Did enough people accept all this that it didn't matter for their sales? Does this mean Episode 2 will have all of the above copy protection techniques? Obviously I won't drop any more money on such software.
You mean you actually spent money on buying a boxed copy of a computer game? Come on, it's 2007 - digital distribution has been around for years!
Boxed versions of Valve games now (for the PC, anyway) just contain compressed, encrypted data files to save you a big download. Once installed, they're the same as versions of the games purchased online - they need to be decrypted and authenticated once, and after that you can run Steam in its offline mode if you're that paranoid. The only reason I can think of buying stuff offline now is when market forces conspire to put the boxed version on super-special offer. I believe the boxed Episode One was available very cheaply in the USA - but was astoundingly expensive in the UK, so we got a much better deal buying online over here.
But then, you're just the usual troll whingeing about Steam whenever Valve is mentioned. Carry on!
If you really want to design video games, the best thing you can do is make them yourself. You won't be able to make a super AAA title that way, but you'll have full creative control over your work and something to show for it in a portfolio.
It might be an excellent stepping stone - and my recommendation would be to MAKE A MOD, and see what happens.
My own MINERVA has resulted in unsolicited job offers from all sorts of people - and I'm not even intending to work in the games industry. I mean, I get fan-mail from people like John Romero. Is that a good or a bad thing? I haven't decided...
Somewhat higher-tech, but with a vaguely similar spirit - my choice would be Half-Life 2, and the Source SDK. I've already had hundreds of hours of fun out of it, and could have great fun working on MINERVA without any external distractions.
Although Steam's offline mode would be guaranteed to arse up within a week, demanding an internet connection to continue...
Eugene Shoemaker wound up with some of his ashes on the Lunar Prospector spacecraft, which eventually flown into the moon. He was the guy who co-discovered Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, which eventually smacked into Jupiter.
Likewise, ashes of Clyde Tombaugh, the discoverer of Pluto, are being carried by the New Horizons space probe, due to fly past Pluto, the Kuiper Belt and on into the interstellar void...
Specifically, Jetpac, Knight Lore, 3D Deathchase and Quazatron along with better versions of Elite, Head Over Heels, Spindizzy and R-Type mean C64 LOSES.
What you should do is set your love for the little rubber-keyed monster to music...
Oh wait, it's happened already!
Hey Hey 16K - which might explain some of the peculiar British affection for these machines...
The issue is that the machine doing the billing must NOT be connected to the Internet.
Who says it was even Valve's machine that was compromised? 1UP.com:
Doug Lombardi, director of marketing at Valve, says, "There has been no security breach of Steam." However, he does confirm our expert's findings by adding, "The alleged hacker gained access to a third-party site that Valve uses to manage the commercial partners in its Cyber Café program. This Cyber Café billing system is not connected to Steam. We are working with law enforcement agencies on this matter, and encourage anyone with more information to e-mail us at Catch_A_Thief@valvesoftware.com."
These "textures" were things like the light attenuation pattern of a flashlight. You buy this stuff from a specialist because you can't afford the time it'd take for one of your artists to even figure out how to make something like this, let alone perfect the process to where it's going to look as good as the ones you can buy.
Point torch at white-painted wall. Take photo. Adjust levels in Photoshop or nearest equivalent so that white-painted wall is now black, and pattern from torch is only thing visible.
Oh no, really difficult!
I seriously doubt the textures in question (lights, and animated water textures) are from Marlin Studios. Why? Well, they don't appear to have such things for sale, and the idea that two companies would independently end up with pixel-perfect copies of a du/dv map for rendering water refractions in DirectX 8, when this texture library company isn't even selling such a thing, seems a bit unlikely.
Eh, that rings a bell; and I don't suppose it really matters. It'd be trivial to generate the waveforms manually, store them in a small amount of memory and point the sound chip towards them.
Yep, I've seen MOD files (and descendants) use tiny snippets of square waves, sine waves etc. as samples to build up 'chip tunes' - interestingly, they can still sound better than the ST's YM2149 coprolite...
If the STe had directly replaced (same price) the STFM when it came out, there would have been enough sold to make selling enhanced software worthwhile. It had some "nice" improvements, but nothing radical, the kind you'd expect as *standard* from a company that wanted to keep its market share.
