The worst thing is that I'm actually going to college with people that have that very same dinosaur mentality that I just spoofed.
A friend I went to university was recently boasting about his latest hardware acquisition - a colossal Apple monitor (I'm pretty sure it was the 30in Cinema display) and an appropriately speedy graphics card for his PC to drive it.
He uploaded a photo. He runs nothing but Xterms, tiled across the display thanks to some ultra-primitive window manager.
I nearly flew across the Atlantic in order to beat him to death with my prehistoric gaming CRT...
If, like many more computer literate users, you elect to "show all file extensions" (Finder:Preferences:Advanced), this "virus" (which is actually a trojan of course) will show up as YaddaYadda.jpg.app and you'll see that it's just a lame attempt at a trojan.
Actually, it seems that (as of 10.4.5, anyway) it'll show as 'YaddaYadda.jpg.app' even if you have the 'Show all file extensions' switched off - a bit of experimentation shows that if the first extension (in this case '.jpg') is a recognised file-type, then the '.app' gets shown as well.
So, from a display point of view:
YaddaYadda.app -> YaddaYadda
YaddaYadda.foo.app -> YaddaYadda.foo
YaddaYadda.jpg.app -> YaddaYadda.jpg.app
YaddaYadda.pdf.app -> YaddaYadda.pdf.app
... and so on.
Basically, if it's trying to impersonate another existing file-type, it'll tell you.
Wow, you must have got in early. My estimated ship date is mid-March, and my machine is stock!
Well, I thought I had, but my order has now been amended. Upgraded to 1.83GHz, yes - but estimated shipping date now March 14th, estimated delivery March 21st.
Had another quick look at my order (I'm in the UK).
MBPRO 15/1.67 CTO. Estimated shipping date: Feb 15, 2006.
Estimated delivery date: Feb 22, 2006.
Still, if it comes with a faster processor, I won't be too disappointed - but with it being leading-edge hardware, it'll probably explode in my lap and permanently neuter me...
As a UI interface designer, I could easily see how some fairly complex interaction is handled quickly by being able to use multiple points of contact. Trying to duplicate the same interaction with mouse and keyboard is ancient and slow by comparison.
I'm not sure how far the physical technology used in the demonstration can be developed, but I do think it was aimed more at investigating new concepts in the software for user interfaces - things like the two-fingered scroll/zoom look so incredibly obvious when compared with scroll-bars, cursor keys, scroll-wheels and other abstractions...
Anyway. Do hurry up with this stuff. My typewriter-with-a-television computer is looking increasingly anachronistic.:-)
Entirely different - it's based on something called 'frustrated internal reflection'. Simple version: you have a thin slab of transparent perspex with LEDs around the sides. The light from the LEDs is kept inside thanks to total internal reflection - it's a bit like a big flat piece of fibre optic cable in a sense.
When you place a finger or other appendage on the upper surface of the perspex, the total internal reflection breaks down and the fingertip (or whatever) gets illuminated - you track this with a camera pointing upwards at the perspex. To get the computer display gubbins, you also have a video projector pointing at the perspex.
I'm not sure how amenable it is to miniaturisation, but since it's used in fingerprint readers (without the video display) it's probably not too bad - presumably you'd have to change the projector and camera to flat equivalents, of course...
(Something I noticed on the page last week - a reference to work on identifying which finger is touching the display. He's updated that sentence to "Wouldn't it also be nice to identify which finger (e.g. thumb, index, etc.) is associated with each contact?" - but I'd had a sudden vision of this thing using fingerprints as, well, unique finger identification tags. The guy behind it seems pretty big on computer vision, and is also working on stuff like a "new generation of CMOS imaging sensors that feature on-board signal processing functionality, we are experimenting with creating a 1000fps non-invasive eye-tracker for under $100" - maybe some custom hardware for tracking and zooming in on the glowing fingerprints and identifying the fingers from there?)
My PC's specs were slightly above that of an Xbox, and with the Windows port of Halo I got performance slightly greater than that of an Xbox.
