Quote from George Harrison, senior vice president for marketing at Nintendo of America. He said there was a shortage because the company must plan its production schedule five months ahead, and projecting future demand is difficult. He added that there had been a worldwide shortage of disk drives that had hurt Nintendo as well as makers of many other devices.
Taken from NYTimes Planning ahead for future demand is hard, but after the first initial rush on launch back in 06 they should of realized that demand this holiday season would be pretty hot too, but if you can't source the components how can you manufacture more units?
Games are actually an area that are multithreading quite well. For one fact, they have been multithreading for quite some time in a simple sense(CPU & Video Card), but now with consoles being multicored and every high-end gaming rig atleast dual-cored now, games are very highly threaded.
Although games do have an advantage, there are a lot of API's & game engines that you can just drop in and run multithreaded out of the box without much work.
Although the one nice thing about multicored PC's is that rogue app that decides that eating 100% CPU is a fun thing to do, but with multicores you still have a very responsive machine to kill it.
The company is just a name, Westwood and all the other great companies that have been eaten have bled most of the core employees that made the company what it was. The general trend seems to be that most of the core employees found new companies together. For example a lot of westwood employees went off and founded Petroglyph games
There really isn't any companies to spit back out again. Shame really.
I agree with the fact that they should of got a copy of the orange box they ordered, but seeing that they ordered a Thai version, they should of got the local Thai version, with all the wonder of the Thai language.
That makes sense to me, they buy a Thai copy of the game, so they get it in Thai, if they want an english version of the game, then they should of brought it from an english region.
Portal took me about 2 hours to complete. I watched my housemate do the same in 1 sitting. Portal is not 5 hours long. Inless you count the challenges.
If you have played narbacular drop and have enough sense that things going through the portal keep their velocity out the otherside all the challenges where brain dead obvious, point->click->jump->click->fly.
What I really enjoyed about portal was the constant voice clichy ammusing voice, the additional story to the half-life series and a simple but fun boss fight and great ending song.
What is really going to make portal last is the huge Half-Life 2 modding community. Therewill be countless map packs and other things for Portal, it will only take a few months.
If he was not crazy, and used logical (sounding) conclusions and appealed to reasonable or religious sensibilities he would be MUCH more dangerous to free speech than he is. Your giving him idea's. Think of the children! They will have no video games, be reduced to playing outside on swings or even slides! They could get hurt!
Actually, their API's are very similar to each other. Bullet was very close to a drop in replacement to ODE, but as all physics API's simulate physics in a similar fashion all their API's are reasonably similar. I'm sorry I misunderstood your statement at the beginning. I would say that ODE and Bullet are much more similar to each other in API's than OpenGL and Direct3D are.
Now moving into the realm of I-have-no-idea-what-I'm-talking-about. I hope you are talking about yourself there. If you read the date that mail is from it is Feb 2006, a lot has happened in that 18 months. If you care to take a look at Bullet's feature list : you will see that is now supports:
Projected Gauss Siedel (quickstep) and
Generic 6 Degree of Freedom Constraint , Motors, Limits
In a recent project of mine I created an ODE implementation, but it was painfully slow. I changed my implementation to use Bullet and got about a 5x improvement in performance. For me Bullet was superior, espically in the realms of convex collisions & dynamics.
I have used ODE and I was actually quite disappointed with its performance compared to that of Bullet. Its feature set isn't as rich either. Convex hulls are not fully supported yet, and they are not very optimized. So far the best physics engine I have used is Bullet.
Bullet is open source, fast, feature rich. Supports Stable stacking amd even moving concave hulls. ODE is open source but I found it slow, and a little feature poor. Newton is closed source but free. I found you could easily bog it down and ragdoll performance was pitterful at the time I used it, Other problem is it highly relies on callbacks for updating everything, and very pedantic about where function calls have to be made. My house mate is currently using PhysX in a project (he doesnt have a physx card) but the CPU implementation looks impressive and very smooth. The SDK for Ageia is free as well.
