That is assuming that space is not in discrete units, (which again I guess is a matter of context). In his context it stands as a 6 dimensional discrete unit space (buildings, floors etc), but you have now changed the context which has now changed the dimensions to a 3D contiguous space. I don't really see that as a problem, its just a matter of context.
Surely momentum could be summed up in 4D with time, so where the object is at different positions over time you could deduce the velocity from that, if you want momentum add a 5th dimension for mass. Anyway I am mainly talking out of of my ass, so feel free to slap me down.
That is a max speed limiter, running of the speed reading that comes off the wheels/gearbox rather than a GPS. Its more to limit them on the motorways.
Nice! Does anyone know the name of the first song on the hour long video? That's a really nice chiptune.
Well, it was driving me insane as I have been listening to Chiptune songs for the last 2-3weeks, and I knew I had heard it, so after a search through my play list, here it is:
Mr. Spastic - Sloppy
His album and many great others can be got for free (under creative commons) from 8bit Peoples
I'm not waiting on bated breath or anything like that for this thing. It just would be cool if it actually does work and the majority is wrong how ever unlikely. The small amounts of force don't matter so much in space ESA's Smart 1 that was propelled by an Ion Drive produced 70mn of thrust which is compareable to the 'results' of the EmDrive, if it actually works.
Solar sails always made me ponder how they worked, if light just bounces off them, and they are made of a super reflective material to absorb from them as little as possible, and the speed of light does not change and cannot change, so there is no transfer of momentum, where is the energy transfer? I assume as the solar sail is moving and being accelerate the reflected light has a reduction in frequency and this is where the energy transfer lies?
A far more useful and more technically achievable propulsion technology is what New Scientist dubbed the relativity drive it is basically a super conducting hollowed tapered cylinder that bounces Microwaves within its confines. As they bounce around millions of times they hit the larger end at a more perpendicular angle then the narrow end, therefore producing a new propulsive force. The article is a good read.
Yeah, I also forgot to mention that Valve distributes its games to retail stores via Electronic Arts rather than themselves, and EA just take a cut for distributing it. You are right that the 2 do overlap, that the big publishers do distribute themselves, so they get as much of the sales pie as they can, but here in Australia games that sell for $100 AUD stores buy at for around $70 AUD, so if the publisher distributes on steam for $80 and if valve take %5-%10 (I don't know how much steam takes) which means they are getting around $70 per unit still, but they save on the printing, stamping and shipping costs for the discs, then the publisher is still getting a net gain and someone else has to worry about distributing it rather than them.
A lot of publishers are reluctant to offer better deals on Steam than in retail, as they will effectively hand their jobs over to Valve and Steam.
I think you are getting confused between a publish and distributor, they are 2 different things. The publisher puts in the investment to make the game, the distributor puts it on the shelf, or in steams case on to download. Who do you think makes most of the money for the game, the company that has an online store, or the companies that print it, package it, ship it, sell it to store, who put it on shelves. Or the company that invested millions into developing it. Steam/Valve never paid to develop the game, they are jsut offering a service to distribute it.
but NES cartridges were very expensive to produce as they were a solid state, electronic cartridge with all that manufacturing overheard, vs the distribution system on steam which almost has a 'tends towards zero' cost.
This also ties into the inflation cost, yes games cost more back then in terms of dollar parity but they actually cost more to manufacture the media. Yes I know games are expensive to actually develop now a days but if each cartridge cost around $20 (pulling numbers out of my ass) to manufacture and you sold 2 million units that $40,000,000 in materials. Where as with a CD or online distribution the costs are far less so they are still earning similar $ sales in units, where is the consumer getting any savings? Nope he/she isn't. Expectations of game prices were set in the 80's with an expensive media and carried on from there, slowly working its way up. It should of come down with cheaper media and they would of sold a lot more games and possibly made more money.
Wondered how long it was going to take them to release the new content. Although you can just copy and paste and rename the 2 coop campaigns that are not in VS from their coop campaign equivalents, all the config files for the mission cycles and listings are there. The copied maps are missing stuff, they don't have all the zombie ladders they should and the AI doesn't have the best paths but it gives some more variety than the current 2 VS campaign sets. Looking forwards to the new survival mode, more choices the better!
The lastest Asimo walks pretty decently, in the words of James May "a bit like a guy who has had a accident in his pants, but at least he walks like somebody".
