The machine will eventually behave like an AI, and human go players will essentially learn how you think and counteract your particular behaviors.
Except that the machine is able to learn from past experiences as well. So playing against a "creative" player can be input back into the learning algorithm and like the born assimilated. It's not like AlphaGo is a hardcoded playing style. I'm sure the developers don't even really know exactly how it works since a lot of the internal neural network learning is pretty obtuse. If anything AlphaGo should be able to 'emulate' playing styles of different players by weighting inputs from past games of specific players. Or it can employ all of the playing styles of all of the players mishmashed together. However you slice it, humanity in the long run always loses. If you spend a lifetime developing a novel strategy in secret you can probably use it a handful of times until that becomes part of AlphaGo's learning experience. Then you have to go back to your secret Go Temple to forge a new strategy.
. All of the standard testing applications like Fraps, FCAT and other overlays are locked out of UWP games.
If by "locked out" you mean, use different APIs and can't rely on 20 year old hooks but instead need to use the new modern hooks... then yeah you're "locked out". But that's a bit like saying that developers are "locked out" of Nvidia's next generation GPUs because there is no hardware to test on yet.
Big UWP AAA games have been out for about a month. Everyone is acting like it's a giant conspiracy that SLI and VSync is a little glitch on a platform that has only ever seen a single game released. Jesus, give them a month or two to work out the bugs. And don't act like the need for new using different hooks on a different platform is some grand scheme to lock out debugging tools. "Breaking news, Visual Studio not able to debug Linux application using windows debug and profiling tools!"
Steam has a near monopoly on the PC gaming market (75%). And you're afraid that Microsoft might have a monopoly on the gaming market? Steam charges developers a fee, the same fee as Microsoft.
The "Xbox One launch shit show" was offering a system that gave customers more flexibility than Steam did.
If you don't like the Windows Store, then just sell your product with an installer and a sideload. UWP apps run by default without any system reconfiguration in Windows 10. But publishers *want* to be in a store. Publishers are more than happy (along with indies for that matter) to give Valve or Microsoft a 30% cut in exchange for payment processing, promotion and hosting fees. The Steam/Microsoft Store cut is still less or at least comparable to the Wholesale discount physical retail stores demand to sell physical disks. Sure you could throw up a website and try to sell through that. Or you could just sell it through steam and let them deal with DRM (yes steam is DRM), money and hopefully a featured banner on the front page.
The only thing Valve is pissed off about in regards to the Windows Store, is that Microsoft is competing on their turf doing the exact same thing.
Dumb users: "Windows sucks, it's full of viruses and malware!"
Microsoft: "Introducing UWP, a sandboxed environment in which an app can't infect your computer with any viruses!"
Dumb users: "Microsoft is trying to steal my ability to infect myself with viruses!"
There is nothing inherently wrong with UWP/WinRT. The APIs are still very immature and nowhere near the depth of Win32 which has had 30 years to bake but pretty much anything you can do in Win32 you can do in UWP.
And contrary to popular belief, you can install a UWP app without using the Windows Store. You can even distribute UWP apps without using the store. I made an app and just zipped it up and sent it to people. So yes, I do hope that Microsoft Deprecates Win32 sooner rather than later. Win32 is a whole mess of security nightmares. And Linux is no better. UWP is really ahead of the curve in being both powerful and also relatively secure. It's somewhat akin to running a container but without all of the virtualization hassles.
The advantage is that you can use Xbox Live chat and ideally get cross-buy and cross play. So your game saves transfer between the Xbox and PC. That's a selling point for me. However not all Windows Store apps are cross buy.
Bandwidth has to be measured end-to-end. I can transmit terrabits per second over laser of random noise. So you have to take into account the time to copy data to a MicroSD at 90MB/s. So it's 169,200 seconds + the heat death of the universe over USB 2.0 to copy to each MicroSD.:D
It's an even shittier story than that. Windows RT was a real OS. It had powershell, win32 support (although only for signed applications), it had true multi-user sessions, true multi-tasking and windowing... it was just the ARM compile of Windows 8 but wouldn't allow applications installations without a Microsoft certificate. Arm Windows 8 is as real of an OS as Ubuntu for ARM is also a real OS.