Given that the original needed a GeForce 3.5ish to run at 640x480, 30fps - I think people were a bit ambitious in hoping the port would run with full shaders at some very high resolutions on typical PC hardware of the day. Now, though, it runs very smoothly on my GeForce 6600 at 1280x960...
Which wasn't directly related to Islam, but was more a result of deeper-rooted issues with French immigration policy, poverty and the like. Sorry.
With regard to the more recent problems, it's still some small proportion of Muslims causing some horrific tensions. My message to this silent, moderate Muslim majority: stop playing around with mumbled, after-the-event apologies, and politicise. When there's British National Party activity here, they're often tailed by people waving anti-Nazi banners. Similarly, there should be people waving 'Islam Against Violence' placards whenever these racist twits preach, demonstrate or do anything - please, please take back your religion and culture from these hateful, vocal scumbags...
Well, a lot of the player created content for Dawn of War is going to based on Games Workshops Warhammer 40K IP, and so far they aren't complaining about any of the mods being made of which they are well aware.
Games Workshop is surprisingly lenient regarding use of its creations in third-party computer games mods - scroll down to the 'Modifications, Total Conversions, and Games' section. An excerpt:
"Any game or mod must be a "total conversion." In other words, you must not use our intellectual property (logos, images, names etc.) in relation to the worlds, names, logos, or images of any other company. For example, you cannot place our Space Marines in a Disney total conversion using the Unreal engine, but you could make a TC solely using Space Marines with the Unreal engine. This is, of course, assuming that you have permission to use the Unreal engine"
So if you're using Games Workshop names and ideas in a Games Workshop-derived computer game, I think there'll be even less for them to complain about...
But that one card's access time is just HORRIDNESS. As the author said, that was bundled for free with a camera, and you do get what you pay for. Wow.
As a kind of contrast - with the camera I got shortly before Christmas, I got 1.5GB of free CompactFlash storage. One 1GB card which came in the box (it seems a pretty fast one, too) and upon registering the camera, a 256MB one through the post.
Unfortunately, SanDisk's supplies were apparently a bit low, so it metamorphosed into a 512MB effort on the way. It arrived with a covering letter, apologising for any possible inconvenience...;-)
I think CompactFlash is meant to have lasted so long because, basically, it's a crap standard. It's supposed to be a miniaturised, electrically compatible IDE - memory cards impersonate old-fashioned IDE hard disks, requiring controller circuitry specifically for this task. Contrast this with, say, SmartMedia as used in my older camera - sleek, thin, and with the controller circuitry in the camera, and thus impossible to upgrade. Camera came with a 16MB card which I augmented with a 64MB monster, and eventually a stack of 128MB cards - the maximum size possible. Oops. Dead-end.
I wonder when the first camera that comes with a freebie 1TB memory card will be available - and more importantly, will that be considered an unusable minimum?;-)
Let's see: as a web programmer, the Commodore 64 is missing 32-bit support (showstopper), speed, memory (I work with source code reaching several hundred kilobytes), a proper colour display, etc. Someone tell me - why _should_ I use the Commodore 64? To save a few hundred dollars - a small fraction of my total software cost? Etc. Etc. Etc.
...
If you need Photoshop, then go ahead and continue using it. Whinge to Adobe if it doesn't work on Linux, not free software developers. The GIMP's fun, free, written by hobbyists and for certain tasks is quite capable - for people like myself, who like mucking about with building new computer game textures, create simple graphics for web development and occasionally fiddle with photos we've taken, it's great. And slightly cheaper than Photoshop.;-)
After around eight years of using The GIMP, I've found I can sit down in front of Photoshop and often, within minutes, be far more proficient in its use than the official user of that computer. Have I thought about buying a copy? Yes - but right now it doesn't really offer me anything that I can do in The GIMP already. That may change - and when it does, I'll buy a copy of Photoshop. It's bloody awesome software, after all - but for the moment, I'm quite happy with my metaphorical little Commodore 64...
erm last time I loaded up the GIMP I couldn't even use any of the OS X fonts. Maybe you can (can you?) but that's a pretty big reason to use it for home-graphics use (ie when you can't afford/need photoshop).
