Back when you needed one animator to put out a product, it made sense to have him on staff permanently. Now you might need twenty or more animators for a brief period on a product's development cycle. The only companies that can keep them around fulltime are those big enough (like EA) to have enough products in development that they can be moved around. Thus, the industry is moving towards contractors who move from company to company on a per-project basis, much as the film industry does now.
For that to work, you need a critical mass of both people and companies in an area. If you don't have that, there's no pool of workers to hire when projects need to ramp up, and nowhere else for those workers to earn a paycheck when projects ramp down.
Louisiana has neither right now. And there's no incentive for one to come unless the other is already there.
I think you mean a flammable gas rather than a volatile one. Volatile means that something easily turns into gas or vapor at relatively low temperatures, which is exactly what you want for heat exchange. It doesn't imply anything at all the flammability of the substance.
To be fair, most commonly encountered volatile chemicals are also flammable, and once something is in a gaseous state (and mixed with air) it gets a lot easier to ignite, but the volatility and flammability aren't the same.
I completely overlooked Singles: Flirt Up Your Life at E3. Now that this article has brought it to my attention, I'm definitely going to check it out!...which pretty much drives the point home that self-serving "journalists" such as this care more about raising their own visibility than about the moral agenda they claim to promote.
The Pentium 4 EE actually has 178 million transistors, which puts it in between ATI's and NVIDIA's latest.
In all of this, keep in mind that there's computing and there's computing...the kind of computing power in a GPU is excellent for doing the same numeric computation to every element of a large vector or matrix, not so much for branchy decisiony type things like walking a binary tree. You wouldn't want to run a database on something structured like a GPU (or an old vector-processing Cray), but something like a simulation of weather or molecular modeliing could be perfect for it.
The similarities of a GPU to a vector processing system bring up an interesting possibility...could Fortran see a renaissance for writing shader programs?
Assuming you're talking about Myth III, I wouldn't say it was a bad thing resume-wise, though. The rabid fanboy community from the first 2 games all hated it because the multiplayer wasn't anywhere near what anyone wanted, but the single-player game was solid enough for it to get positive reviews (8.7/10 and 8.4/10 from IGN and GameSpot, respectively). Lots of the team got to move on to better projects at better companies, when some of them weren't even in the game industry beforehand. So, the work did pay off, if indirectly.
Overall, things aren't THAT bad in the industry. My current project is for Activision, and it's much, much better. They get the idea that when only the top 10% or so of games actually make a profit, giving the developer the time and resources to make something that has a shot at being a hit will pay off in the long run. I still work long hours, but I still love what I do.
Rendering digital video is about as parallel as compute loads get. Generally each frame can be an independent computation. For most ray-tracing algorithms, computing each pixel of each frame is fully parallelizable too.
The global AI things they did to have 10,000 troops all interacting together is obviously not quite so independent, but I'm willing to be the bulk of the compute load goes into creating pictures of those interactions, not the interactions themselves.
You said it yourself...games SELL because of graphics. The game buying public speaks with their wallets that graphics are the most important thing. When that changes, and only when that changes, professional game developers (i.e. those who make games in order to make money) will start emphasizing other things.
I expect this to come around sooner rather than later, because the graphics arms race is reaching a point of diminishing returns. There's such a thing as "good enough", and "more complicated pixel shaders in your 3D" isn't the kind of jump that "now in 3D instead of 2D" was.
Part of the problem with your complaint is that you continue to see pointers to NUL-terminated character arrays instead of strings, right down to your pseudo-Hungarian notation. The whole idea is not to compare pointers, but strings, with the pointer implementation of a handle to the first character of the string a string implementation detail, ideally hidden.
I would say the problem is that you (and the author of the article) see a pointer to a NULL-terminated character arrays as being the same as a string, and expect it to behave as something other than what it really is.
I see the pointers in my example as pointers because they were declared to be pointers. If they'd been declared as std::string, I would see them as abstract strings whose implementation details are hidden. These are different things with unique properties, and it is very reasonable to expect that a generic "greater" function would compare ints as ints, pointers as pointers, and string objects as string objects.
My complaint with this example is that it causes pointers to be silently treated as string objects rather than pointers. Unexpected behavior is bad when you've got a codebase into the millions of lines. In a team where someone else wasn't aware of this exception to the expected behavior of the "greater" function, this could easily turn into a very annoying bug to track down.
