It's a nice engine for people who want to get going quickly and it's very artist friendly which is ideal as coders shouldn't be fucking around with art related tasks.
On PC/Mac, I could definitely look into Unity but for mobile I'll avoid it for another little while as it IS pretty CPU heavy. Their C# like script language (mono) runs on a mono-emulation layer which interprets the byte code at run time which is nice to make it platform agnostic but it will cost you! I'm not sure if this has been upgraded to do JIT compiling.. I would hope they did but a lot of coders I know who are doing mobile projects with unity have speed as their biggest complaint! Even simple games with minimal geometry and shaders doesn't run nearly as quick as it should!
As a soon to be full-time mobile game developer, I had done some research into the Android platform and it turns out targeting version 2.1 and up is the way to go:
http://developer.android.com/resources/dashboard/platform-versions.html
12.6% are still running 1.6 and 1.7. Not only that 2.1 devices are much more capable with faster CPU and GPUs.
In my case, I plan to make an engine that run OpenGL ES 2.0 only. Screw 1.1 and it's fixed function pipeline and its wimpy ARM 9 CPU's!
If only it were so simple.
As a kid I was always in the middle of dirt and germs. I was a filthy kid... guess what, that didn't do SHIT as I still had plenty of food allergies to contend with. Granted nothing life threatening but food allergies are not pleasant at all.
I've always enjoyed coding with MS build chains. Coding the XBOX360 is so straight forward as is making Win32 apps that use D3D. Same with the Windows Mobile devices. It's a breeze to write and debug apps with Visual Studio.
However, hardware support is another story. They introduced Direct3D Mobile in Windows Mobile 5 but because WinMo up to now has been something of a wild west, some devices had D3D drivers while others didn't. And the ones that did weren't the best. Very few did OpenGL ES. You could however, quite easily get access to the linear frame buffer and just write your own rasterizers which worked quite well!
I've talked with some WinMobile insiders and they told me that WinMo 7 would be way stricter when it came to hardware and device variance. OpenGL ES would be the norm and would replace Direct3D Mobile.
If they can sort the hardware issues and force manufactures (HTC you listening, you ass clowns) to implement quality drivers, they could very much regain from 4th spot where they are now!
I didn't expect the Conservatives to do a fucking thing on this one! Goodness forbid they tell a Canadian company that they can't fuck over their clients.
The NDP and Greens have been the most vocal about making a big change in the Telco industry!
The Liberals.... meh I'm sure if you pressured hard enough they would do something.
STAPH doesn't stand a chance against it and it won't fuck up your bacterial flora in your gut like anti-biotics will (thus further weakening your immune system).
Unless I'm coding some high speed spASM code... In regular C/C++ I stick to commenting a whole block as opposed to each line. I've worked with overly anal coders who code each line.. I want to kick them in the teeth.
I've had mixed success with it as far as cognitive functioning goes. Taken alone, I've noticed a little improvement but nothing drastic. Depending on the brand I would actually get a big of an allergic reaction from it! Im trying a new formula called Memory Essentials. It contains:
Alpha-Glycerylphosphorycholine (alpha-GPC) (from soy) - 250 mg
Vitamin B6 (as pyridoxine HCI) - 76 mg
Folic Acid - 100 mcg
Vitamin B12 (as cyanocobalamin, methycobalamin) - 50 mcg
Pantothenic Acid (as calcium panthothenate) - 100 mg
Phosphatidylserine Complex (from soy) - 100 mg
Green Tea Extract (leaf) - 100 mg
Blueberry Powder - 50 mg
Ginkgo Biloba Extract - 100 mg
Giving it a try this month. It;s making a difference no doubt but not sure how big. I'll go without it next month and compare.
How ever one supplement that DEFINITLY makes a difference for me is L-Tyrosine as it's a precursor to L-Dopa aka dopamine. My main problem area has always been focus over memory retention. Used to take ritalin as a kid, that shit made me into a zombie!
The reason the byte code runs so fast is that ARM cpu's with the Jazelle extension can execute byte code directly on the CPU!
Oh and ya very good point about NOT going crazy with malloc/frees in your code... that's just retarded!
ACTUALLY... the last time this happened was RIGHT before Iran was to make the official announcement of the secondary oil bourse being converted from US dollars to Euros.