Gimp.app will make use of installed OS X fonts by default, but the list is somewhat polluted by rarely-used variants used for far-Eastern languages and similar, and irritatingly it doesn't pick up on the different styles available for some fonts. I think I'll report a bug...;-)
Simple test... create a new image, use the ellipse select tool to create a circle, stroke that circle. Look how absolutely nasty and NOT SMOOTH the stroke is.
Work-around: use the ellipse select tool to create a circle, Menu: Select: To Path, clear the selection then Menu: Edit: Stroke Path. Beautifully smooth, plus it's kept the path so you can edit with the bezier tool and whatnot - have a look in the Paths tab of the Layers dialogue box.
Why can't the installer for GIMP/Mac do this (or, if it isn't installed with an installer program, GIMP itself at first startup, just like it creates all those directories etc.)?
There's no installer (like 'proper' Mac applications, you just drag the program from the disk image into your Applications folder), and by the time The GIMP itself is running, X11.app is already up and running so will ignore any configuration changes (probably just until it's next run, though).
However, there is the 'Gimp.app' wrapper program which starts up X11, provides an icon for drag-and-drop, etc. - it would probably be fairly straightforward to add a 'Do you want this config option changing?' thing for when it's first run.
I think I'll go and suggest that right now, actually.:-)
The toolbox in a separate window thing, which I actually like on Linux, doesn't work on Mac because the first click on a window in OSX selects the window and does not activate any elements in that window. This means that selecting a new tool requires double-clicking in the toolbox window. Then using the tool requires double-clicking in the image window -- once to select the window and once to use the tool.
Perhaps not ideal for the hypothetical 'average Mac user' who will have a fit if asked to go anywhere near a command-line, but the click-to-raise toolbox thing is easily fixed; quit X11.app and at the terminal, enter the following:
Start The GIMP again, and behold! Clicking on the toolbox now works properly. Annoying that this has to be done, but personally I'd blame Apple for silly defaults...;-)
Do you know who Hedy Lamarr was? If you were alive when Blazing Saddles was released, you were expected to. Not anymore, though. She's been lost to history.
I know! She co-invented spread-spectrum radio communications during the second world war!
Oh, and she was an actress too. And to point this back towards computer games, the pet headcrab in Half-Life 2 was called Lamarr. As in Hedy. Geddit?
As for this Scottish guy - something tells me he may not have as much success with the ladies after his change in careers. Before: "I'm a professional tennis player" - good! After: "I'm a professional computer-game player" - you must be joking...;-)
When you plug multiple monitors into a new Nvidia or ATI card (or cards in SLI or Crossfire), they actually show up to the OS as additional monitors. This is actually the perfered behaviour because it lets you use monitors with different resolutions and sizes together and in non-traditional arangements. Unfortunatly, it means that actual multiple monitor support has to be specifically coded into games.
I think the apparent multiple monitor support is often a useful abstraction - I get the impression that it can be just one big framebuffer shared between multiple displays.
At least, I quite accidentally got a 2560x960, dual-screen Darwinia when I first ran it on Linux with my GeForce 6600. It looked pretty amazing, but was a bit too difficult to control thanks to the split down the middle. I eventually added a screenmode which ignored the right-hand monitor for gaming purposes...
I'm pretty sure Gimp.app is now a universal binary, and has been so for a while - it's packaged as a self-contained.app which you can drag straight into your Applications folder.
Oh, and it's completely free. No dubious paid downloads costing $29.95 or anything.
In a clothes shop just after Christmas, I saw a large point-of-sale keyboard which had a numeric keypad with small monochrome LCD screens in the keys. As the sales person entered information, the text on the keys would change - I was immediately reminded of the Optimus keyboard.
It didn't look particularly new, either - anyone else seen such things?
I think the major limiting factor in game rendering systems at the moment isn't the programming, but the content.
