I tend to visualize arrays of dimensions > 3 as trees, actually. Not quite so elegant as a square/cube design, but it's a lot easier to wrap your head around than, say, a cube shifted in two time dimensions.
Well, consider that today's 120 FPS average card is tomorrow's 30 FPS average card, and next week's obsolete technology. Developers have the needs to push the technology far beyond its current limits, and will continue to do so for a long time to come. Just because UT2K4 runs at 50 FPS on your current card doesn't mean that next year's games will. A video card is typically a 2-3 year investment for a lot of people, and you're gonna want something beefy that will stand up to games for a while.
I ran a Voodoo3 2000 for years, up until Jedi Knight 2 came out, at which point I upgraded to a Geforce 3, but that Voodoo lasted me for a good long while. The Geforce gave me a good two years, and I'm now running a Geforce FX 5700, which gives me stellar performance in most everything I throw at it. However, some of the latest games like Far Cry have pushed it to its limits, and by this time next year, it won't be able to run new games at average settings, I'd bet, simply because the actual software technology is advancing so quickly.
A part of it is hot rodding, yes. I think a good deal of it, though, is getting the most bang for your buck, so it lasts a while longer.
I kinda have to wonder if the first generation of the 6xxx line will be like the first generation of the FX line - big, noisy, and clunky. The FX line has seriously slimmed down since. I'm curious to see what revisions will do to nVidia's product line.
Wow. As an avid Soul Calibur fan whose roommate is always talking trash, it'd be nice to have some hard stats to back up the asskickings.
If these guys don't make any movements towards sharing this with the general public, I very well may have to work on hacking up something like this myself.
I remember reading a book -ages- ago (I would have been 12 or 13), and only remember one point from it: There was a character (female, I think?) who was apparently gifted with telepathy, but in reality, she simply picked up on people's subvocalizations. I don't think I've ever read Ender's Game. Does anyone know what this might be?
I seem to remember liking the book, but I can't remember what it was for the life of me. It seems that it had to do with a lead male character who was a fugitive or spy or something, and the female character, who startled the male character by picking up on his thoughts via subvocalization.
I picked up PoP:SoT for the Xbox, and it is perfect for it. I really can't imagine playing it on a PC, but it just felt perfect on the console.
The sheathing thing - it's there to let you know the fight is over and that you can relax a bit. At the later points in the game, there are some battles that are just insane, and the visual break is a good way to bring an end to each of them. Unsheathing the sword is trivial, IMO.
I don't know what platform you played the game on, but I had absolutely zero control problems with the camera on the Xbox. The right thumbstick swings it around - it's quite intuitive and easy to use.
The automatic entry of the save pillars is annoying, I'll grant you that. However, the visions can be helpful if you get stuck in the area ahead. They're designed to provide you with hints primarily, and look cool secondarily. I do wish, however, that they let you choose to activate the pillar with a button press or similar, rather than forcing you to go through the sequence if you touched it.
The cutscene animations are a little wonky - they're quite obviously hand-animated, rather than motion-captured. I guess Square has just spoiled us when it comes to cutscene quality.:)
Personally, I loved the game. It really doesn't have any replay value, but the time I spent playing through it the first time was absolutely magical.
I think that PoP hasn't sold too many units because it's a fairly short game - I went through it in about 8 hours all told, which was just about right for me, really. I like to come home from work in the evenings and play for an hour or so, and PoP really facilitated that well. I've heard that it has done amazingly well with rentals, which would tend to make sense considering its length.
It isn't just the Jedi system in Galaxies that's flawed - the entire game is flawed. They have some basic underlying design principles that just suck any semblance of fun out of the game, and they're making them worse.
I've been playing Galaxies on and off for the last few months, but at the rate they're deteriorating the quality of the gameplay, I won't be there much longer.
PS: And why SHOULD I pay $10 a month for a game I already paid $60 for? Silly marketing execs. Now if the game was free upfront and it was only the monthly fee, I could be lured in..
Well, bandwidth and content creators aren't free, you know.
Or, you can use something like Trillian, which has transparent encryption built in. Of course, both parties need to be using encryption-aware clients, but it's a bit easier than learning a new language.
I ran the demo on a XP2400+/1GB PC2100/Geforce FX 5700 (NV36), and it was still somewhat choppy. It ran at probably 20-30 FPS at 800x600, without antialiasing or ansiotropic filtering. It's gonna need some performance tweaking before it's good to go, definitely.
The lighting, though, is a ton of fun to play with.
*shrug* I dunno. I started my Linuxing on Redhat, and though it had a learning curve, I've found it quite easy to use.
I just upgraded to Fedora yesterday (from RH7.3), and I've yet to have a complaint.
I'm a casual anime fan (ie, most of my anime experience comes from my relatively-normal roommate's DVDs), and to me, the draw is that anime can be used to tell stories that simply aren't possible (well, at least not easy) to tell with traditional filmmaking techniques. It's just another storytelling medium, and as with any such medium, it's not the medium itself that makes or breaks the whole experience, but rather, the story behind it.
