong word. I meant background downloading. I got it confused with the auto-start I guess.
I don't know about others, but I've turned on the auto-start option so that if the console sits idle it will run this in the foreground. It might take a while to complete a work-unit but at least it's still going. Plus it looks really nice. This way I don't have to conciously start it when I'm going to walk away from the PS3 for a few hours but know I'll play it later. Also, combined with the autodownload feature I can leave the console running to download a few movie trailers (Transformers, A Bee's Story and Shrek 3 hit last night) or game demos and have Folding run as well.
-One includes a hard drive the other doesn't
---The hard drive is removable and games are required to run with or without it... so there really is no difference to developers
Nice way to gloss over the problem for developers - do we or do we not require a hard drive. That's a choice that could have been hard to make if the gimped system sold just as well or even a large percentage of the better system. Then you have to make the choice of whether it's better to make a more technically impressive game by caching to the hard drive and locking out a good chunk of users or making a less technical game with higher sales.
Sorry, I know you're the messenger, but you make this point and I have to go off on it:
Campaign messages are very tightly controlled to avoid self damage, you don't want anyone doing anything unpredictable.
That is completely what's wrong with political campaigns in America today - too many people controlling the message and the candidates just saying exactly what their talking points tell them to say. The presidential debate in 2004 was disgusting and disgraceful in my opinion. The candidates weren't even allowed to say each other's name for fear of their heads exploding. If there's anything wrong with our political process in America today, outside of the gross undermining of our constitution by all parties involved, it's that elections have turned into a puppet show with the strings being controlled by those in power and their grossly overpaid consultants.
I'd argue however that MS has an even tougher job than usual here as console users are probably often even less security-literate than PC users.
So your grandma is more computer literate than a gamer? Hmmm...I don't think so. Not to mention that while a PC is more of an open system (even MS Windows is more open than the console), the console is definitely a little harder to break into as it doesn't allow the user to have administrative rights as easily, especially for downloadable content from a store like Arcade, PSN, or whatever the Wii one is (can't remember).
I have no idea why someone marked you as a troll. You completely refute the parent's statement that MS never promised 100% BC...with links! Slashdot is going to the fanboys. The only question is who will reign supreme, 360 or Wii? I need to go do some meta-moderation.
That Sony had these issues with the hardware BC engine in the initial SKUs as well - and they patched it. FFXII specifically was cited as one game that suffered from the issue and now it runs very well. I expect them to issue at least one patch for these issues. It's obviously something the customers want and Sony is getting a bit better about adressing them.
Actually, I'm not really a fan of the Wii. I am a fan of the PS3, but I do agree with him that the SIXAXIS motion sensing is not as responsive as it should be - some kind of calibration needs to be built in I think. However, I also think that motion sensing technology is really where game design is bound to go. It's almost as interactive as the field can get.
Obviously, the guy is a legend in his own right and deserves some respect, but I'm going to take issue with the following statement:
On the motion-sensor front, I've been intimately involved in creating role-playing games. It's all I've been doing, so when I look at the RPG space, there's not a huge need for motion sensing. So I'm not that interested in that aspect of the technology. But take the 360 controller, for example, which is actually the best one that I've seen, especially the analog. And it's easy to operate, and it's really reactive, unlike the Sixaxis.
That sounds a bit narrow-sighted to me, if not overly biased. Let's avoid the "next-gen/previous-gen" feature debate - the Wii really is drawing in audiences based on the motion-sensing party games. That's what's selling the system right now. To throw out motion-sensing just because it might not pertain to your field right now is wrong, IMO. What he says and what he does are two separate things, and he might make a motion sensing RPG down the line, but the guy makes his money off the 360 so he needs to sell it well. He does give Microsoft a little criticism, namely about the marketing campaign in Japan, but I think this statement was pretty wrong in the long run.
Apparently this study was spurned from interviews in Portland, Oregon. I don't think they've mastered the art of drifting through corners.
Our company uses a proxy server that redirects you to a warning page. I think most large organizations do that nowadays if they want to block something. I doubt you can proxy your way around it since you need the proxy to get out of the firewall, so basically you can't connect through port 80 at all. Of course, attempting to go around the proxy will probably get you fired anyways, so I don't try it.
Another reason, that isn't documented here, that people would want to block external communications (AIM, GMail, whatever) would be legal requirements to document any communication with a client. This would especially include banks, security companies, etc. I know that financial institutions are required to archive all email communication forever, literally. Morgan Stanley got into huge trouble because they didn't. In order to control the flow of information, most banks just block external email services so the content is easier to control.