People seem to forget or not realise that there were hundreds and hundreds of games for the NES/SNES/Master System/Mega Drive, almost every film, TV series, comic book seemed to have some cheap tacky game tie in, even more so than today. Just look at this list List of NES Games , but then back in those days the Nintendo Seal of Quality actually meant something, there were very few truly bad games, but really only a small fraction of those games are really remembered as great games as the parents have said.
A good measure for this is take a look at Nintendo's virtual console on the Wii, all of the really popular old titles got released first and the list has slowly extended and almost everything on the list could be seen as a classic.
There are plenty of titles from the later 90's and the 00's that will be fondly remembered into the future, I'm a main fps gamer so things like Doom, Quakes, Half-lifes, Team Fortresses, Counter Strike, UT, Deus Ex 1. A lot of them won't get played as much as the older 80's and early 90's stuff, as they are not pick up'n'play like Pac-Man or Mario, and as Windows marches on and the 'legacy' support fails it becomes more of a pain to install them, but that doesn't mean they will be forgotten. A good game you have invested/lost a lot of time to, had some laughs and other memorable moments. Games are like films you will always remember the good ones, the bad ones forgotten into the $1 discount bin. If games were just discarded aside as the new games come out, then why is backwards compatibility for consoles held in such high regard? Even the XBox 360 now has the XBox classics you can download and play.
Agreed, Idea's are really dime a dozen, I infact use the same phrase to my students ( I work at The Academy of Interactive Entertainment ) fobsta has an uphill battle, pitching to developers is almost pointless as very few have the cash to make anything themselves and if they do its going to be someone at that companies baby. Developers are just guns for hire. So pitching to a publisher is the way to go, fobsta has stated he was a working demo/prototype (they are always rough) and a trailer. My question is, by trailer do you mean Visualisation of segment of gameplay or Selling the story. Having a smooth, polished concept video of how the final game make play, look and feel helps and it will smooth off the rough edges of the prototype. As the parent said NDA's are the way to go, I am a little less cynical on what they are worth. NDA's seem to be well respected and honoured within the industry so find a template NDA and adjust it for your needs.
That said it is a large uphill battle, Publishers are the ones with the money but I would not know where to start to get a publishers interest, and getting yourself heard through the sea wannabe teenager game designers is going to be virtually impossible. You could try venture capitalists but I expect they would not fund someone who has very little/no professional game development experience. Remember only about 1/3rd of games actually make money, it is very high risk.
There is no quick fix for your problem. From what I can see there are 2 ways to go are, strip your game to its very core fun, as simple as can be but is still your game, no feature creep at all. Make a demo, submit it to the Indepedant Games Festival, if it is really good it will be picked up (Look at Narbacular Drop/Portal and The Blob). If the game is small enough, maybe try and produce something for the Nokia Games Innovation Challenge or keep an eye out for other similar competitions. You could try and go solo, like Introversion with Uplink, Darwinia & Defcon again if the idea is small enough, but you might have to find yourself a couple of good friends who are willing to starve.
Or, the other thing I like about dual core and up boxes is that they appear to be more stable, back on a single core machine, when a process really wanted to lock up, in some mysterious while(1); loop it could be a real try of patience to kill the app. On a dual core machine no worries, still got the other core to save yourself with:)
A friend of mines dog 'urinated' into his SNES ( along time ago), and that appeared to brick it. I suggested running some warm water through it as it can't do any more harm seeing that it is bricked, and leaving it somewhere a little warm and dry for a week or so to dry it. Low and behold it came back to life, but then it is a Nintendo.
It is probably a fair bit cheaper now, considering they had a die shrink so could also reduce the amount of heatsinks etc as it now runs cooler.
If memory servers that $850 was component cost! If you take into account packaging, shipping and most significantly retailer markup. Sony must of been hemorrhaging money but that is almost how all the consoles are launched except Nintendo of course.