Where a room in a Doom map could have been a single rectangle with simple textures on the walls, floor and ceiling, a single lighting value and a simple sprite-based barrel for decoration, an equivalent room in a modern FPS might have thousands of triangles, per-pixel lighting from multiple light sources (each placed manually for the best visual effect), high-resolution textures with multiple components (albedo, specular, normal maps), decal textures with complex shaders, and highly detailed barrels with thousands of triangles and their own unique, complex textures...
The rendering hardware might have become massively more powerful, but for a typical indoors FPS the environments haven't become any more complex in their layouts, only in the detailing. F.E.A.R. is a brilliant example of this - the demo brought my PC to a juddering standstill when rendering some incredibly lacklustre scenes - generic alleyways, rooms with pipes, warehouses...
Strip the fancy shaders, props and lighting away, and the layout is pretty similar to a game from perhaps ten years ago.
What I'd be interested to see would be a game with relatively simple textures, geometry and so on, but rendering so much of it that it actually gives modern hardware a decent workout. Wild examples - a game where you're trying to escape a crime-scene in a city with realistically busy streets; FPS games with genuine swarms of monsters (instead of methodically shooting individual enemies placed by the designers, perhaps you'd be carefully clearing your route, blocking potential entrances where monsters could get in); an RPG city with crowd scenes involving hundreds or thousands of procedurally modified characters (imagine Elite, but with people instead of star systems...)
Instead, we keep getting Doom with fancier graphics.
Perfect story for this question. What books, and other resources does the slashdot audience recommend for the beginning modder?
I haven't seen any useful books (although admittedly I've never looked) - I guess the best way of learning is by doing. If you're interested in the Source engine, have a look at the Valve Developer Community wiki, which has a huge amount of information available. There are also innumerable web forums and other communities dedicated to mapping, modelling, coding and whatever - I'm sure there'll be one aimed precisely at whichever game you're interested in.
My best advice would be to start small. Don't make the usual mistake of creating a team intent on building the next Counter-Strike killer - instead, start off by building something like a deathmatch map, a new prop, a new texture or some altered behaviour in the game's code. If it's worth releasing, then release it - otherwise, continue learning and having fun.
You don't have to create a massive total conversion to get recognition - for example, the first MINERVA map has no new code, a couple of modified textures, a few transplanted sounds and a new music track - other than the map itself, it's all standard Half-Life 2 content. But well over 160,000 downloads and counting.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
The worst thing is that I'm actually going to college with people that have that very same dinosaur mentality that I just spoofed.
A friend I went to university was recently boasting about his latest hardware acquisition - a colossal Apple monitor (I'm pretty sure it was the 30in Cinema display) and an appropriately speedy graphics card for his PC to drive it.
He uploaded a photo. He runs nothing but Xterms, tiled across the display thanks to some ultra-primitive window manager.
I nearly flew across the Atlantic in order to beat him to death with my prehistoric gaming CRT...
Actually, it seems that (as of 10.4.5, anyway) it'll show as 'YaddaYadda.jpg.app' even if you have the 'Show all file extensions' switched off - a bit of experimentation shows that if the first extension (in this case '.jpg') is a recognised file-type, then the '.app' gets shown as well.
So, from a display point of view:
Basically, if it's trying to impersonate another existing file-type, it'll tell you.
It's changed again! Estimated shipping date: 28th February, estimated delivery: 7th March.
STOP TAUNTING ME!!!!
Wow, you must have got in early. My estimated ship date is mid-March, and my machine is stock!
:-)
Well, I thought I had, but my order has now been amended. Upgraded to 1.83GHz, yes - but estimated shipping date now March 14th, estimated delivery March 21st.
CURSE YOU, APPLE!
Had another quick look at my order (I'm in the UK).
MBPRO 15/1.67 CTO. Estimated shipping date: Feb 15, 2006.
Estimated delivery date: Feb 22, 2006.
Still, if it comes with a faster processor, I won't be too disappointed - but with it being leading-edge hardware, it'll probably explode in my lap and permanently neuter me...