Actually, the rumor on the Internets is that singleplayer just didn't work out well at all, and wasn't fun. I'd rather they cut it then give us a crappy version of it. I'm also completely confused on why it's going to be a Blu-ray title. It sounds like the game is going to be smaller than expected, so why go the full out retail route? I think that's going to hurt sales.
They have promised a demo for late spring. If that plays out well, then it might justify the retail release I guess. The game looks fun from videos, but I haven't seen enough of the ground combat to determine whether the videos are an accurate representation of gameplay.
I wrote the article summary. I probably meant famous but for some reason infamous sounds better in my head. I will point out that maybe SETI@Home can be considered infamous in that so many people used it on their computers and it never really accomplished anything. It was billed as the first large-scale distributed programming project, but it probably was one of the most pointless applications ever. Not to mention I could never understand the interface or believe that you were actually doing anything. This, I can buy more into - we know how finite the human gene is.
I don't think the delay was primarily DX10. I think between both next gen consoles and DX10 migration, they had their hands full. They had to develop code for both the hardware and the network for each console, which takes a pretty long time. They figured that it'd probably take them a while to put this one out, but they figured that after this they had the channels set up to deploy episodes much more quickly for the next gen products.
Sony does not make money on the PS3.
Maybe not the console, but they make money on the games licensing. And they're making a killing on the PS2 right now - both the console and the games.
The Gamespot around the corner from my apartment told me that Nintendo is guaranteeing consistent shipments by the end of April I think. It might have been March, but that sounds awfully close.
I bet they're going to revise it too, but they won't officially comment because people will stop buying in anticipation of the new release later this year. I don't think they'll make it too much smaller, and I'm not exactly sure how they'd get the load times faster unless they revise the UMD drive somehow. However, I bet they might upgrade the wireless card to handle the anticipated release of their video/music platform and HOME for the PSP in the fall. The wireless is okay right now, but it's range is lower and speeds are slower than most laptops now due to the fact it's 802.11b. 8GB of built-in flash doesn't really make sense seeing as one of the nicest things about the PSP/PS3 combo is the ability to transfer files via the card, and read/writes aren't exactly slow. However, one of the biggest problems with the web browser is that it constantly runs out of memory when loading large pages so maybe a small upgrade of the internal cache could improve performance.
Yes, early adopters will have to go out and buy another $50/$60 controller inorder to get rumble in their games ...
Actually that's not guaranteed yet. As IGN points out, Splitfish has developed technology that is both an addon and could be added to the existing design internally. So it's up in the air as Sony hasn't said word about whether they'll go with Immersion or Splitfish. And it's possible that even if Sony does go with Immersion for internal workings, Splitfish might figure out a way to get their rumble pack to be compatible with the Immersion technology. Long story short, it's way to early to call it at this point.
Actually, Sarbanes-Oxley would still apply as long as they are a publicly traded company on a US Exchange. I believe it only would cease to apply if they delisted from the NYSE and listed in an international market. The whole reason why fewer foreign companies are listing in American Exchange is that they'd be subject to SOX rules, even though they're located in another country.
Microsoft sells XBox 360s, which compete directly with PS3s.
Microsoft does *not* sell PCs, which compete directly with Macs.
Microsoft sells Windows, which competes directly with OS-X, which is tied to Macs.
And given that Macs are now basically PCs, it's safe to say Microsoft isn't going to make Games for Mac(R) anytime soon.
I just wanted to say that you should take the document with a grain of salt...it's obviously been handed over to the marketing department to sell the product.
This document wasn't made for public consumption, although neither the summary nor the linked article state this. It was designed to pitch HOME to Developers and Publishers of games (note that the document's URL is "Third Party Relations.pdf" and on the SCE Developers website). If you want to get a business to sign onto something, you have to show them how to make money. That explains the hyped advertising talk.
Sony is not a communist organization. They need to make money to keep the shareholders happy. If they want something to be free to their users, they have to pay for it somehow. Advertising is the most obvious way. I don't think I'll mind the adverts as long as the service remains free. And they really won't want to charge for a service that is so core to their console especially after they've pledged to keep it free. I bet the cost of operating HOME outweighs the cost of a low subscription fee ala XBox Live.
I think the fact that they're going to make it available on PSP and Mobile Devices like Cell Phones says that's it's less an advertising vehicle and more of an attempt to create a kind of Portal specifically for Sony products and worlds. It might even be possible for them to integrate this into their other electronics lines at some point, although televisions might defeat the purpose of a PS3 I guess...
Not before Sony. It's simple business sense - if you're making money and selling well, why do you need to drop your price? Why increase the loss you have on your console? I don't see any need for Microsoft to drop their price any time soon. Sony will move first, and it won't be for a while. I'd stop holding onto the hope that a price drop is coming if I were you.