Absolutely - Commodore, Atari and the like really needed to keep building new stuff instead of marginally improving on what came before. Giant head starts over the likes of Macs and PCs soon became increasingly irrelevant, with Soundblaster cards then SVGA then later 3DFX accelerators, etc. etc. etc. Trying to continue to sell the same hardware for half a decade or more was plain silly. PCs were ugly, but became the platform of choice for companies developing interesting new chipsets. (Commodore versus Atari? Now ATI versus NVIDIA, but they have marketing!)
It's perhaps fortunate that I could never afford a Falcon in my early teens - it really was a platform already on its way out, even before the total lack of marketing. The re-use of the same case from the STFM just made it painfully obvious.
It's all irrelevant now, and if anything it's taught me to give up on any kind of brand loyalty. Under my desk there's an AMD-plus-NVIDIA PC, booting Windows XP and Linux, and on my lap there's an Intel-plus-ATI MacBook Pro, booting MacOS X and Windows XP.
And on the desk?
My old 520STFM, on a visit from its resting place in a cupboard - it's what prompted my initial bout of nostalgia.;-)
Yes! Im sick of asking everyone if they played Frontier Elite 2 and getting nothing but blank faces. It amazed as a young gamer and amazes me more now as a programmer; written in assembler and giving the player a procedurally generated universe to explore, all on one floppy disk.
I missed playing it when it was first released (friends raved about it, however) and eventually got round to playing it many years later on a super-speedy emulated ST. It was brilliant, and this was when I was familiar with 3D accelerated graphics, high resolution texture mapping and all that.
Recently, I signed up for a week's free trial of Eve Online, hoping for a multiplayer version of more than the same. I was sorely disappointed - the combat was many steps backwards, there was nothing to explore and planets were just a pretty backdrop that could be flown straight through. I lasted less than 24 hours.
I'm cautiously optimistic about a new project called Infinity: The Quest for Earth - its seamless, planetary landings to space stations to solar systems seem a natural progression on Elite 2's, and the combat in the combat prototype seems remarkably familiar, too.
And yes, there should be an entire procedurally generated universe to explore. No word on it fitting on a floppy disk, however...;-)
It *could* do sampled sound, but the chip itself didn't specifically support this, so I assume it was necessary to keep "feeding" the chip, putting a load on the CPU; whereas the Amiga could just point the sound chip to the right section of memory and let it get on with it. This was- I assume- why ST games didn't normally feature impressive sound; also, its natively chip-generated sound wasn't even as good as the Amiga's.
I'm not sure if the Amiga's sound hardware could natively generate sound - it may have been sample playback or nothing. But then, with four independent channels of sampled sound, each with its own playback speed and volume, you're hardly going to complain...;-)
The ST's sound chip was indeed an embarrassment by comparison (it could beep, it could burp and it could hiss), although things did improve with the STe. That had two channels of CPU-ignoring sample playback (left and right), and the experience spotty demo coders had in persuading the older ST's sound chip to playback four-channel Soundtracker modules in a processor-friendly manner obviously helped them write decent mixing routines for the STe.
Hardly any games ever used the improved abilities, of course.
And then there's the Atari Falcon030, which still urinates over the audio capabilities of many modern computers. Eight channels of 16-bit, 48kHz sound, mixed with a DSP chip - allowing such things as MP2 playback with bugger-all load on the main processor.
By which time it was all irrelevant, and Atari stopped making computers shortly afterwards. So long!
From the linked screenshots, the alleged borrowed assets appear to be shaders or bumpmaps and such.
The du/dv and normal maps for Half-Life 2's water definitely aren't shaders - they're inputs for shaders, but don't themselves contain a single line of program code. As with Doom 3's light textures, they're definitely artwork - while the player indeed won't 'see' them as they appear in the games' datafiles, they're quite distinctive and do contribute to the original games' artistic directions.
It would be quite strange to licence such textures from third-parties. They're not photographically sourced, so no big photo libraries would carry them - and in the case of the light textures, anyone halfway competent with Photoshop could make some decent facsimiles from scratch fairly quickly. It makes sense to buy sound libraries (to save shooting guns, breaking objects and releasing monsters in a clean and tidy office) and photo references (need to find some rusty old machines, tumble-down buildings etc.) - but not 128x128 pixel blobs of light.