Really, there are as many subgenres in anime as there are in traditional live-action film - you can find everything ranging from fantasy to sci-fi to soap operas and everything in between. The trick is to find the right series. There's a lot of fantasy, sure, but if you know which series to look at, you'll find anime that covers most any genre. Just like any art medium, though, there is a lot of crap that tends to obscure the real gems. You say you don't like fantasy - not sure what your genres of choice are, then, but two popular series you might try are Cowboy Bebop (Almost a kind of "western" in space) or Trigun (More of a sci-fi type series, but also has that "western" feel). I've seen neither in its entirety, but I have enjoyed what I've seen of them. It might be worth seeing if you could rent a DVD or something.
I dunno - I guess if I could give you one "draw", it's that anime is just another medium - it's used to tell stories, and there are some excellent stories told with it. Enjoy the stories. You don't have to like anime because it's anime, or because it's Japanese and seen as a geeky thing. Just approach it as you would any other type of film - evaluate it as a film, and if you don't like it (or you find that it is crap), then find something else. The sheer volume of anime out there guarantees there is something out there that you'll enjoy.
Well, that's really what I meant. No serious studio is going to use a pirated version of the engine to create a game, but HL2 is obviously using some cutting-edge techniques to achieve the results that they have demonstrated. The availability of the code means that such techniques could be analyzed and incorporated into other engines, diluting the exclusivity of the Source engine, and making it a lot easier for developers looking for a next gen engine to roll their own, or buy one a bit cheaper than Source.
Most people don't think like that. They think "You have the source, you can make whatever cheats you want!" They're gamers, not coders, and most don't have a clue what they're talking about. I trust that Valve is professional enough to write tight code.
The most damage is the loss of company secrets (Source engine techniques, anyone?) and the potential damage to engine licensing opportunities, I think.
I got wind of this earlier this morning. There's a big thread on it. So far, those looking at it believe it's most likely a heavily-modified HL1 SDK, or something. Not sure if it's a hoax yet. Of course, they're gamers, not coders.
I wouldn't recommend getting a FX5200, myself - if you're going to go FX, get a 5600 Ultra. You'll pay a little more (I've seen them for $160) but the performance increase you'll see is definitely worth it. The GeforceFX 5200 performs about on par with a GF3 Ti200 (which I've got, great card, but getting old), but it has PS2.0 and such. The 5600 is really the "midlevel" card of the FX series.
Link feels so "outside" the Soul Calibur paradigm:(... at least Spawn is a character that has a charisma comparable to Cervantes' (is Cervantes in SC2? Haven't played it yet... think that yesterday evening I was playing with the first, SoulEdge on PSX)
Yep, Cervantes is unlockable, and is every much as bit a bitch as he was in the original Soul Calibur.:)
Link fits in suprisingly well, actually, much better than I had hoped. I think I've had more fun playing him than any other character thus far, because he really does bring his own style to the game.
Slashdot Mirror
I tend to visualize arrays of dimensions > 3 as trees, actually. Not quite so elegant as a square/cube design, but it's a lot easier to wrap your head around than, say, a cube shifted in two time dimensions.
Well, consider that today's 120 FPS average card is tomorrow's 30 FPS average card, and next week's obsolete technology. Developers have the needs to push the technology far beyond its current limits, and will continue to do so for a long time to come. Just because UT2K4 runs at 50 FPS on your current card doesn't mean that next year's games will. A video card is typically a 2-3 year investment for a lot of people, and you're gonna want something beefy that will stand up to games for a while.
I ran a Voodoo3 2000 for years, up until Jedi Knight 2 came out, at which point I upgraded to a Geforce 3, but that Voodoo lasted me for a good long while. The Geforce gave me a good two years, and I'm now running a Geforce FX 5700, which gives me stellar performance in most everything I throw at it. However, some of the latest games like Far Cry have pushed it to its limits, and by this time next year, it won't be able to run new games at average settings, I'd bet, simply because the actual software technology is advancing so quickly.
A part of it is hot rodding, yes. I think a good deal of it, though, is getting the most bang for your buck, so it lasts a while longer.
I kinda have to wonder if the first generation of the 6xxx line will be like the first generation of the FX line - big, noisy, and clunky. The FX line has seriously slimmed down since. I'm curious to see what revisions will do to nVidia's product line.
You know, it's a sad day in Slashdot-land when the first post in a thread is marked "redundant".
Wow. As an avid Soul Calibur fan whose roommate is always talking trash, it'd be nice to have some hard stats to back up the asskickings.
If these guys don't make any movements towards sharing this with the general public, I very well may have to work on hacking up something like this myself.
I remember reading a book -ages- ago (I would have been 12 or 13), and only remember one point from it: There was a character (female, I think?) who was apparently gifted with telepathy, but in reality, she simply picked up on people's subvocalizations. I don't think I've ever read Ender's Game. Does anyone know what this might be?
I seem to remember liking the book, but I can't remember what it was for the life of me. It seems that it had to do with a lead male character who was a fugitive or spy or something, and the female character, who startled the male character by picking up on his thoughts via subvocalization.