As a UI interface designer, I could easily see how some fairly complex interaction is handled quickly by being able to use multiple points of contact. Trying to duplicate the same interaction with mouse and keyboard is ancient and slow by comparison.
:-)
I'm not sure how far the physical technology used in the demonstration can be developed, but I do think it was aimed more at investigating new concepts in the software for user interfaces - things like the two-fingered scroll/zoom look so incredibly obvious when compared with scroll-bars, cursor keys, scroll-wheels and other abstractions...
Anyway. Do hurry up with this stuff. My typewriter-with-a-television computer is looking increasingly anachronistic.
Entirely different - it's based on something called 'frustrated internal reflection'. Simple version: you have a thin slab of transparent perspex with LEDs around the sides. The light from the LEDs is kept inside thanks to total internal reflection - it's a bit like a big flat piece of fibre optic cable in a sense.
When you place a finger or other appendage on the upper surface of the perspex, the total internal reflection breaks down and the fingertip (or whatever) gets illuminated - you track this with a camera pointing upwards at the perspex. To get the computer display gubbins, you also have a video projector pointing at the perspex.
I'm not sure how amenable it is to miniaturisation, but since it's used in fingerprint readers (without the video display) it's probably not too bad - presumably you'd have to change the projector and camera to flat equivalents, of course...
(Something I noticed on the page last week - a reference to work on identifying which finger is touching the display. He's updated that sentence to "Wouldn't it also be nice to identify which finger (e.g. thumb, index, etc.) is associated with each contact?" - but I'd had a sudden vision of this thing using fingerprints as, well, unique finger identification tags. The guy behind it seems pretty big on computer vision, and is also working on stuff like a "new generation of CMOS imaging sensors that feature on-board signal processing functionality, we are experimenting with creating a 1000fps non-invasive eye-tracker for under $100" - maybe some custom hardware for tracking and zooming in on the glowing fingerprints and identifying the fingers from there?)
My PC's specs were slightly above that of an Xbox, and with the Windows port of Halo I got performance slightly greater than that of an Xbox.
Given that the original needed a GeForce 3.5ish to run at 640x480, 30fps - I think people were a bit ambitious in hoping the port would run with full shaders at some very high resolutions on typical PC hardware of the day. Now, though, it runs very smoothly on my GeForce 6600 at 1280x960...
... the raging violence in France ...
Which wasn't directly related to Islam, but was more a result of deeper-rooted issues with French immigration policy, poverty and the like. Sorry.
With regard to the more recent problems, it's still some small proportion of Muslims causing some horrific tensions. My message to this silent, moderate Muslim majority: stop playing around with mumbled, after-the-event apologies, and politicise. When there's British National Party activity here, they're often tailed by people waving anti-Nazi banners. Similarly, there should be people waving 'Islam Against Violence' placards whenever these racist twits preach, demonstrate or do anything - please, please take back your religion and culture from these hateful, vocal scumbags...
Games Workshop is surprisingly lenient regarding use of its creations in third-party computer games mods - scroll down to the 'Modifications, Total Conversions, and Games' section. An excerpt:
So if you're using Games Workshop names and ideas in a Games Workshop-derived computer game, I think there'll be even less for them to complain about...
But that one card's access time is just HORRIDNESS. As the author said, that was bundled for free with a camera, and you do get what you pay for. Wow.
;-)
;-)
As a kind of contrast - with the camera I got shortly before Christmas, I got 1.5GB of free CompactFlash storage. One 1GB card which came in the box (it seems a pretty fast one, too) and upon registering the camera, a 256MB one through the post.
Unfortunately, SanDisk's supplies were apparently a bit low, so it metamorphosed into a 512MB effort on the way. It arrived with a covering letter, apologising for any possible inconvenience...