In the example in part 1, this guy specializes a template function that returns the greater of the two arguments so that when two const char pointers are passed to it, it will do a lexical comparison.
And greaterPtr == ptrA, because even though ptrB > ptrA, "edcba" > "cba" by lexical comparison.
This is a perfect example of how NOT to use the expressive power of C++. If one of the junior programmers on my project specialized a template the way he did, we'd sit him down for a remedial discussion of coding style and software maintainability.
I wonder if the creators of Vampire will be as open to mod and level creation as Valve is. With the use of the source engine, I think that there will be many tools available to the community but developer support is crucial too.
What exactly would it mean to you, to create a mod based on Vampire as opposed to HL2? If you were going to strip a game down to the engine and build your own unique gameplay and content, there aren't that many differences between what you'd have left of our stuff and what you'd have left of their stuff. I'm genuinely curious about what it is that you're expecting to see from Troika in this area, because as the lead programmer on the project I have some small amount of influence over this.:)
You've heard about Greyhawk: Temple of Elemental Evil, right? It's supposed to be using the 3.5 edition rules very faithfully. Faithfully as in being unapologetically turn-based, the way the D&D rules are meant to work, which is something of a rarity in 2003. More at Gamespot and IGN.
Disclaimer: I work at one of the companies involved, though my work isn't related to the project.
Why would you want to spend half your waking hours doing something you don't love? Personally, I think having the opportunity to devote 60+ hours a week to game development more than makes up for the low pay.:)
I make hiring decisions for programmers at Troika Games, a PC RPG developer. We get a lot of resumes, most of which don't ever get an interview. What's going to make you stand out to me isn't your college degree or your years of work in web development while you wished you were doing games. The thing that will most likely get your hired is a piece of runnable code that shows both your abilities, and your passion and motivation. A little shareware project, a graphics demo, work on an Unreal mod...you get the idea. The fact is that the people who will truly excel working on games already ARE working on games because it's so much a part of them that they can't do otherwise; they just need a salaried position on a well-funded team.:)
So your viewpoints are completely different, and she disapproves of the things that you think are fun, and you have to lie to her about your opinions just to be allowed in bed with her...
Despite everyone's assumptions, nothing called "Half-Life 2" has ever been announced or talked about by anyone connected with Valve. Team Fortress 2 has been shown publicly, however.
The primary motivation for more color bits isn't the final output. Many monitors don't even have 8 bits per channel in their color resolution! But when you're performing many layers of compositing and texturing, if your intermediate results and your mathematical precision have an error of 1 part in 512 (the best you can hope for with perfect rounding and 8 bits per channel), the accumulated error in your final pixel can be very visible.
Furthermore, going to higher color precision makes it practical to have a linear color space. Your eyes are much more sensitive to subtle changes in dark colors than light ones, and the color distribution on most monitors is skewed accordingly (i.e. the difference in intensity between a green level of 13 and 14 is much smaller than between a green level of 240 and 241). That eliminates visible banding in dark areas, but it makes it a bitch to add things together and have it come out right (i.e. an color value of 40 isn't twice as bright on screen as a color value of 20). With insanely high precision, you can just use a linear color space and still have enough precision at the low end to avoid banding.
Not with the latest hardware. As the post you replied to mentioned, the Radeon 9700, as well as Nvidia's upcoming chip, support render targets and internal data paths with 32 bits of PER CHANNEL for a total of 128 bits of color data per pixel. SGI's hardware supports 12 bits of precision per channel for a total of 48 bits.
In fairness, those are 32-bit floats, not integers. The actual precision of the color data is "only" 24 bits per channel, and the remaining bits are taken up by the sign bit and the 8-bit exponent which allows a much greater range of magnitudes than if this was just a 32-bit integer.
Clear?:)
(And before anyone points out that 24 + 1 + 8 = 33, the top bit of the mantissa isn't stored because it's always implied to be a 1.)