But what's really stupid is that it's not gone. Windows 10 Mobile is already an ARM build of Windows 10. With continuum it's got mouse and keyboard support etc. If you turn the zoom way down on the dpi settings the browser pops into desktop mode because it thinks it's running on a PC. Windows 10 Mobile and Windows 10 Desktop are even on the same build version now. So Windows RT didn't go away it's just hiding inside of Windows 10 "Mobile" aka the ARM compile of Windows 10.
So we should all be allowed to fly a commercial airliner? Maybe include commercial multi-engine pilots licenses in K-12 education? If it's a core part of our liberty to be able to travel under our own driving/piloting skills then it's outrageous that we rely on commercial aviation!
I'm really getting sick of all you cowards trying to reduce our liberties in the name of safety. Further, I've seen you quote Jefferson's quote about liberty and safety. I imagine you'll be unable or unwilling to admit the irony. It's okay, I'm used to it.
Lol you think that driving is an innate right. Sorry pal, it aint.
The roads are a public utility. If there is a way to use them that accomplishes the current goal: travel from A to B in a superior fashion then we will do that. It has nothing to do with "liberty". We don't have the "liberty" to drive a 23 foot wide monster truck and take up two lanes down the highway. We don't have the liberty to have flame throwers on the backs of our cars. We don't have liberty to put pikes on our hoods to skewer pedestrians. We forbid those things because while rad, the public risk outweighs the Metal badassery of driving around with 6 foot flames coming out of your trunk. If you're blind you don't have liberty to use the roads at all. If you've had a seizure in the last 6 months you don't have the liberty to drive. If you're 15 years old you don't have the liberty to operate a motor vehicle.
You weren't given an inalienable right by the gods to manually guide a 2 ton metal machine at 80mph inches away from other people doing the same. We do it because we decided that the benefit was greater than the drawbacks of not doing it. It's pretty cut and dry. If we decide that the pros and cons of autonomous vehicles outweigh the pros and cons of driven vehicles we'll inevitable decide that nobody is allowed to drive anymore. And since autonomous driving is improving exponentially every year while human drivers have been stagnant for decades that time is coming pretty soon.
This is *the* one big place (video editing being the other) where Macs are still King.
Considering the state of the art GPU acceleration on PC and the availability of substantially superior CPUs with high clock speeds (which is generally what you want vs many cores), Windows is still the place to be for video editing.
How many $12.25/hr jobs though offer full health insurance. I work a high tech job and we don't vision or dental and our co-pay is infinity because it's an HSA. She also gets free food every day for lunch. We used to have that policy but now it's just once a week.
The mistake was placing the call center in San Francisco. Put it in Lincoln Nebraska. At $12.25/hr you could afford a 1 bedroom apartment, heat and a car payment.
That's the only way these soulless corporations will ever feel the sting and be forced to raise wages.
I think you meant to say: Forced to take a $12/hr job with full medical benefits and literally a free lunch and move it India where it probably should have been to start with.
Yeah, his website lets you choose from one of several forms which it then emails. This is a "robot lawyer" like my kindle is a "robot author" since I can call up different stories depending on what I want to read.
It's a handy website I'm sure. But usually my parking tickets are more complicated, like "I applied for a zone renewal 3 times but your system still hasn't sent me my sticker. I called the parking office and they said our neighborhood had a backlog and therefore shouldn't be enforced for expired tags."
I still didn't need a "lawyer" I just had to explain my situation in 4-5 sentences and email it off.
Try any RTS game with your XBox controller, I dare you.
So in your bizzaro world you think that a cross play RTS will start with the Console version and then impose a gamepad on the desktop version?! If anything they'll start with the mouse and keyboard RTS (where RTSs actually sell well) and then slap on an awkward (and FREE) console/gamepad port.
Aside of that, yes, there are actually a select few good console-to-PC ports. They're just exceedingly rare and the hit-to-miss ratio is not favorable enough to warrant risking a dime on trying to find out whether one is.
Yes, Console/PC multiplatform games are a real hit and miss except for in the last 12 months (including but not limited to....)