I suspect the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. graphics programmers were independently implementing some fairly similar engine features to Doom 3 and Source, and to test their work 'borrowed' the shader input textures from the games they were emulating. Then, through forgetfulness, miscommunication or deceit, the original placeholders got left in the game.
I can't see it as being an attempt to save time or money during development - the screenshots I've seen contain some vastly more difficult and impressive map, character and prop texturing, so their artists are definitely more than capable of knocking together some quick light textures. Maybe a programmer did the original borrowing, and nobody on the art team realised where these new textures were actually from?
Moral of the story, though - don't use other people's stuff as placeholders. You might forget!
Thanks for the recommendation, I'll look into them later this year - part of the reason I went for Mobistar was that they had a half-price offer on for the first year. It's fairly good value right now.;-)
Cell/mobile phone companies, as annoying as some of them are, all have no trouble being forthcoming with limits and tracking usage. I don't see why ISPs should be any different.
Interestingly, Mobistaris a mobile phone company - so much so that I got the mobile phone first, and signed up to the ADSL afterwards. My monthly bandwidth usage is printed on my phone bill.
I wouldn't say they were a particularly good ISP, but they could be much worse. But still, anyone got information about other Belgian ISPs, in case I'm missing out on something particularly wonderful elsewhere?
Cheap and cheerful ADSL - I get 15GB a month transfer included, and every gigabyte after that costs 50 cents.
No idea if there's an upper limit (but I doubt it) - but it has the benefit of clearly publicising how much you can transfer, and what happens if you exceed that. No hidden small-print or anything...
I agree! The current events overtones with the Homeland Security and illegal immigrant killings/deportations were only for the benefit of attracting those in the reviewer community that hate the US' current administration. Their plan worked and it got rave reviews.
If you want to place it against your own government's apparent deficiencies, fine - but to my eyes it was commenting more on the far-right sentiments that are all-too-present in the UK today, with a smidgen of American human rights abuses for added verisimilitude. I imagine your average Daily Mail reader would love the Britain portrayed in the film - I found it rather chillingly plausible.
But then, I'm a fervent lefty. I suppose you had to be to really appreciate the film - one touch I liked was the fictitious political cartoonist's work being drawn by the very muchreal-lifeSteve Bell. (Yes, I deliberately chose some of his more inflammatory cartoons...;-) )
Fantastic cinematography, a plausible imagining of a (hopefully) impossible world, and an understated but nuanced plot? I liked it, anyway.
on an AMD64 X2 4200 with 2 Gigs of ram. Performance wise I haven't had any real issues with this exception. I read several posts, flamers and fan boys aside here are my results. I used a folder containing 51 files for a grand total of 142 megs. When I copied this folder from one hard drive to another on my box (both are WD Raptor 10k rpm sata drives) and viewing the "More Details" on the copy dialog Vista reported a speed of 22Mb/sec.
A vague comparison - 221MB over 124 files, from a 5400rpm laptop drive to a 7200rpm, Firewire 400 external disk. 10.43 seconds, an average of 21.2MB/s.
Shouldn't you be getting better performance from such spangly disks? This is a MacBook Pro, running MacOS X 10.4.9. I'll do another test with the same files, same disks and same hardware but with Windows XP later.
"I have to say that in 1981, making those decisions, I felt like I was providing enough freedom for 10 years. . That is, a move from 64k to 640k felt like something that would last a great deal of time. Well, it didn't - it took about only 6 years before people started to see that as a real problem."
... Then you have the Motorola 68000, designed in the late 1970s and used in home computers in the mid 1980s - capable of addressing a whopping 16MB of memory, and using a flat 32-bit address space in case of future expansion.
So obviously 640kB wasn't enough for everyone back then...;-)
Slashdot Mirror
My unboxed copy came with two T-shirts, a book and a trip to Seattle.
Sadly, the T-shirts turned out to be a bit too big for me.
You mean you actually spent money on buying a boxed copy of a computer game? Come on, it's 2007 - digital distribution has been around for years!
Boxed versions of Valve games now (for the PC, anyway) just contain compressed, encrypted data files to save you a big download. Once installed, they're the same as versions of the games purchased online - they need to be decrypted and authenticated once, and after that you can run Steam in its offline mode if you're that paranoid. The only reason I can think of buying stuff offline now is when market forces conspire to put the boxed version on super-special offer. I believe the boxed Episode One was available very cheaply in the USA - but was astoundingly expensive in the UK, so we got a much better deal buying online over here.