I think CompactFlash is meant to have lasted so long because, basically, it's a crap standard. It's supposed to be a miniaturised, electrically compatible IDE - memory cards impersonate old-fashioned IDE hard disks, requiring controller circuitry specifically for this task. Contrast this with, say, SmartMedia as used in my older camera - sleek, thin, and with the controller circuitry in the camera, and thus impossible to upgrade. Camera came with a 16MB card which I augmented with a 64MB monster, and eventually a stack of 128MB cards - the maximum size possible. Oops. Dead-end.
I wonder when the first camera that comes with a freebie 1TB memory card will be available - and more importantly, will that be considered an unusable minimum?
Let's see: as a web programmer, the Commodore 64 is missing 32-bit support (showstopper), speed, memory (I work with source code reaching several hundred kilobytes), a proper colour display, etc. Someone tell me - why _should_ I use the Commodore 64? To save a few hundred dollars - a small fraction of my total software cost? Etc. Etc. Etc.
...
;-)
If you need Photoshop, then go ahead and continue using it. Whinge to Adobe if it doesn't work on Linux, not free software developers. The GIMP's fun, free, written by hobbyists and for certain tasks is quite capable - for people like myself, who like mucking about with building new computer game textures, create simple graphics for web development and occasionally fiddle with photos we've taken, it's great. And slightly cheaper than Photoshop.
After around eight years of using The GIMP, I've found I can sit down in front of Photoshop and often, within minutes, be far more proficient in its use than the official user of that computer. Have I thought about buying a copy? Yes - but right now it doesn't really offer me anything that I can do in The GIMP already. That may change - and when it does, I'll buy a copy of Photoshop. It's bloody awesome software, after all - but for the moment, I'm quite happy with my metaphorical little Commodore 64...
erm last time I loaded up the GIMP I couldn't even use any of the OS X fonts. Maybe you can (can you?) but that's a pretty big reason to use it for home-graphics use (ie when you can't afford/need photoshop).
;-)
Gimp.app will make use of installed OS X fonts by default, but the list is somewhat polluted by rarely-used variants used for far-Eastern languages and similar, and irritatingly it doesn't pick up on the different styles available for some fonts. I think I'll report a bug...
Simple test... create a new image, use the ellipse select tool to create a circle, stroke that circle. Look how absolutely nasty and NOT SMOOTH the stroke is.
Work-around: use the ellipse select tool to create a circle, Menu: Select: To Path, clear the selection then Menu: Edit: Stroke Path. Beautifully smooth, plus it's kept the path so you can edit with the bezier tool and whatnot - have a look in the Paths tab of the Layers dialogue box.
Why can't the installer for GIMP/Mac do this (or, if it isn't installed with an installer program, GIMP itself at first startup, just like it creates all those directories etc.)?
:-)
There's no installer (like 'proper' Mac applications, you just drag the program from the disk image into your Applications folder), and by the time The GIMP itself is running, X11.app is already up and running so will ignore any configuration changes (probably just until it's next run, though).
However, there is the 'Gimp.app' wrapper program which starts up X11, provides an icon for drag-and-drop, etc. - it would probably be fairly straightforward to add a 'Do you want this config option changing?' thing for when it's first run.
I think I'll go and suggest that right now, actually.
Perhaps not ideal for the hypothetical 'average Mac user' who will have a fit if asked to go anywhere near a command-line, but the click-to-raise toolbox thing is easily fixed; quit X11.app and at the terminal, enter the following:Start The GIMP again, and behold! Clicking on the toolbox now works properly. Annoying that this has to be done, but personally I'd blame Apple for silly defaults...
Nah. Boll-ocks!
Do you know who Hedy Lamarr was? If you were alive when Blazing Saddles was released, you were expected to. Not anymore, though. She's been lost to history.
;-)
I know! She co-invented spread-spectrum radio communications during the second world war!
Oh, and she was an actress too. And to point this back towards computer games, the pet headcrab in Half-Life 2 was called Lamarr. As in Hedy. Geddit?
As for this Scottish guy - something tells me he may not have as much success with the ladies after his change in careers. Before: "I'm a professional tennis player" - good! After: "I'm a professional computer-game player" - you must be joking...