Fallout 4 XCom The Witness Rise of the Tomb Raider DiRT Helldivers Grandtheft Auto 5 The Witcher 3 Metal Gear Solid V Ori and the Blind Forest Oddworld: Abe's Oddyssee Tales from the borderlands Final Fantasy XIV Rocket League Project CARS...
XCom is way better with mouse and keyboard, but guess what they released it on Xbox too and it totally worked. But who cares, it's FREE. If you don't like the Console port... play it on the PC with mouse and keyboard. If you don't like the PC Port play it on the console.
My PC is hooked up to my TV. Whether it's a console or a PC is purely semantics. Whether the XBox One is a PC or a console is completely arbitrary terminology. "Ugh ports from beige pc cases to white pc cases never work!" It makes no sense at all. If there are going to be any control problems the only place they'll ever take place is with a game like Star Craft. And there is a snowball's chance in hell that they would target the gamepad and then lazily throw in some mouse and keyboard support later.
Why would a PC game that happens to be running on a console run badly on a PC? I've got breaking news for you: PC games also manage to run on lower spec crummy desktops. The Minimum System Requirements are usually a few generations *older* than the latest consoles. So if you're going to make a cross-release game you just make the PC version and then hardcode the resolution to "1920x1080" and the quality settings to "Textures: Good, Models: Better, Shaders:Best,Lighting: Good." And hit ship.
Also, this might surprise you but every PC Game you probably play today will work great with an Xbox One controller. Just plug it in and you're good to go. The controls don't suck.
perhaps because the graphics cards are at least last generation on the consoles?
Because PC games never release options to run on older graphics cards?
The PC Master Race has always run a wide variety of hardware from multiple generations, multiple operating systems and hugely diverse control sets. You could play a game like flight simulator on an ancient dinosaur of a business all-in-one or you could crank up the quality settings for the day with the latest in volumetric cloud rendering and atmospheric effects. You could play it with a keyboard, or you could play it with a full custom built cockpit featuring a yoke and pedals.
But you don't think that a game could target both older PCs and a console which is probably better than 80% of the PC customer's hardware? Give me a break.
Xbox and PS4 are both x86 PCs. If anything every console game is just a specific quality setting that's been well polished. This notion of controls being crappy is ludicrous--it's been 10 years since console controls have seen any major change for first person shooters. It's been 30 years since there's been a major change from WASD and Mouse+Keyboard. It's not like developers have to spent a ton of time refining controls these days. Some games play better or worse with a control pad. I enjoy Rocket League with a control pad and I play Fallout 4 with a control pad... and I just use an XBox One controller on the PC for both. Steam works great with a control pad. I play Battlefield 4 and TF2 with a mouse and keyboard.
Porting for Windows 10 takes nearly no work. You're developing either a DirectX12 game for Windows or you're developing a DirectX12 game for Windows. Create your art assets at multiple detail levels. Polish your shaders to run at levels that run smoothly on the XBox One. Then for the PC give people the option of cranking the settings and resolution to the Max.
I don't like to buy Xbox One games anymore because I want to also be able to play them on my laptop with a controller plugged in when I'm on a plane or in a hotel while traveling. I like to be able to play games on my PC at work during lunch. But I also would love to be able to play my same games on my Xbox at home which until recently had a better video card and cpu.
The Xbox One is just becoming one of many reference PCs like the Surface Pro line. The Xbox One Controller is now available for PC and Xbox One. The Oculus Rift is shipping with an XBox One controller. I can't see how you can defend lock-in with consoles. Why wouldn't you want to play your PC games on your XBox? Why wouldn't you want to play your Xbox games on the PC?
From your safe place behind a safe computer, you can say that.
Go ask the people in Syria if they feel like they are taking part in a "more humane and less deadly conflict".
That's like saying "Global Warming isn't true because it snowed today!" The Syrian conflict is a horrific, awful anomaly. Even then, it's pretty restrained by historical standards and more than offset by the otherwise tranquil world scene at present. It should also be noted that much of what Assad is doing isn't involving guided munitions because he just flat out doesn't have them. And his opposition has no airforce at all.