Back to the topic the whole:
now requires a $1200 piece of graphics technology just to participate
is a little provoking/flamebait (I see the article is tagged as so). Just like most hobbies and obsessions there are always some who are willing to pay the extra %100-%200 to get extra %15 over everyone else, just like with sports cars. They are the extreme and not the norm, I think of myself a hardcore gamer and I aim to buy the upper midrange in graphics cards (I have an 8800GTS 640mb the only reason I got that was it was on special). This article seems to be making it out that gamers only choice is to buy 4x8800GTX's although I havn't RTFA. There has been big advances in GPU's that last few years and a bit of a wall has been hit, that and AMD/ATI is lagging behind a bit so NVidia can milk the market until ATI/AMD start to put some real hurt on. Game developers have hit the limit of todays machines, they just need to wait a bit. That and the Crysis engine was built to last the next 3-5 years it is meant to be pushing todays machines to their limits.
The thing that I find a lot of people don't seem to see with the console wars (which you do seem to see), is that Microsoft is in it for the long haul to crush Sony and have the pockets to do so. Even though Sony are a massive firm, with a huge revenue their profits are not all the much. Sony of course are not going anywhere anytime soon, and have the home Japanese market that is almost impenetrable to outside companies. Microsoft wants a firm grip on NA and EU and they currently have a pretty strong one. With the only thing separating the 2 major consoles are basically exclusives and personal preference it is a boom time to consumers apart from the fixed high pricing of games. I fear there could be another video game crash (more like recession) not as bad the 82/83 crash but still quite painful.
The other thing carmack was rambling on about was a Voxel based system. If you havnt seen this already its worth a quick peak Voxlap Cave Demo I havn't RTA but from the summary it sounds like he is making a system similar to this but using an octree to allow for LoD.
Interesting that, seeing as that is NASA's plans, you have the smaller Ares I to launch the Orion crew module and the larger Ares V to do the heavy lifting of equipment: Shuttle-Derived_Launch_Vehicle Inless wikipedia is out of date and NASA's plans have changed.
(64-bit XP never was really supported by hardware manufacturers)
That may of been true when 64-bit XP came out, and for its first 6 months, but I have been using 64-bit XP ever since I built my new Core 2 machine. I did dual boot it with 32-bit XP just incase (I heard the stories as well), but I soon realised that 2-bit XP was superflous. 64-bit XP is fantastic, its stable, fast, unbloated and so far have not had anything not work on it appart from Diablo 1. Hardware-wise most common hardware released in the last 2 years has drivers for it (even things like my USB->PlayStation2 controller adapter has 64bit drivers). Give it a try I think you will be pleasantly surprised.
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That is assuming that space is not in discrete units, (which again I guess is a matter of context). In his context it stands as a 6 dimensional discrete unit space (buildings, floors etc), but you have now changed the context which has now changed the dimensions to a 3D contiguous space. I don't really see that as a problem, its just a matter of context.
Surely momentum could be summed up in 4D with time, so where the object is at different positions over time you could deduce the velocity from that, if you want momentum add a 5th dimension for mass.
Anyway I am mainly talking out of of my ass, so feel free to slap me down.
That is a max speed limiter, running of the speed reading that comes off the wheels/gearbox rather than a GPS. Its more to limit them on the motorways.
Nice! Does anyone know the name of the first song on the hour long video? That's a really nice chiptune.
Well, it was driving me insane as I have been listening to Chiptune songs for the last 2-3weeks, and I knew I had heard it, so after a search through my play list, here it is:
Mr. Spastic - Sloppy
His album and many great others can be got for free (under creative commons) from 8bit Peoples
I'm not waiting on bated breath or anything like that for this thing. It just would be cool if it actually does work and the majority is wrong how ever unlikely. The small amounts of force don't matter so much in space ESA's Smart 1 that was propelled by an Ion Drive produced 70mn of thrust which is compareable to the 'results' of the EmDrive, if it actually works.
Solar sails always made me ponder how they worked, if light just bounces off them, and they are made of a super reflective material to absorb from them as little as possible, and the speed of light does not change and cannot change, so there is no transfer of momentum, where is the energy transfer? I assume as the solar sail is moving and being accelerate the reflected light has a reduction in frequency and this is where the energy transfer lies?
New Scientist has had numerous articles on this over the years, a quick search brings up 2 immediately.
A far more useful and more technically achievable propulsion technology is what New Scientist dubbed the relativity drive it is basically a super conducting hollowed tapered cylinder that bounces Microwaves within its confines. As they bounce around millions of times they hit the larger end at a more perpendicular angle then the narrow end, therefore producing a new propulsive force. The article is a good read.