You maybe after realistic physics, but it sometimes makes me laugh too. Realism != fun (most of the time). If in EvE you had to fly to a planet, get into orbit, match orbits with the station, approach it, properly match velocities, pilot into the docking bay. You would get pretty sick of it by your 5th go. That's why in my opinion the players should be kept away from game design, as the majority do not have a clue. I have had a couple of conversions with friends along these lines
Wouldn't it be cool if you had to properly dock with stations. No it wouldn't. But it would look so cool! It would look cool, but how many times do you dock with a station? About 10-20 times a day How long do you imagine it would take to dock? About 3-5 minutes So you want to spend an extra hour of you day to just look cool while you dock. Well I suppose not.
Although saying that some developers don't have a clue about game design either, and I'm no game designer myself.
Ok, and if you were a spammer, would you spend the time to try and hack a secure server, run by very knowledgable admins (hopefully) who would not let something like that happen at all, as you say Linux in its default config has no open ports.
Or would you try and obtain as many WinXP machines on decent ADSL and cable connections (256kbit/sec upload can send a lot of html based mail). Sure there are thousands of webservers around the place. But any admin worth his salt will quickly work out what is happening when his upload bandwidth gets saturated and CPU load on the servers seems unsually high. Most WinXP users dont even know what Task manager is, those are the targets I would go for.
If a major distro of linux (say Ubuntu) was 90% of the desktop market, this trick would still work. It asks the user to install something and click past the warning (Ubuntu's case password protection for installing an app). 90% of the users are idiots or not digital natives changing the OS isnt going to fix that.
Battlefield Series C&C (13 releases & expansions) 7+ Cricket Games 20 FIFA branded games All Harry Potter games 20 Madden Games 13 Medal of Honours 10 Nascar Games 18 NBA Branded Games 18 Need For Speeds 17 NHL Games 31 The Sims Branded releases 12+ PGA Releases
I know a lot of them are sports games and you can't just change gameplay direction on a sports game. But C&C, Medal of Honour, Need for Speed and The Sims have never really and much deviation from the original, once you have played one you have almost played them all (sports games a different matter, they are all the same and often quite good but get updated each year, thats the hook). Each of the EA titles on their own has had many more releases than a single Nintendo game franchise. (Inless you count all Mario games under 1 franchise).
Almost every nintendo franchise you have listed there has significantly expanded and changed from the original, but has still kept their identities. The only games that havnt are Mario Party, and Mario sports games (Which are still really fun).
With a Nintendo 'brand' game I am almost assured that any game I pickup & play, I can get into almost immediately and have a lot of fun, and not really get frustrated. The same cannot be said about most of the EA titles listed, and a lot of other companies as well. The brand helps to reinforce consumer trust that with Nintendo games the consumer almost always gets a reward for that trust, in a good, fun game. End Rant
Back in the Gemini days, there were not millions if not billions of flecks of paint and other debris in orbit that could kill an astronaut in EVA. We have done a good job of polluting our local space.
The damage to the heatshield is a small crator, with most of those 2 tiles still intact. If you check the anomalies log for the first Shuttle mission STS-1 Columbia lost 16 tiles and damaged 148 others and successfully landed. I think damage to a couple of minor tiles the shuttle can easily cope with.
As others have stated, the Shuttle wasn't NASA design choice, more a political pencil pushers lust. They have done very well Imho, astronauts know the there are risks, known and unknown, they accept them and risk their lives to go into space. Its their choice to fly on the shuttle and they are not forced, its a tragedy that lives are lost but if they died doing what they love and what is so horrific about that?
2K Games have seemed to be very good to Irrational thus far. Quote from this Gamasutra article:
The publisher also says that its 2K Games label has "fostered the studio's growth by substantially investing in its people," giving 2K Boston the means to double its studio size since its 2005 acquisition.
As far as I know, 2K Games has so far let Irrational grow and operate relatively unhindered and non-intrusive. I don't think anything bad is going to happen to Irrational under 2K. My worry would more be Take Two getting brought out, and something bad happening. 2K lets its Studios produce controversial games more so than any other publisher out there, and most of their released games have been good.
One thing you have to remember though, is its not the Studio that makes great games, the studio is just a name. Its the people working on them that make games great. People can always move on start something new.
that a game written to take advantage of the Cell architecture
Thats the problem right there. Sure there are going to be some developers that will write a game to take advantage (I am thinking good old dependable Square Enix), but will most common developers take the time to utilize it? The one thing Microsoft has some experience with is making software, and they know its hard, so they designed a console with quite a lot of power, but easy to develop for with a good toolset, therefore easier to utilise that power.