Compare that to 100 years ago and a similar conflict probably would have resulted in flat out genocide and deliberate extermination of 70% of the population. Current estimates are that about 0.5 - 2.5% of the population has been killed in the conflict. That's comparable to the American Civil War, but the vast majority of the world is at peace so as a percentage of world deaths it's pretty tiny. The Syrian conflict is almost notable because the world is otherwise so peaceful.
Obama's killed more innocent civilians with drone strikes to "kill a few hostile bad actors" than Bush ever did. And last I checked Obama wasn't a member of the GOP.
The GOP leading candidates will *happily* tell you that they'll carpet bomb Syria. That's not partisan, that's their campaign *platform*. That's not partisan bullshit, that's what they proudly argue is what *needs* to happen. Hillary and hawkish democrats are for targeted strikes and Bernie and the more liberal democrats are for nothing at all.
We're in a fucking twilightzone if it's now a 'Liberal Smear' to "accuse" GOP candidates of supporting their own campaign platform and stump speech. "HOW DARE YOU ACCUSE CRUZ OF SAYING WE SHOULD CARPET BOMB SYRIA UNTIL THE AND GLOWS!"
You don't get to accuse Obama of being "Soft on terrorists" and also accuse him of carpet bombing at the same time. Obama and GW Bush both were quite restrained in their air campaigns. That's not partisan, but GW Bush isn't a fucking GOP candidate so my point stands of "GOP Presidential Candidates".
My reaction: "Wow 30c a GB! How much does that work out to be for 1TB... wait a second... that's the same price that Samsung 1TB drives have been at for ages....
Arguably while war is all about winning, it's not at "all cost". We (ignoring GOP presidential candidates) will not bomb an urban civilian center these days in order to kill a few hostile bad actors. Arguably the availability of precision munitions changed the moral balance from "bomb a city into submission" into the modern sensibility of "only bomb specific targets of military importance."
Even though war is a terrible and bloody affair, we as societies have constantly been moving towards more humane and less deadly conflict. It's one thing to shoot someone shooting at you. It's quite another to kill someone in cold blood. War is arguably largely about self defense today: "I have to shoot you in order to not die." The shift I see happening with autonomous weapons is that there is no imperative to shoot people shooting at you. It might be expensive or costly to lose an autonomous infantryman, but if you can capture without killing I suspect we'll expect our autonomous soldiers to exert "self control". Obviously if it's a shooter killing civilians you would be morally justified in stopping them using violent force if necessary but otherwise autonomous troops effectively become more akin to police officers than soldiers in their relationship to the population.
Here's the thing though. Even if chips remain equally powerful or 10% slower... if they could fit a 40 core Xeon into a 10watt atom power profile that would be a MASSIVE performance increase in mobiles. I'm relatively satisfied with CPU performance these days with a dual Xeon. If it meant I could get a current workstation in a mobile form, great! However I'm assuming that GPUs do keep improving and we finally see openings for specialized chips for physics and raytracing--the last two areas that would really benefit from dedicated hardware. Neither have ever caught on because Intel keeps improving quickly enough that a small specialized chip market can't get to market before Intel outpaces them.
The only option to achieve that through process not physical security is to write everything sufficiently modularly that every module is untrusted and interfaces through documented APIs. This can actually be a good requirement since it should make updating any one feature relatively easy. I know of at least one large fortune 500 company that is rewriting everything on the assumption that the network is publicly accessible. This has the nice side effect that you can actually make it publicly accessible to mobile employees.
If every developer is assigned a specific module to write that does a very narrow set of goals then all they need to do is take in data of format XYZ and output data of format UVW. At some point you'll need someone in house for architecting what modules you need developed and an integrator to handle the bits you seem to be paranoid about exposing to developers but it would limit the potential exposure to any one developer going AWOL.
The downside of course is that depending on the task it can get very difficult to break up a large project into discreet chunks/interfaces.
Slashdot Mirror
The machine will eventually behave like an AI, and human go players will essentially learn how you think and counteract your particular behaviors.