Yeah, I also forgot to mention that Valve distributes its games to retail stores via Electronic Arts rather than themselves, and EA just take a cut for distributing it.
You are right that the 2 do overlap, that the big publishers do distribute themselves, so they get as much of the sales pie as they can, but here in Australia games that sell for $100 AUD stores buy at for around $70 AUD, so if the publisher distributes on steam for $80 and if valve take %5-%10 (I don't know how much steam takes) which means they are getting around $70 per unit still, but they save on the printing, stamping and shipping costs for the discs, then the publisher is still getting a net gain and someone else has to worry about distributing it rather than them.
I think you are getting confused between a publish and distributor, they are 2 different things. The publisher puts in the investment to make the game, the distributor puts it on the shelf, or in steams case on to download. Who do you think makes most of the money for the game, the company that has an online store, or the companies that print it, package it, ship it, sell it to store, who put it on shelves. Or the company that invested millions into developing it.
Steam/Valve never paid to develop the game, they are jsut offering a service to distribute it.
but NES cartridges were very expensive to produce as they were a solid state, electronic cartridge with all that manufacturing overheard, vs the distribution system on steam which almost has a 'tends towards zero' cost.
This also ties into the inflation cost, yes games cost more back then in terms of dollar parity but they actually cost more to manufacture the media. Yes I know games are expensive to actually develop now a days but if each cartridge cost around $20 (pulling numbers out of my ass) to manufacture and you sold 2 million units that $40,000,000 in materials. Where as with a CD or online distribution the costs are far less so they are still earning similar $ sales in units, where is the consumer getting any savings? Nope he/she isn't. Expectations of game prices were set in the 80's with an expensive media and carried on from there, slowly working its way up. It should of come down with cheaper media and they would of sold a lot more games and possibly made more money.
They say (I don't know who they are) that any hole/gap that you can fit a pencil through a mouse can get through as well.
Wondered how long it was going to take them to release the new content.
Although you can just copy and paste and rename the 2 coop campaigns that are not in VS from their coop campaign equivalents, all the config files for the mission cycles and listings are there. The copied maps are missing stuff, they don't have all the zombie ladders they should and the AI doesn't have the best paths but it gives some more variety than the current 2 VS campaign sets.
Looking forwards to the new survival mode, more choices the better!
The lastest Asimo walks pretty decently, in the words of James May "a bit like a guy who has had a accident in his pants, but at least he walks like somebody".
People seem to forget or not realise that there were hundreds and hundreds of games for the NES/SNES/Master System/Mega Drive, almost every film, TV series, comic book seemed to have some cheap tacky game tie in, even more so than today. Just look at this list List of NES Games , but then back in those days the Nintendo Seal of Quality actually meant something, there were very few truly bad games, but really only a small fraction of those games are really remembered as great games as the parents have said.
A good measure for this is take a look at Nintendo's virtual console on the Wii, all of the really popular old titles got released first and the list has slowly extended and almost everything on the list could be seen as a classic.
There are plenty of titles from the later 90's and the 00's that will be fondly remembered into the future, I'm a main fps gamer so things like Doom, Quakes, Half-lifes, Team Fortresses, Counter Strike, UT, Deus Ex 1. A lot of them won't get played as much as the older 80's and early 90's stuff, as they are not pick up'n'play like Pac-Man or Mario, and as Windows marches on and the 'legacy' support fails it becomes more of a pain to install them, but that doesn't mean they will be forgotten. A good game you have invested/lost a lot of time to, had some laughs and other memorable moments. Games are like films you will always remember the good ones, the bad ones forgotten into the $1 discount bin. If games were just discarded aside as the new games come out, then why is backwards compatibility for consoles held in such high regard? Even the XBox 360 now has the XBox classics you can download and play.
I was going to say something similar, but along the lines of Adanaxis its a 4D Space shooter I played a couple of years ago.
Agreed, Idea's are really dime a dozen, I infact use the same phrase to my students ( I work at The Academy of Interactive Entertainment ) fobsta has an uphill battle, pitching to developers is almost pointless as very few have the cash to make anything themselves and if they do its going to be someone at that companies baby. Developers are just guns for hire. So pitching to a publisher is the way to go, fobsta has stated he was a working demo/prototype (they are always rough) and a trailer. My question is, by trailer do you mean Visualisation of segment of gameplay or Selling the story. Having a smooth, polished concept video of how the final game make play, look and feel helps and it will smooth off the rough edges of the prototype. As the parent said NDA's are the way to go, I am a little less cynical on what they are worth. NDA's seem to be well respected and honoured within the industry so find a template NDA and adjust it for your needs.