But then, you're just the usual troll whingeing about Steam whenever Valve is mentioned. Carry on!
(Yes, it did take me a while to realise that Ibid. wasn't just some incredibly popular journal along the lines of Nature or Science...)
Sadly, no - but I did ask him if my dear Minerva had made him her bitch.
For some reason, I never got a reply. I think he might have taken offence.
It might be an excellent stepping stone - and my recommendation would be to MAKE A MOD, and see what happens.
My own MINERVA has resulted in unsolicited job offers from all sorts of people - and I'm not even intending to work in the games industry. I mean, I get fan-mail from people like John Romero. Is that a good or a bad thing? I haven't decided...
Mine's 09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0. I wonder
Somewhat higher-tech, but with a vaguely similar spirit - my choice would be Half-Life 2, and the Source SDK. I've already had hundreds of hours of fun out of it, and could have great fun working on MINERVA without any external distractions.
Although Steam's offline mode would be guaranteed to arse up within a week, demanding an internet connection to continue...
Have you checked Google recently?
Results 1 - 10 of about 746,000 for "09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0". (0.11 seconds)
The cat isn't just out of the bag, it's having kittens...
Likewise, ashes of Clyde Tombaugh, the discoverer of Pluto, are being carried by the New Horizons space probe, due to fly past Pluto, the Kuiper Belt and on into the interstellar void...
Roy Lichtenstein, anyone?
What you should do is set your love for the little rubber-keyed monster to music...
Oh wait, it's happened already!
Hey Hey 16K - which might explain some of the peculiar British affection for these machines...
Who says it was even Valve's machine that was compromised? 1UP.com:
Point torch at white-painted wall. Take photo. Adjust levels in Photoshop or nearest equivalent so that white-painted wall is now black, and pattern from torch is only thing visible.
Oh no, really difficult!
I seriously doubt the textures in question (lights, and animated water textures) are from Marlin Studios. Why? Well, they don't appear to have such things for sale, and the idea that two companies would independently end up with pixel-perfect copies of a du/dv map for rendering water refractions in DirectX 8, when this texture library company isn't even selling such a thing, seems a bit unlikely.
Yep, I've seen MOD files (and descendants) use tiny snippets of square waves, sine waves etc. as samples to build up 'chip tunes' - interestingly, they can still sound better than the ST's YM2149 coprolite...
Absolutely - Commodore, Atari and the like really needed to keep building new stuff instead of marginally improving on what came before. Giant head starts over the likes of Macs and PCs soon became increasingly irrelevant, with Soundblaster cards then SVGA then later 3DFX accelerators, etc. etc. etc. Trying to continue to sell the same hardware for half a decade or more was plain silly. PCs were ugly, but became the platform of choice for companies developing interesting new chipsets. (Commodore versus Atari? Now ATI versus NVIDIA, but they have marketing!)
It's perhaps fortunate that I could never afford a Falcon in my early teens - it really was a platform already on its way out, even before the total lack of marketing. The re-use of the same case from the STFM just made it painfully obvious.
It's all irrelevant now, and if anything it's taught me to give up on any kind of brand loyalty. Under my desk there's an AMD-plus-NVIDIA PC, booting Windows XP and Linux, and on my lap there's an Intel-plus-ATI MacBook Pro, booting MacOS X and Windows XP.
And on the desk?
My old 520STFM, on a visit from its resting place in a cupboard - it's what prompted my initial bout of nostalgia.
I missed playing it when it was first released (friends raved about it, however) and eventually got round to playing it many years later on a super-speedy emulated ST. It was brilliant, and this was when I was familiar with 3D accelerated graphics, high resolution texture mapping and all that.
Recently, I signed up for a week's free trial of Eve Online, hoping for a multiplayer version of more than the same. I was sorely disappointed - the combat was many steps backwards, there was nothing to explore and planets were just a pretty backdrop that could be flown straight through. I lasted less than 24 hours.
I'm cautiously optimistic about a new project called Infinity: The Quest for Earth - its seamless, planetary landings to space stations to solar systems seem a natural progression on Elite 2's, and the combat in the combat prototype seems remarkably familiar, too.
And yes, there should be an entire procedurally generated universe to explore. No word on it fitting on a floppy disk, however...