Except that the machine is able to learn from past experiences as well. So playing against a "creative" player can be input back into the learning algorithm and like the born assimilated. It's not like AlphaGo is a hardcoded playing style. I'm sure the developers don't even really know exactly how it works since a lot of the internal neural network learning is pretty obtuse. If anything AlphaGo should be able to 'emulate' playing styles of different players by weighting inputs from past games of specific players. Or it can employ all of the playing styles of all of the players mishmashed together. However you slice it, humanity in the long run always loses. If you spend a lifetime developing a novel strategy in secret you can probably use it a handful of times until that becomes part of AlphaGo's learning experience. Then you have to go back to your secret Go Temple to forge a new strategy.
. All of the standard testing applications like Fraps, FCAT and other overlays are locked out of UWP games.
If by "locked out" you mean, use different APIs and can't rely on 20 year old hooks but instead need to use the new modern hooks... then yeah you're "locked out". But that's a bit like saying that developers are "locked out" of Nvidia's next generation GPUs because there is no hardware to test on yet.
Big UWP AAA games have been out for about a month. Everyone is acting like it's a giant conspiracy that SLI and VSync is a little glitch on a platform that has only ever seen a single game released. Jesus, give them a month or two to work out the bugs. And don't act like the need for new using different hooks on a different platform is some grand scheme to lock out debugging tools. "Breaking news, Visual Studio not able to debug Linux application using windows debug and profiling tools!"
Steam has a near monopoly on the PC gaming market (75%). And you're afraid that Microsoft might have a monopoly on the gaming market? Steam charges developers a fee, the same fee as Microsoft.
The "Xbox One launch shit show" was offering a system that gave customers more flexibility than Steam did.
If you don't like the Windows Store, then just sell your product with an installer and a sideload. UWP apps run by default without any system reconfiguration in Windows 10. But publishers *want* to be in a store. Publishers are more than happy (along with indies for that matter) to give Valve or Microsoft a 30% cut in exchange for payment processing, promotion and hosting fees. The Steam/Microsoft Store cut is still less or at least comparable to the Wholesale discount physical retail stores demand to sell physical disks. Sure you could throw up a website and try to sell through that. Or you could just sell it through steam and let them deal with DRM (yes steam is DRM), money and hopefully a featured banner on the front page.
The only thing Valve is pissed off about in regards to the Windows Store, is that Microsoft is competing on their turf doing the exact same thing.
Dumb users:
"Windows sucks, it's full of viruses and malware!"
Microsoft:
"Introducing UWP, a sandboxed environment in which an app can't infect your computer with any viruses!"
Dumb users:
"Microsoft is trying to steal my ability to infect myself with viruses!"
There is nothing inherently wrong with UWP/WinRT. The APIs are still very immature and nowhere near the depth of Win32 which has had 30 years to bake but pretty much anything you can do in Win32 you can do in UWP.
And contrary to popular belief, you can install a UWP app without using the Windows Store. You can even distribute UWP apps without using the store. I made an app and just zipped it up and sent it to people. So yes, I do hope that Microsoft Deprecates Win32 sooner rather than later. Win32 is a whole mess of security nightmares. And Linux is no better. UWP is really ahead of the curve in being both powerful and also relatively secure. It's somewhat akin to running a container but without all of the virtualization hassles.
The advantage is that you can use Xbox Live chat and ideally get cross-buy and cross play. So your game saves transfer between the Xbox and PC. That's a selling point for me. However not all Windows Store apps are cross buy.
Bandwidth has to be measured end-to-end. I can transmit terrabits per second over laser of random noise. So you have to take into account the time to copy data to a MicroSD at 90MB/s. So it's 169,200 seconds + the heat death of the universe over USB 2.0 to copy to each MicroSD. :D
It's an even shittier story than that. Windows RT was a real OS. It had powershell, win32 support (although only for signed applications), it had true multi-user sessions, true multi-tasking and windowing ... it was just the ARM compile of Windows 8 but wouldn't allow applications installations without a Microsoft certificate. Arm Windows 8 is as real of an OS as Ubuntu for ARM is also a real OS.