That said it is a large uphill battle, Publishers are the ones with the money but I would not know where to start to get a publishers interest, and getting yourself heard through the sea wannabe teenager game designers is going to be virtually impossible. You could try venture capitalists but I expect they would not fund someone who has very little/no professional game development experience. Remember only about 1/3rd of games actually make money, it is very high risk.
There is no quick fix for your problem. From what I can see there are 2 ways to go are, strip your game to its very core fun, as simple as can be but is still your game, no feature creep at all. Make a demo, submit it to the Indepedant Games Festival, if it is really good it will be picked up (Look at Narbacular Drop/Portal and The Blob). If the game is small enough, maybe try and produce something for the Nokia Games Innovation Challenge or keep an eye out for other similar competitions. You could try and go solo, like Introversion with Uplink, Darwinia & Defcon again if the idea is small enough, but you might have to find yourself a couple of good friends who are willing to starve.
IPv6 won't have enough IP's for all of space!?! we need IPv8!
You must be new here
Thats what the <sarcasm>... </sarcasm > tags are used for!
Or, the other thing I like about dual core and up boxes is that they appear to be more stable, back on a single core machine, when a process really wanted to lock up, in some mysterious while(1); loop it could be a real try of patience to kill the app. On a dual core machine no worries, still got the other core to save yourself with :)
A friend of mines dog 'urinated' into his SNES ( along time ago), and that appeared to brick it. I suggested running some warm water through it as it can't do any more harm seeing that it is bricked, and leaving it somewhere a little warm and dry for a week or so to dry it. Low and behold it came back to life, but then it is a Nintendo.
If memory servers that $850 was component cost! If you take into account packaging, shipping and most significantly retailer markup. Sony must of been hemorrhaging money but that is almost how all the consoles are launched except Nintendo of course.
Back to the topic the whole: is a little provoking/flamebait (I see the article is tagged as so). Just like most hobbies and obsessions there are always some who are willing to pay the extra %100-%200 to get extra %15 over everyone else, just like with sports cars. They are the extreme and not the norm, I think of myself a hardcore gamer and I aim to buy the upper midrange in graphics cards (I have an 8800GTS 640mb the only reason I got that was it was on special). This article seems to be making it out that gamers only choice is to buy 4x8800GTX's although I havn't RTFA. There has been big advances in GPU's that last few years and a bit of a wall has been hit, that and AMD/ATI is lagging behind a bit so NVidia can milk the market until ATI/AMD start to put some real hurt on. Game developers have hit the limit of todays machines, they just need to wait a bit. That and the Crysis engine was built to last the next 3-5 years it is meant to be pushing todays machines to their limits.
Thanks for the info. I thought what I read was a little iffy.
Win98 actually supports the Windows Driver Model (WDM) so in theory it should work with Win2K drivers.
Although why you would want to use Win98 is beyond me.
The thing that I find a lot of people don't seem to see with the console wars (which you do seem to see), is that Microsoft is in it for the long haul to crush Sony and have the pockets to do so. Even though Sony are a massive firm, with a huge revenue their profits are not all the much. Sony of course are not going anywhere anytime soon, and have the home Japanese market that is almost impenetrable to outside companies. Microsoft wants a firm grip on NA and EU and they currently have a pretty strong one.
With the only thing separating the 2 major consoles are basically exclusives and personal preference it is a boom time to consumers apart from the fixed high pricing of games. I fear there could be another video game crash (more like recession) not as bad the 82/83 crash but still quite painful.
The other thing carmack was rambling on about was a Voxel based system. If you havnt seen this already its worth a quick peak Voxlap Cave Demo I havn't RTA but from the summary it sounds like he is making a system similar to this but using an octree to allow for LoD.
Interesting that, seeing as that is NASA's plans, you have the smaller Ares I to launch the Orion crew module and the larger Ares V to do the heavy lifting of equipment: Shuttle-Derived_Launch_Vehicle Inless wikipedia is out of date and NASA's plans have changed.