Sony has a machine with sheer power, but most of that is almost criptically locked up within the SPE's of the Cell, with completely different hardware and memory access systems to what a lot of programmers are used to. BUT I can also see this not really affecting the PS3 in the long run. With Game budgets now huge, complex and long. The tendicy now being to use License API's like Agieas Physx which has been adapted to run on the Cell SPE's and I can see more things like that happening. Games programmers can still program the General Purpose code for the game they are used too on the PowerPC part of the Cell, and the API's such as Physx, Havok and even things possibly like Unreal3's culling code could all be but on the workhorse of the Cell without the development teams having to worry about it too much.
It could (if not already with say Unreal3) that the teams don't really have to think about the underlying hardware of the platform they are working on, they just work withing the framework provided. Anyroad thats my 2 cents.
I dont know. WoW is dispised in my games industry circle, it has had a very detrimental effect on the industry. This one game has significantly dropped the sales of the games industry as a whole. The fact that it isn't really that good of a game, it was made of the masses to be sold to the masses. Soap opera's are aweful shows, but it doesnt stop something like East Enders being watched by 13million people each night.
Just because a game has sold lots of copies doesn't mean it is a great game. The other question has always arised, this applys to many MMO's. How many people have just forgot about their subscriptions, and just browsing down their statement don't really notice that $15, and do something about it.
WoW would be something you put one your resume, but I don't think it would be seen in the same light as Bioshock or Half-life2. World of Warcraft isn't even in the top 10 of MMORPG.com's game rating list: http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/sort/rating/gam eID/0. It's a bit odd, that it is played by the masses but the masses except there are many better games. Although it does make me laugh that Planetside is rated above it.
I wouldn't really say brought illegal downloading to the masses. If you walk up to the average person in the street and ask them if they use the internet, you would probably get a yes. If you then asked do you use bittorrent, or know what it is, you would probably get a no.
The fact is torrents are mainly used by students, the less well of or the damn right stingy, and no matter what you do to these people no will not part money unless they have to, either because they can't afford to. The stingy people you may scare into buying content, but for the students and less fortunate there really isnt any loss in sales because there wouldn't be a sale in the first place, they are getting content they like, but couldn't afford.
If you give people a simple, organised alternative e.g. iTunes (not the best system I know) people will use it and pay for content. The MPAA should get with the times and organise an iTunes for films for the entire market (I know some studios are starting to get on the bandwagon, and I won't even touch on the DRM issue, as that will go on for hours).
But going after students and the like is pointless, there wasn't really a sale there in the first place.
Well FFXII isnt exclusive to the PS3, nor will GTAIV be (it will come out for the 360). Microsoft doesnt have a chance in hell of buying Square Enix, Japan has strange laws and regulations on foreign companies trying to buy in, and the fact the games companies there are really intertwined and all own shares in each other, its a kinda, if they want to buy one of us out, they will have to buy us all attitude.
What sony has, is its name (Playstation), I was in a GAME the other week some construction worker was there, said something along the lines of 'I want to get a Playstation because I never really liked the Xbox'. Once the price of the PS3 comes down, the un-vocal fanboys will start buying it up from Fortress U.K and Japan (biggest Sony markets per head of population), U.K is one of the few countries where the PSP outsells the DS.
Blu-ray winning the format war is unlikly me thinks, currently they are outselling HD-DVD (from anothe persons comment) but when the consummers (espically US) realise there is no pornography on Blu-ray http://www.google.com/search?q=sony%20pornography% 20blu-ray, you just can't say no to basically one of the biggest entertainment industries in the world: http://www.blazinggrace.org/pornstatistics.htm (nice stats weird site, soul warping effects of masturbation anyone?) and according to http://www.usatoday.com/life/movies/news/2005-01-0 5-dvd-sales-inside_x.htm the total revunue for home video is 24.5 billion according to the blazinggrace porn video sales and rentals is 3.62 billion thats almost 15% of the market, but it is also more than that. You can watch porn and other films in HD with HD-DVD or just normal films with Blu-ray, which one will the consume choose? (Sounds like betamax to me). The only thing this doesnt take into account is the Internet, but will you be able to resist a 50" closeup of a mans errect penis in High Def?