But what's really stupid is that it's not gone. Windows 10 Mobile is already an ARM build of Windows 10. With continuum it's got mouse and keyboard support etc. If you turn the zoom way down on the dpi settings the browser pops into desktop mode because it thinks it's running on a PC. Windows 10 Mobile and Windows 10 Desktop are even on the same build version now. So Windows RT didn't go away it's just hiding inside of Windows 10 "Mobile" aka the ARM compile of Windows 10.
So we should all be allowed to fly a commercial airliner? Maybe include commercial multi-engine pilots licenses in K-12 education? If it's a core part of our liberty to be able to travel under our own driving/piloting skills then it's outrageous that we rely on commercial aviation!
I'm really getting sick of all you cowards trying to reduce our liberties in the name of safety. Further, I've seen you quote Jefferson's quote about liberty and safety. I imagine you'll be unable or unwilling to admit the irony. It's okay, I'm used to it.
Lol you think that driving is an innate right. Sorry pal, it aint.
The roads are a public utility. If there is a way to use them that accomplishes the current goal: travel from A to B in a superior fashion then we will do that. It has nothing to do with "liberty". We don't have the "liberty" to drive a 23 foot wide monster truck and take up two lanes down the highway. We don't have the liberty to have flame throwers on the backs of our cars. We don't have liberty to put pikes on our hoods to skewer pedestrians. We forbid those things because while rad, the public risk outweighs the Metal badassery of driving around with 6 foot flames coming out of your trunk. If you're blind you don't have liberty to use the roads at all. If you've had a seizure in the last 6 months you don't have the liberty to drive. If you're 15 years old you don't have the liberty to operate a motor vehicle.
You weren't given an inalienable right by the gods to manually guide a 2 ton metal machine at 80mph inches away from other people doing the same. We do it because we decided that the benefit was greater than the drawbacks of not doing it. It's pretty cut and dry. If we decide that the pros and cons of autonomous vehicles outweigh the pros and cons of driven vehicles we'll inevitable decide that nobody is allowed to drive anymore. And since autonomous driving is improving exponentially every year while human drivers have been stagnant for decades that time is coming pretty soon.
This is *the* one big place (video editing being the other) where Macs are still King.
Considering the state of the art GPU acceleration on PC and the availability of substantially superior CPUs with high clock speeds (which is generally what you want vs many cores), Windows is still the place to be for video editing.
How many $12.25/hr jobs though offer full health insurance. I work a high tech job and we don't vision or dental and our co-pay is infinity because it's an HSA. She also gets free food every day for lunch. We used to have that policy but now it's just once a week.
The mistake was placing the call center in San Francisco. Put it in Lincoln Nebraska. At $12.25/hr you could afford a 1 bedroom apartment, heat and a car payment.
That's the only way these soulless corporations will ever feel the sting and be forced to raise wages.
I think you meant to say:
Forced to take a $12/hr job with full medical benefits and literally a free lunch and move it India where it probably should have been to start with.
Not parent but these were posted elsewhere in the thread:
https://archive.is/AR4XX/image
http://imgur.com/5WJFUAF
Yeah, his website lets you choose from one of several forms which it then emails. This is a "robot lawyer" like my kindle is a "robot author" since I can call up different stories depending on what I want to read.
It's a handy website I'm sure. But usually my parking tickets are more complicated, like "I applied for a zone renewal 3 times but your system still hasn't sent me my sticker. I called the parking office and they said our neighborhood had a backlog and therefore shouldn't be enforced for expired tags."
I still didn't need a "lawyer" I just had to explain my situation in 4-5 sentences and email it off.
Try any RTS game with your XBox controller, I dare you.
So in your bizzaro world you think that a cross play RTS will start with the Console version and then impose a gamepad on the desktop version?! If anything they'll start with the mouse and keyboard RTS (where RTSs actually sell well) and then slap on an awkward (and FREE) console/gamepad port.
Aside of that, yes, there are actually a select few good console-to-PC ports. They're just exceedingly rare and the hit-to-miss ratio is not favorable enough to warrant risking a dime on trying to find out whether one is.
Yes, Console/PC multiplatform games are a real hit and miss except for in the last 12 months (including but not limited to....)