*love*
The cutscene animations are a little wonky - they're quite obviously hand-animated, rather than motion-captured. I guess Square has just spoiled us when it comes to cutscene quality. :)
Personally, I loved the game. It really doesn't have any replay value, but the time I spent playing through it the first time was absolutely magical.
I think that PoP hasn't sold too many units because it's a fairly short game - I went through it in about 8 hours all told, which was just about right for me, really. I like to come home from work in the evenings and play for an hour or so, and PoP really facilitated that well. I've heard that it has done amazingly well with rentals, which would tend to make sense considering its length.
It isn't just the Jedi system in Galaxies that's flawed - the entire game is flawed. They have some basic underlying design principles that just suck any semblance of fun out of the game, and they're making them worse. I've been playing Galaxies on and off for the last few months, but at the rate they're deteriorating the quality of the gameplay, I won't be there much longer.
The way most companies treat it, I'd say it's a "gamma" :D
Well, bandwidth and content creators aren't free, you know.
Or, you can use something like Trillian, which has transparent encryption built in. Of course, both parties need to be using encryption-aware clients, but it's a bit easier than learning a new language.
I ran the demo on a XP2400+/1GB PC2100/Geforce FX 5700 (NV36), and it was still somewhat choppy. It ran at probably 20-30 FPS at 800x600, without antialiasing or ansiotropic filtering. It's gonna need some performance tweaking before it's good to go, definitely.
The lighting, though, is a ton of fun to play with.
*shrug* I dunno. I started my Linuxing on Redhat, and though it had a learning curve, I've found it quite easy to use. I just upgraded to Fedora yesterday (from RH7.3), and I've yet to have a complaint.
I'm a casual anime fan (ie, most of my anime experience comes from my relatively-normal roommate's DVDs), and to me, the draw is that anime can be used to tell stories that simply aren't possible (well, at least not easy) to tell with traditional filmmaking techniques. It's just another storytelling medium, and as with any such medium, it's not the medium itself that makes or breaks the whole experience, but rather, the story behind it.
Really, there are as many subgenres in anime as there are in traditional live-action film - you can find everything ranging from fantasy to sci-fi to soap operas and everything in between. The trick is to find the right series. There's a lot of fantasy, sure, but if you know which series to look at, you'll find anime that covers most any genre. Just like any art medium, though, there is a lot of crap that tends to obscure the real gems. You say you don't like fantasy - not sure what your genres of choice are, then, but two popular series you might try are Cowboy Bebop (Almost a kind of "western" in space) or Trigun (More of a sci-fi type series, but also has that "western" feel). I've seen neither in its entirety, but I have enjoyed what I've seen of them. It might be worth seeing if you could rent a DVD or something.
I dunno - I guess if I could give you one "draw", it's that anime is just another medium - it's used to tell stories, and there are some excellent stories told with it. Enjoy the stories. You don't have to like anime because it's anime, or because it's Japanese and seen as a geeky thing. Just approach it as you would any other type of film - evaluate it as a film, and if you don't like it (or you find that it is crap), then find something else. The sheer volume of anime out there guarantees there is something out there that you'll enjoy.
The solution is obvious. Nuke them from orbit; it's the only way to be sure.
Heh. My roommate and I split the cost on Max Payne 2. For $24, it was just about right. :D
Of course, we, uh, only played it on one computer at a time. Yes. Yes, we did.
Well, that's really what I meant. No serious studio is going to use a pirated version of the engine to create a game, but HL2 is obviously using some cutting-edge techniques to achieve the results that they have demonstrated. The availability of the code means that such techniques could be analyzed and incorporated into other engines, diluting the exclusivity of the Source engine, and making it a lot easier for developers looking for a next gen engine to roll their own, or buy one a bit cheaper than Source.
I'm anxiously awaiting your analysis. :D
Most people don't think like that. They think "You have the source, you can make whatever cheats you want!" They're gamers, not coders, and most don't have a clue what they're talking about. I trust that Valve is professional enough to write tight code.
The most damage is the loss of company secrets (Source engine techniques, anyone?) and the potential damage to engine licensing opportunities, I think.
Thread here.
Be interesting to see what the verdict of the Slashdot code gurus is.
I think you made a typo. There's not supposed to be a "k" after 250. :D
We wants it, our precioussssss! :D
I am totally hyped about this game.
I wouldn't recommend getting a FX5200, myself - if you're going to go FX, get a 5600 Ultra. You'll pay a little more (I've seen them for $160) but the performance increase you'll see is definitely worth it. The GeforceFX 5200 performs about on par with a GF3 Ti200 (which I've got, great card, but getting old), but it has PS2.0 and such. The 5600 is really the "midlevel" card of the FX series.
Yep, Cervantes is unlockable, and is every much as bit a bitch as he was in the original Soul Calibur. :)
Link fits in suprisingly well, actually, much better than I had hoped. I think I've had more fun playing him than any other character thus far, because he really does bring his own style to the game.