I have to agree with this argument. The previous house I was living in, my house mate had a decent projector, 2000watt amp, and 1700 legit DVD's. You should of seen the wall they lived on.
The main selling point of HD-DVD and Blueray to him was the fact that it could fit entire seasons or even every tv episode of a series on 1 disc. Therefore taking less wall space up, but he was in no rush to get a blue-ray player or a HD-DVD player for that matter, he did have a Laser disc player and about 50 or so laser discs. Now that was a flawed idea.
Slashdot Mirror
Quote from George Harrison, senior vice president for marketing at Nintendo of America. He said there was a shortage because the company must plan its production schedule five months ahead, and projecting future demand is difficult. He added that there had been a worldwide shortage of disk drives that had hurt Nintendo as well as makers of many other devices.
Taken from NYTimes Planning ahead for future demand is hard, but after the first initial rush on launch back in 06 they should of realized that demand this holiday season would be pretty hot too, but if you can't source the components how can you manufacture more units?
Games are actually an area that are multithreading quite well. For one fact, they have been multithreading for quite some time in a simple sense(CPU & Video Card), but now with consoles being multicored and every high-end gaming rig atleast dual-cored now, games are very highly threaded.
Although games do have an advantage, there are a lot of API's & game engines that you can just drop in and run multithreaded out of the box without much work.
Although the one nice thing about multicored PC's is that rogue app that decides that eating 100% CPU is a fun thing to do, but with multicores you still have a very responsive machine to kill it.
The company is just a name, Westwood and all the other great companies that have been eaten have bled most of the core employees that made the company what it was. The general trend seems to be that most of the core employees found new companies together. For example a lot of westwood employees went off and founded Petroglyph games
There really isn't any companies to spit back out again. Shame really.
I agree with the fact that they should of got a copy of the orange box they ordered, but seeing that they ordered a Thai version, they should of got the local Thai version, with all the wonder of the Thai language.
That makes sense to me, they buy a Thai copy of the game, so they get it in Thai, if they want an english version of the game, then they should of brought it from an english region.
One thing I find is a pyro can be a little light, and takes a bit of time to fight through the push back force applied by being hit by the sentry
Portal took me about 2 hours to complete. I watched my housemate do the same in 1 sitting. Portal is not 5 hours long. Inless you count the challenges.
If you have played narbacular drop and have enough sense that things going through the portal keep their velocity out the otherside all the challenges where brain dead obvious, point->click->jump->click->fly.
What I really enjoyed about portal was the constant voice clichy ammusing voice, the additional story to the half-life series and a simple but fun boss fight and great ending song.
What is really going to make portal last is the huge Half-Life 2 modding community. Therewill be countless map packs and other things for Portal, it will only take a few months.
Yeah I know what you are saying, it would be nice to have OpenPhysics where we have vendor specific implementations.
Actually, their API's are very similar to each other. Bullet was very close to a drop in replacement to ODE, but as all physics API's simulate physics in a similar fashion all their API's are reasonably similar.
I'm sorry I misunderstood your statement at the beginning.
I would say that ODE and Bullet are much more similar to each other in API's than OpenGL and Direct3D are.
In a recent project of mine I created an ODE implementation, but it was painfully slow. I changed my implementation to use Bullet and got about a 5x improvement in performance. For me Bullet was superior, espically in the realms of convex collisions & dynamics.
I have used ODE and I was actually quite disappointed with its performance compared to that of Bullet. Its feature set isn't as rich either. Convex hulls are not fully supported yet, and they are not very optimized. So far the best physics engine I have used is Bullet.
Bullet is open source, fast, feature rich. Supports Stable stacking amd even moving concave hulls.
ODE is open source but I found it slow, and a little feature poor.
Newton is closed source but free. I found you could easily bog it down and ragdoll performance was pitterful at the time I used it, Other problem is it highly relies on callbacks for updating everything, and very pedantic about where function calls have to be made.