Fallout 4 ...
XCom
The Witness
Rise of the Tomb Raider
DiRT
Helldivers
Grandtheft Auto 5
The Witcher 3
Metal Gear Solid V
Ori and the Blind Forest
Oddworld: Abe's Oddyssee
Tales from the borderlands
Final Fantasy XIV
Rocket League
Project CARS
XCom is way better with mouse and keyboard, but guess what they released it on Xbox too and it totally worked. But who cares, it's FREE. If you don't like the Console port... play it on the PC with mouse and keyboard. If you don't like the PC Port play it on the console.
My PC is hooked up to my TV. Whether it's a console or a PC is purely semantics. Whether the XBox One is a PC or a console is completely arbitrary terminology. "Ugh ports from beige pc cases to white pc cases never work!" It makes no sense at all. If there are going to be any control problems the only place they'll ever take place is with a game like Star Craft. And there is a snowball's chance in hell that they would target the gamepad and then lazily throw in some mouse and keyboard support later.
Why would a PC game that happens to be running on a console run badly on a PC? I've got breaking news for you: PC games also manage to run on lower spec crummy desktops. The Minimum System Requirements are usually a few generations *older* than the latest consoles. So if you're going to make a cross-release game you just make the PC version and then hardcode the resolution to "1920x1080" and the quality settings to "Textures: Good, Models: Better, Shaders:Best,Lighting: Good." And hit ship.
Also, this might surprise you but every PC Game you probably play today will work great with an Xbox One controller. Just plug it in and you're good to go. The controls don't suck.
perhaps because the graphics cards are at least last generation on the consoles?
Because PC games never release options to run on older graphics cards?
The PC Master Race has always run a wide variety of hardware from multiple generations, multiple operating systems and hugely diverse control sets. You could play a game like flight simulator on an ancient dinosaur of a business all-in-one or you could crank up the quality settings for the day with the latest in volumetric cloud rendering and atmospheric effects. You could play it with a keyboard, or you could play it with a full custom built cockpit featuring a yoke and pedals.
But you don't think that a game could target both older PCs and a console which is probably better than 80% of the PC customer's hardware? Give me a break.
Xbox and PS4 are both x86 PCs. If anything every console game is just a specific quality setting that's been well polished. This notion of controls being crappy is ludicrous--it's been 10 years since console controls have seen any major change for first person shooters. It's been 30 years since there's been a major change from WASD and Mouse+Keyboard. It's not like developers have to spent a ton of time refining controls these days. Some games play better or worse with a control pad. I enjoy Rocket League with a control pad and I play Fallout 4 with a control pad... and I just use an XBox One controller on the PC for both. Steam works great with a control pad. I play Battlefield 4 and TF2 with a mouse and keyboard.
Porting for Windows 10 takes nearly no work. You're developing either a DirectX12 game for Windows or you're developing a DirectX12 game for Windows. Create your art assets at multiple detail levels. Polish your shaders to run at levels that run smoothly on the XBox One. Then for the PC give people the option of cranking the settings and resolution to the Max.
I don't like to buy Xbox One games anymore because I want to also be able to play them on my laptop with a controller plugged in when I'm on a plane or in a hotel while traveling. I like to be able to play games on my PC at work during lunch. But I also would love to be able to play my same games on my Xbox at home which until recently had a better video card and cpu.
The Xbox One is just becoming one of many reference PCs like the Surface Pro line. The Xbox One Controller is now available for PC and Xbox One. The Oculus Rift is shipping with an XBox One controller. I can't see how you can defend lock-in with consoles. Why wouldn't you want to play your PC games on your XBox? Why wouldn't you want to play your Xbox games on the PC?
One of Wikipedia's largest problems is that it cites things which cite things which end up citing Wikipedia if you go far enough back.
It would be great to have Wikipedia akin to Wolfram Alpha but less math and more about factual primary sources.
From your safe place behind a safe computer, you can say that.
Go ask the people in Syria if they feel like they are taking part in a "more humane and less deadly conflict".