I'm coming into this discussion a little late, but there seem to be two divided opinions here: "the Linux gaming market sucks when the Linux versions of games ends up available on shelves later and costs more" and "the Linux gaming market sucks when Linux versions of games are available as a free download/patch, preventing a viable business from forming around shipping nice, supported versions". These seem mutually exclusive to me. A Linux retail box is going to get lower priority from distributors and less in the way of discount promotions from retailers. A free download (or even an "unsupported" install on a hybrid CD) will be available day 1 at the Windows price, but don't try calling a mainstream publisher for Linux support and don't expect anyone to purchase a Linux-only version a month later at a higher cost.
So, which would people rather see happen? I'm not just asking for rhetorical purposes, btw. (But no, I'm not announcing anything related to Linux except my own personal interest in it as I sit at home in my robot pajamas on a Saturday morning drinking orange juice and reading slashdot!)
Let's see... if I record my audio to a CD-R uncompressed at 44.1 kHz, two channels, 16 bits per channel, that's 74 minutes per CD-R that they need to tax for a total of $3.65. But data's data, and maybe I like high-end audio -- five channels at 24 bits apiece, for only 19.7 minutes per CD-R, and I only need to pay 97 cents tax on my blanks. But of course a bit is a bit, and if I'm intending to write the music at 32kbps MP3...why, I owe $160 dollars in tax per blank. And let's not even talk about the fact that any hard drive is potentially digital recording media!
Video games have gone mainstream. $8 billion in revenue last year. That's more than the movie industry. We aren't some fringe segment anymore; we're just as much a part of the national psyche as Titanic. What we're seeing in Congress is the generation gap between our 'distinguished' representatives and the real world.
This isn't a true installation of LinuxPPC. As I understand it, it's a single very large MacOS file containing an image of a Linux ext2 filesystem with Linux loaded. A user would boot under MacOS, and then run a LinuxPPC "Live" application that would map in the contents of that file as a volume, unload most of the MacOS, and "boot" from that file. Not exactly a power-user kind of Linux, but it is a good way to introduce general users to Linux without making them go through the learning curve and commitment of repartitioning a hard drive. I'd like to see Red Hat and others pick up this idea to attract Windows users.
Slashdot Mirror
Back when you needed one animator to put out a product, it made sense to have him on staff permanently. Now you might need twenty or more animators for a brief period on a product's development cycle. The only companies that can keep them around fulltime are those big enough (like EA) to have enough products in development that they can be moved around. Thus, the industry is moving towards contractors who move from company to company on a per-project basis, much as the film industry does now.
For that to work, you need a critical mass of both people and companies in an area. If you don't have that, there's no pool of workers to hire when projects need to ramp up, and nowhere else for those workers to earn a paycheck when projects ramp down.
Louisiana has neither right now. And there's no incentive for one to come unless the other is already there.
Any geek worthy of the word knows which game he'll be missing work for in August.
Doom 3, baby!
I think you mean a flammable gas rather than a volatile one. Volatile means that something easily turns into gas or vapor at relatively low temperatures, which is exactly what you want for heat exchange. It doesn't imply anything at all the flammability of the substance.
To be fair, most commonly encountered volatile chemicals are also flammable, and once something is in a gaseous state (and mixed with air) it gets a lot easier to ignite, but the volatility and flammability aren't the same.
I completely overlooked Singles: Flirt Up Your Life at E3. Now that this article has brought it to my attention, I'm definitely going to check it out!
The Pentium 4 EE actually has 178 million transistors, which puts it in between ATI's and NVIDIA's latest.
In all of this, keep in mind that there's computing and there's computing...the kind of computing power in a GPU is excellent for doing the same numeric computation to every element of a large vector or matrix, not so much for branchy decisiony type things like walking a binary tree. You wouldn't want to run a database on something structured like a GPU (or an old vector-processing Cray), but something like a simulation of weather or molecular modeliing could be perfect for it.
The similarities of a GPU to a vector processing system bring up an interesting possibility...could Fortran see a renaissance for writing shader programs?
I think that was my project. :)
Assuming you're talking about Myth III, I wouldn't say it was a bad thing resume-wise, though. The rabid fanboy community from the first 2 games all hated it because the multiplayer wasn't anywhere near what anyone wanted, but the single-player game was solid enough for it to get positive reviews (8.7/10 and 8.4/10 from IGN and GameSpot, respectively). Lots of the team got to move on to better projects at better companies, when some of them weren't even in the game industry beforehand. So, the work did pay off, if indirectly.