My house mate is currently using PhysX in a project (he doesnt have a physx card) but the CPU implementation looks impressive and very smooth. The SDK for Ageia is free as well.
Ok, and if you were a spammer, would you spend the time to try and hack a secure server, run by very knowledgable admins (hopefully) who would not let something like that happen at all, as you say Linux in its default config has no open ports.
Or would you try and obtain as many WinXP machines on decent ADSL and cable connections (256kbit/sec upload can send a lot of html based mail). Sure there are thousands of webservers around the place. But any admin worth his salt will quickly work out what is happening when his upload bandwidth gets saturated and CPU load on the servers seems unsually high. Most WinXP users dont even know what Task manager is, those are the targets I would go for.
If a major distro of linux (say Ubuntu) was 90% of the desktop market, this trick would still work. It asks the user to install something and click past the warning (Ubuntu's case password protection for installing an app). 90% of the users are idiots or not digital natives changing the OS isnt going to fix that.
Compared to EA's rehash list of:
Battlefield Series
C&C (13 releases & expansions)
7+ Cricket Games
20 FIFA branded games
All Harry Potter games
20 Madden Games
13 Medal of Honours
10 Nascar Games
18 NBA Branded Games
18 Need For Speeds
17 NHL Games
31 The Sims Branded releases
12+ PGA Releases
I know a lot of them are sports games and you can't just change gameplay direction on a sports game. But C&C, Medal of Honour, Need for Speed and The Sims have never really and much deviation from the original, once you have played one you have almost played them all (sports games a different matter, they are all the same and often quite good but get updated each year, thats the hook). Each of the EA titles on their own has had many more releases than a single Nintendo game franchise. (Inless you count all Mario games under 1 franchise).
Almost every nintendo franchise you have listed there has significantly expanded and changed from the original, but has still kept their identities. The only games that havnt are Mario Party, and Mario sports games (Which are still really fun).
With a Nintendo 'brand' game I am almost assured that any game I pickup & play, I can get into almost immediately and have a lot of fun, and not really get frustrated. The same cannot be said about most of the EA titles listed, and a lot of other companies as well. The brand helps to reinforce consumer trust that with Nintendo games the consumer almost always gets a reward for that trust, in a good, fun game. End Rant
Armada and Armada 2 were good for a bash. I quite enjoyed Elite force games as a shooter as well, believe i completed both of them.
That is why it is called Rip-Off Britain
Ding, you have the correct answer. Looking Glass went to Irrational to co-produce the game.
Back in the Gemini days, there were not millions if not billions of flecks of paint and other debris in orbit that could kill an astronaut in EVA. We have done a good job of polluting our local space.
The damage to the heatshield is a small crator, with most of those 2 tiles still intact. If you check the anomalies log for the first Shuttle mission STS-1 Columbia lost 16 tiles and damaged 148 others and successfully landed. I think damage to a couple of minor tiles the shuttle can easily cope with.
As others have stated, the Shuttle wasn't NASA design choice, more a political pencil pushers lust. They have done very well Imho, astronauts know the there are risks, known and unknown, they accept them and risk their lives to go into space. Its their choice to fly on the shuttle and they are not forced, its a tragedy that lives are lost but if they died doing what they love and what is so horrific about that?
One thing you have to remember though, is its not the Studio that makes great games, the studio is just a name. Its the people working on them that make games great. People can always move on start something new.
Thats my 2 cents.
Thats the problem right there. Sure there are going to be some developers that will write a game to take advantage (I am thinking good old dependable Square Enix), but will most common developers take the time to utilize it? The one thing Microsoft has some experience with is making software, and they know its hard, so they designed a console with quite a lot of power, but easy to develop for with a good toolset, therefore easier to utilise that power.
Sony has a machine with sheer power, but most of that is almost criptically locked up within the SPE's of the Cell, with completely different hardware and memory access systems to what a lot of programmers are used to. BUT I can also see this not really affecting the PS3 in the long run. With Game budgets now huge, complex and long. The tendicy now being to use License API's like Agieas Physx which has been adapted to run on the Cell SPE's and I can see more things like that happening. Games programmers can still program the General Purpose code for the game they are used too on the PowerPC part of the Cell, and the API's such as Physx, Havok and even things possibly like Unreal3's culling code could all be but on the workhorse of the Cell without the development teams having to worry about it too much.