That's like saying "Global Warming isn't true because it snowed today!" The Syrian conflict is a horrific, awful anomaly. Even then, it's pretty restrained by historical standards and more than offset by the otherwise tranquil world scene at present. It should also be noted that much of what Assad is doing isn't involving guided munitions because he just flat out doesn't have them. And his opposition has no airforce at all.
Compare that to 100 years ago and a similar conflict probably would have resulted in flat out genocide and deliberate extermination of 70% of the population. Current estimates are that about 0.5 - 2.5% of the population has been killed in the conflict. That's comparable to the American Civil War, but the vast majority of the world is at peace so as a percentage of world deaths it's pretty tiny. The Syrian conflict is almost notable because the world is otherwise so peaceful.
Obama's killed more innocent civilians with drone strikes to "kill a few hostile bad actors" than Bush ever did. And last I checked Obama wasn't a member of the GOP.
The GOP leading candidates will *happily* tell you that they'll carpet bomb Syria. That's not partisan, that's their campaign *platform*. That's not partisan bullshit, that's what they proudly argue is what *needs* to happen. Hillary and hawkish democrats are for targeted strikes and Bernie and the more liberal democrats are for nothing at all.
We're in a fucking twilightzone if it's now a 'Liberal Smear' to "accuse" GOP candidates of supporting their own campaign platform and stump speech. "HOW DARE YOU ACCUSE CRUZ OF SAYING WE SHOULD CARPET BOMB SYRIA UNTIL THE AND GLOWS!"
You don't get to accuse Obama of being "Soft on terrorists" and also accuse him of carpet bombing at the same time. Obama and GW Bush both were quite restrained in their air campaigns. That's not partisan, but GW Bush isn't a fucking GOP candidate so my point stands of "GOP Presidential Candidates".
My reaction:
"Wow 30c a GB! How much does that work out to be for 1TB... wait a second... that's the same price that Samsung 1TB drives have been at for ages....
Arguably while war is all about winning, it's not at "all cost". We (ignoring GOP presidential candidates) will not bomb an urban civilian center these days in order to kill a few hostile bad actors. Arguably the availability of precision munitions changed the moral balance from "bomb a city into submission" into the modern sensibility of "only bomb specific targets of military importance."
Even though war is a terrible and bloody affair, we as societies have constantly been moving towards more humane and less deadly conflict. It's one thing to shoot someone shooting at you. It's quite another to kill someone in cold blood. War is arguably largely about self defense today: "I have to shoot you in order to not die." The shift I see happening with autonomous weapons is that there is no imperative to shoot people shooting at you. It might be expensive or costly to lose an autonomous infantryman, but if you can capture without killing I suspect we'll expect our autonomous soldiers to exert "self control". Obviously if it's a shooter killing civilians you would be morally justified in stopping them using violent force if necessary but otherwise autonomous troops effectively become more akin to police officers than soldiers in their relationship to the population.
Here's the thing though. Even if chips remain equally powerful or 10% slower... if they could fit a 40 core Xeon into a 10watt atom power profile that would be a MASSIVE performance increase in mobiles. I'm relatively satisfied with CPU performance these days with a dual Xeon. If it meant I could get a current workstation in a mobile form, great! However I'm assuming that GPUs do keep improving and we finally see openings for specialized chips for physics and raytracing--the last two areas that would really benefit from dedicated hardware. Neither have ever caught on because Intel keeps improving quickly enough that a small specialized chip market can't get to market before Intel outpaces them.
The only option to achieve that through process not physical security is to write everything sufficiently modularly that every module is untrusted and interfaces through documented APIs. This can actually be a good requirement since it should make updating any one feature relatively easy. I know of at least one large fortune 500 company that is rewriting everything on the assumption that the network is publicly accessible. This has the nice side effect that you can actually make it publicly accessible to mobile employees.
If every developer is assigned a specific module to write that does a very narrow set of goals then all they need to do is take in data of format XYZ and output data of format UVW. At some point you'll need someone in house for architecting what modules you need developed and an integrator to handle the bits you seem to be paranoid about exposing to developers but it would limit the potential exposure to any one developer going AWOL.
The downside of course is that depending on the task it can get very difficult to break up a large project into discreet chunks/interfaces.