I'm not sure if the Amiga's sound hardware could natively generate sound - it may have been sample playback or nothing. But then, with four independent channels of sampled sound, each with its own playback speed and volume, you're hardly going to complain...
The ST's sound chip was indeed an embarrassment by comparison (it could beep, it could burp and it could hiss), although things did improve with the STe. That had two channels of CPU-ignoring sample playback (left and right), and the experience spotty demo coders had in persuading the older ST's sound chip to playback four-channel Soundtracker modules in a processor-friendly manner obviously helped them write decent mixing routines for the STe.
Hardly any games ever used the improved abilities, of course.
And then there's the Atari Falcon030, which still urinates over the audio capabilities of many modern computers. Eight channels of 16-bit, 48kHz sound, mixed with a DSP chip - allowing such things as MP2 playback with bugger-all load on the main processor.
By which time it was all irrelevant, and Atari stopped making computers shortly afterwards. So long!
Yeah. GSC is Ukrainian!
The du/dv and normal maps for Half-Life 2's water definitely aren't shaders - they're inputs for shaders, but don't themselves contain a single line of program code. As with Doom 3's light textures, they're definitely artwork - while the player indeed won't 'see' them as they appear in the games' datafiles, they're quite distinctive and do contribute to the original games' artistic directions.
It would be quite strange to licence such textures from third-parties. They're not photographically sourced, so no big photo libraries would carry them - and in the case of the light textures, anyone halfway competent with Photoshop could make some decent facsimiles from scratch fairly quickly. It makes sense to buy sound libraries (to save shooting guns, breaking objects and releasing monsters in a clean and tidy office) and photo references (need to find some rusty old machines, tumble-down buildings etc.) - but not 128x128 pixel blobs of light.
I suspect the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. graphics programmers were independently implementing some fairly similar engine features to Doom 3 and Source, and to test their work 'borrowed' the shader input textures from the games they were emulating. Then, through forgetfulness, miscommunication or deceit, the original placeholders got left in the game.
I can't see it as being an attempt to save time or money during development - the screenshots I've seen contain some vastly more difficult and impressive map, character and prop texturing, so their artists are definitely more than capable of knocking together some quick light textures. Maybe a programmer did the original borrowing, and nobody on the art team realised where these new textures were actually from?
Moral of the story, though - don't use other people's stuff as placeholders. You might forget!
Thanks for the recommendation, I'll look into them later this year - part of the reason I went for Mobistar was that they had a half-price offer on for the first year. It's fairly good value right now. ;-)
Interestingly, Mobistar is a mobile phone company - so much so that I got the mobile phone first, and signed up to the ADSL afterwards. My monthly bandwidth usage is printed on my phone bill.
I wouldn't say they were a particularly good ISP, but they could be much worse. But still, anyone got information about other Belgian ISPs, in case I'm missing out on something particularly wonderful elsewhere?
Cheap and cheerful ADSL - I get 15GB a month transfer included, and every gigabyte after that costs 50 cents.
No idea if there's an upper limit (but I doubt it) - but it has the benefit of clearly publicising how much you can transfer, and what happens if you exceed that. No hidden small-print or anything...
If you want to place it against your own government's apparent deficiencies, fine - but to my eyes it was commenting more on the far-right sentiments that are all-too-present in the UK today, with a smidgen of American human rights abuses for added verisimilitude. I imagine your average Daily Mail reader would love the Britain portrayed in the film - I found it rather chillingly plausible.
But then, I'm a fervent lefty. I suppose you had to be to really appreciate the film - one touch I liked was the fictitious political cartoonist's work being drawn by the very much real-life Steve Bell. (Yes, I deliberately chose some of his more inflammatory cartoons...
Fantastic cinematography, a plausible imagining of a (hopefully) impossible world, and an understated but nuanced plot? I liked it, anyway.
Move to Europe. 576p DVDs as standard, anyone?
A vague comparison - 221MB over 124 files, from a 5400rpm laptop drive to a 7200rpm, Firewire 400 external disk. 10.43 seconds, an average of 21.2MB/s.
Shouldn't you be getting better performance from such spangly disks? This is a MacBook Pro, running MacOS X 10.4.9. I'll do another test with the same files, same disks and same hardware but with Windows XP later.
So obviously 640kB wasn't enough for everyone back then...