Overall, things aren't THAT bad in the industry. My current project is for Activision, and it's much, much better. They get the idea that when only the top 10% or so of games actually make a profit, giving the developer the time and resources to make something that has a shot at being a hit will pay off in the long run. I still work long hours, but I still love what I do.
Rendering digital video is about as parallel as compute loads get. Generally each frame can be an independent computation. For most ray-tracing algorithms, computing each pixel of each frame is fully parallelizable too.
The global AI things they did to have 10,000 troops all interacting together is obviously not quite so independent, but I'm willing to be the bulk of the compute load goes into creating pictures of those interactions, not the interactions themselves.
You said it yourself...games SELL because of graphics. The game buying public speaks with their wallets that graphics are the most important thing. When that changes, and only when that changes, professional game developers (i.e. those who make games in order to make money) will start emphasizing other things.
I expect this to come around sooner rather than later, because the graphics arms race is reaching a point of diminishing returns. There's such a thing as "good enough", and "more complicated pixel shaders in your 3D" isn't the kind of jump that "now in 3D instead of 2D" was.
I would say the problem is that you (and the author of the article) see a pointer to a NULL-terminated character arrays as being the same as a string, and expect it to behave as something other than what it really is.
I see the pointers in my example as pointers because they were declared to be pointers. If they'd been declared as std::string, I would see them as abstract strings whose implementation details are hidden. These are different things with unique properties, and it is very reasonable to expect that a generic "greater" function would compare ints as ints, pointers as pointers, and string objects as string objects.
My complaint with this example is that it causes pointers to be silently treated as string objects rather than pointers. Unexpected behavior is bad when you've got a codebase into the millions of lines. In a team where someone else wasn't aware of this exception to the expected behavior of the "greater" function, this could easily turn into a very annoying bug to track down.
In the example in part 1, this guy specializes a template function that returns the greater of the two arguments so that when two const char pointers are passed to it, it will do a lexical comparison.
If I had his code in my project, I could do this:
const char *myString = "edcba";
const char *ptrA = &myString[0];
const char *ptrB = &myString[2];
const char *greaterPtr = greater( ptrA, ptrB );
And greaterPtr == ptrA, because even though ptrB > ptrA, "edcba" > "cba" by lexical comparison.
This is a perfect example of how NOT to use the expressive power of C++. If one of the junior programmers on my project specialized a template the way he did, we'd sit him down for a remedial discussion of coding style and software maintainability.
I wonder if the creators of Vampire will be as open to mod and level creation as Valve is. With the use of the source engine, I think that there will be many tools available to the community but developer support is crucial too.
:)
What exactly would it mean to you, to create a mod based on Vampire as opposed to HL2? If you were going to strip a game down to the engine and build your own unique gameplay and content, there aren't that many differences between what you'd have left of our stuff and what you'd have left of their stuff. I'm genuinely curious about what it is that you're expecting to see from Troika in this area, because as the lead programmer on the project I have some small amount of influence over this.
You've heard about Greyhawk: Temple of Elemental Evil, right? It's supposed to be using the 3.5 edition rules very faithfully. Faithfully as in being unapologetically turn-based, the way the D&D rules are meant to work, which is something of a rarity in 2003. More at Gamespot and IGN.
Disclaimer: I work at one of the companies involved, though my work isn't related to the project.
Why would you want to spend half your waking hours doing something you don't love? Personally, I think having the opportunity to devote 60+ hours a week to game development more than makes up for the low pay. :)
But no, it's not for everyone.
I make hiring decisions for programmers at Troika Games, a PC RPG developer. We get a lot of resumes, most of which don't ever get an interview. What's going to make you stand out to me isn't your college degree or your years of work in web development while you wished you were doing games. The thing that will most likely get your hired is a piece of runnable code that shows both your abilities, and your passion and motivation. A little shareware project, a graphics demo, work on an Unreal mod...you get the idea. The fact is that the people who will truly excel working on games already ARE working on games because it's so much a part of them that they can't do otherwise; they just need a salaried position on a well-funded team. :)
Speaking of which, there's an entry-level programmer/scripting position that we're looking to fill on the team for Vampire: The Masquerade. Impress me.
It's using Direct3D.