It could (if not already with say Unreal3) that the teams don't really have to think about the underlying hardware of the platform they are working on, they just work withing the framework provided. Anyroad thats my 2 cents.
I dont know. WoW is dispised in my games industry circle, it has had a very detrimental effect on the industry. This one game has significantly dropped the sales of the games industry as a whole. The fact that it isn't really that good of a game, it was made of the masses to be sold to the masses. Soap opera's are aweful shows, but it doesnt stop something like East Enders being watched by 13million people each night.
m eID/0. It's a bit odd, that it is played by the masses but the masses except there are many better games. Although it does make me laugh that Planetside is rated above it.
Just because a game has sold lots of copies doesn't mean it is a great game. The other question has always arised, this applys to many MMO's. How many people have just forgot about their subscriptions, and just browsing down their statement don't really notice that $15, and do something about it.
WoW would be something you put one your resume, but I don't think it would be seen in the same light as Bioshock or Half-life2. World of Warcraft isn't even in the top 10 of MMORPG.com's game rating list: http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/sort/rating/ga
I wouldn't really say brought illegal downloading to the masses. If you walk up to the average person in the street and ask them if they use the internet, you would probably get a yes. If you then asked do you use bittorrent, or know what it is, you would probably get a no.
The fact is torrents are mainly used by students, the less well of or the damn right stingy, and no matter what you do to these people no will not part money unless they have to, either because they can't afford to. The stingy people you may scare into buying content, but for the students and less fortunate there really isnt any loss in sales because there wouldn't be a sale in the first place, they are getting content they like, but couldn't afford.
If you give people a simple, organised alternative e.g. iTunes (not the best system I know) people will use it and pay for content. The MPAA should get with the times and organise an iTunes for films for the entire market (I know some studios are starting to get on the bandwagon, and I won't even touch on the DRM issue, as that will go on for hours).
But going after students and the like is pointless, there wasn't really a sale there in the first place.
Well FFXII isnt exclusive to the PS3, nor will GTAIV be (it will come out for the 360). Microsoft doesnt have a chance in hell of buying Square Enix, Japan has strange laws and regulations on foreign companies trying to buy in, and the fact the games companies there are really intertwined and all own shares in each other, its a kinda, if they want to buy one of us out, they will have to buy us all attitude.
% 20blu-ray, you just can't say no to basically one of the biggest entertainment industries in the world: http://www.blazinggrace.org/pornstatistics.htm (nice stats weird site, soul warping effects of masturbation anyone?) and according to http://www.usatoday.com/life/movies/news/2005-01-0 5-dvd-sales-inside_x.htm the total revunue for home video is 24.5 billion according to the blazinggrace porn video sales and rentals is 3.62 billion thats almost 15% of the market, but it is also more than that. You can watch porn and other films in HD with HD-DVD or just normal films with Blu-ray, which one will the consume choose? (Sounds like betamax to me). The only thing this doesnt take into account is the Internet, but will you be able to resist a 50" closeup of a mans errect penis in High Def?
What sony has, is its name (Playstation), I was in a GAME the other week some construction worker was there, said something along the lines of 'I want to get a Playstation because I never really liked the Xbox'. Once the price of the PS3 comes down, the un-vocal fanboys will start buying it up from Fortress U.K and Japan (biggest Sony markets per head of population), U.K is one of the few countries where the PSP outsells the DS.
Blu-ray winning the format war is unlikly me thinks, currently they are outselling HD-DVD (from anothe persons comment) but when the consummers (espically US) realise there is no pornography on Blu-ray http://www.google.com/search?q=sony%20pornography
I know I can, but can you?
I have to agree with this argument. The previous house I was living in, my house mate had a decent projector, 2000watt amp, and 1700 legit DVD's. You should of seen the wall they lived on.
The main selling point of HD-DVD and Blueray to him was the fact that it could fit entire seasons or even every tv episode of a series on 1 disc. Therefore taking less wall space up, but he was in no rush to get a blue-ray player or a HD-DVD player for that matter, he did have a Laser disc player and about 50 or so laser discs. Now that was a flawed idea.