When you plug multiple monitors into a new Nvidia or ATI card (or cards in SLI or Crossfire), they actually show up to the OS as additional monitors. This is actually the perfered behaviour because it lets you use monitors with different resolutions and sizes together and in non-traditional arangements. Unfortunatly, it means that actual multiple monitor support has to be specifically coded into games.
I think the apparent multiple monitor support is often a useful abstraction - I get the impression that it can be just one big framebuffer shared between multiple displays.
At least, I quite accidentally got a 2560x960, dual-screen Darwinia when I first ran it on Linux with my GeForce 6600. It looked pretty amazing, but was a bit too difficult to control thanks to the split down the middle. I eventually added a screenmode which ignored the right-hand monitor for gaming purposes...
I'm pretty sure Gimp.app is now a universal binary, and has been so for a while - it's packaged as a self-contained .app which you can drag straight into your Applications folder.
Oh, and it's completely free. No dubious paid downloads costing $29.95 or anything.
Halo for the Mac did happen eventually... ;-)
The only there keys keyboard you will ever need is this one.
;-)
They've already thought of that...
(Screenshot because the site seems intent on dying horribly. Wonder why?)
In a clothes shop just after Christmas, I saw a large point-of-sale keyboard which had a numeric keypad with small monochrome LCD screens in the keys. As the sales person entered information, the text on the keys would change - I was immediately reminded of the Optimus keyboard.
It didn't look particularly new, either - anyone else seen such things?
I think the major limiting factor in game rendering systems at the moment isn't the programming, but the content.
Where a room in a Doom map could have been a single rectangle with simple textures on the walls, floor and ceiling, a single lighting value and a simple sprite-based barrel for decoration, an equivalent room in a modern FPS might have thousands of triangles, per-pixel lighting from multiple light sources (each placed manually for the best visual effect), high-resolution textures with multiple components (albedo, specular, normal maps), decal textures with complex shaders, and highly detailed barrels with thousands of triangles and their own unique, complex textures...
The rendering hardware might have become massively more powerful, but for a typical indoors FPS the environments haven't become any more complex in their layouts, only in the detailing. F.E.A.R. is a brilliant example of this - the demo brought my PC to a juddering standstill when rendering some incredibly lacklustre scenes - generic alleyways, rooms with pipes, warehouses...
Strip the fancy shaders, props and lighting away, and the layout is pretty similar to a game from perhaps ten years ago.
What I'd be interested to see would be a game with relatively simple textures, geometry and so on, but rendering so much of it that it actually gives modern hardware a decent workout. Wild examples - a game where you're trying to escape a crime-scene in a city with realistically busy streets; FPS games with genuine swarms of monsters (instead of methodically shooting individual enemies placed by the designers, perhaps you'd be carefully clearing your route, blocking potential entrances where monsters could get in); an RPG city with crowd scenes involving hundreds or thousands of procedurally modified characters (imagine Elite, but with people instead of star systems...)
Instead, we keep getting Doom with fancier graphics.
Perfect story for this question. What books, and other resources does the slashdot audience recommend for the beginning modder?
:-)
I haven't seen any useful books (although admittedly I've never looked) - I guess the best way of learning is by doing. If you're interested in the Source engine, have a look at the Valve Developer Community wiki, which has a huge amount of information available. There are also innumerable web forums and other communities dedicated to mapping, modelling, coding and whatever - I'm sure there'll be one aimed precisely at whichever game you're interested in.
My best advice would be to start small. Don't make the usual mistake of creating a team intent on building the next Counter-Strike killer - instead, start off by building something like a deathmatch map, a new prop, a new texture or some altered behaviour in the game's code. If it's worth releasing, then release it - otherwise, continue learning and having fun.
You don't have to create a massive total conversion to get recognition - for example, the first MINERVA map has no new code, a couple of modified textures, a few transplanted sounds and a new music track - other than the map itself, it's all standard Half-Life 2 content. But well over 160,000 downloads and counting.