I feel tingly, Brock.
My girlfriend runs Linux. 'Nuff said. :)
So your viewpoints are completely different, and she disapproves of the things that you think are fun, and you have to lie to her about your opinions just to be allowed in bed with her...
Do you really want to be marrying this chick?
Despite everyone's assumptions, nothing called "Half-Life 2" has ever been announced or talked about by anyone connected with Valve. Team Fortress 2 has been shown publicly, however.
The primary motivation for more color bits isn't the final output. Many monitors don't even have 8 bits per channel in their color resolution! But when you're performing many layers of compositing and texturing, if your intermediate results and your mathematical precision have an error of 1 part in 512 (the best you can hope for with perfect rounding and 8 bits per channel), the accumulated error in your final pixel can be very visible.
Furthermore, going to higher color precision makes it practical to have a linear color space. Your eyes are much more sensitive to subtle changes in dark colors than light ones, and the color distribution on most monitors is skewed accordingly (i.e. the difference in intensity between a green level of 13 and 14 is much smaller than between a green level of 240 and 241). That eliminates visible banding in dark areas, but it makes it a bitch to add things together and have it come out right (i.e. an color value of 40 isn't twice as bright on screen as a color value of 20). With insanely high precision, you can just use a linear color space and still have enough precision at the low end to avoid banding.
PC: 32 bits
:)
SGI: 48 bits
Not with the latest hardware. As the post you replied to mentioned, the Radeon 9700, as well as Nvidia's upcoming chip, support render targets and internal data paths with 32 bits of PER CHANNEL for a total of 128 bits of color data per pixel. SGI's hardware supports 12 bits of precision per channel for a total of 48 bits.
In fairness, those are 32-bit floats, not integers. The actual precision of the color data is "only" 24 bits per channel, and the remaining bits are taken up by the sign bit and the 8-bit exponent which allows a much greater range of magnitudes than if this was just a 32-bit integer.
Clear?
(And before anyone points out that 24 + 1 + 8 = 33, the top bit of the mantissa isn't stored because it's always implied to be a 1.)
I'm coming into this discussion a little late, but there seem to be two divided opinions here: "the Linux gaming market sucks when the Linux versions of games ends up available on shelves later and costs more" and "the Linux gaming market sucks when Linux versions of games are available as a free download/patch, preventing a viable business from forming around shipping nice, supported versions". These seem mutually exclusive to me. A Linux retail box is going to get lower priority from distributors and less in the way of discount promotions from retailers. A free download (or even an "unsupported" install on a hybrid CD) will be available day 1 at the Windows price, but don't try calling a mainstream publisher for Linux support and don't expect anyone to purchase a Linux-only version a month later at a higher cost.
So, which would people rather see happen? I'm not just asking for rhetorical purposes, btw. (But no, I'm not announcing anything related to Linux except my own personal interest in it as I sit at home in my robot pajamas on a Saturday morning drinking orange juice and reading slashdot!)
Let's see... if I record my audio to a CD-R uncompressed at 44.1 kHz, two channels, 16 bits per channel, that's 74 minutes per CD-R that they need to tax for a total of $3.65. But data's data, and maybe I like high-end audio -- five channels at 24 bits apiece, for only 19.7 minutes per CD-R, and I only need to pay 97 cents tax on my blanks. But of course a bit is a bit, and if I'm intending to write the music at 32kbps MP3...why, I owe $160 dollars in tax per blank. And let's not even talk about the fact that any hard drive is potentially digital recording media!
Video games have gone mainstream. $8 billion in revenue last year. That's more than the movie industry. We aren't some fringe segment anymore; we're just as much a part of the national psyche as Titanic. What we're seeing in Congress is the generation gap between our 'distinguished' representatives and the real world.
This isn't a true installation of LinuxPPC. As I understand it, it's a single very large MacOS file containing an image of a Linux ext2 filesystem with Linux loaded. A user would boot under MacOS, and then run a LinuxPPC "Live" application that would map in the contents of that file as a volume, unload most of the MacOS, and "boot" from that file. Not exactly a power-user kind of Linux, but it is a good way to introduce general users to Linux without making them go through the learning curve and commitment of repartitioning a hard drive. I'd like to see Red Hat and others pick up this idea to attract Windows users.