The secondary oil bourse is used for indirect petroleum products like pharmaceuticals, tires, rubber, plastic and what not. Their (Iran's) plan was to trade secondary and eventually primary oil products on a fair trade market in Euros rather than US dollars. This little stunt does harm to the US green back as it devalues it but the Europeans don't have much of a problem with that!
Coincidence that wire was cut RIGHT before this announcement? Maybe!
As an engine coder for Windows Mobile.. all I ask of nVidia (and all hardware manufactureres) is to PROVIDE PROPER Direct 3D mobile drivers! There are SO many devices on the market that feature 3D hardware yet it's dormant because there are no drivers for it!
I actually thought the iPhone was shit until I finally saw the specs. Damn that thing is packing some nice power!
The CPU is an ARM1176 that features vector floating point capability and Jazelle technology (the CPU natively runs Java bytecode). It's also clocked anywhere between 524 and 667 MHz.
The graphics chip is a PowerVR MBX which is a very decent mobile 3D accelerator that is also found in some Windows Mobile devices as well. Apparently they (apple) have provided an interface to the accelerator via OpenGL ES. Lets hope the upcoming SDK is open enough to let us write some good games for that little fucker!
The Texas Instruments OMAP 850 SoC (System on Chip) is actually a pretty decent platform! I code a lot on the Windows Mobile platform and this chipset is featured in quite a few SmartPhones like the Samsung BlackJack and many PocketPC devices from HTC.
The OMAP 850 has an ARM926EJ-S CPU at it's core that features Jazelle technology (thats the J) that is capable of executing Java bytecode in HARDWARE! The E stands for Extended instructions which allow for saturated arithemetic type operations... very useful! The 850 chipset also includes hardware 2D acceleration but is useless unless there is on board video memory which hopefully they have SOME! This SoC also features the ARM MMU (memory management unit) so this primes it for multi-tasking OS's. I'm guessing the Linux Kernal runs natively while all apps run Java. I'm not sure if how ARM does Java instructions, they are pretty hush on that.
The big bottleneck in these devices is usually the bus speed so hopefully they've clocked the bus at the rate of the CPU.
Actually, this isn't some flakey hack by any means. I'm a coder at this company and currently working in our mobile division. The technology has been perfected and runs efficiently (and even more so once I'm done optimizing key functions in ARM assembler). We have done quite a bit of testing and even in situations where there is lots of motion in the scene, the software is able to compensate quite nicely! We actually use the lowest resolution of the camera so power consumption is minimized. Sure accelerometers are more accurate BUT because they are so expensive, manufacturers are reluctant to use it and we offer a good alternative so long as you have a camera handy on your phone.
As for the technology, we can do quite a lot of cool things with it. As the article stated, we have 3 distinct types of motion we can detect - rock, roll and shake.
Roll can be used for ball rolling games, UI navigation or even as FPS controls. Shake has been used for shuffling an MP3 play list but can be used for rolling dice in an RPG or shooting virtual craps! The rock is perfect for "reloading" a gun or maybe throwing something in game. We had one app which allowed you to launch virtual pies at people. That was a popular one!
One thing is certain... we have done something right for Japan's LARGEST cell phone carrier to have picked us up for use in 2 major game releases using their phones - Crash Bandicoot and Katamari Damashii not to mention our tech has been in used in alot of other games already. We have our camera tracking on many platforms including the PS2, XBOX 360 and PC.
The French hate the Americans way to much to ever become like them.:) I totally applaud their move to open source and I'm hoping one day to see my government (Canada... once we get rid of the conservatives) move toward open source. The cost of switching would be initially high but once we stop forking out shitloads of $$$ to M$ we would for sure come out ahead. Create a nice chunk of IT related work too!
I would even like to see a distro that caters to multiple levels. One for home users, another for goverment, another for law-enforcement, health care, intel, military.. etc. Has this idea ever been looked at before?
Woot.. I had a dumbed down version of the Trash 80.... the MC-10! It was a small and very sleek little unit.... couldn't do to much with it. THen got a Vic-20.. and then a second Vic-20 and fuck I loved them... I hand entered so many games from those magazines... and when you misplaced just ONE digit... ka-boom!
Then came my first 8086 and the rest is history...
The infectious bacteria on this planet are very quickly becoming anti-biotic resistant because humans gulp down anti-biotics for damn well anything (north Americans especially). You go see a doctor and complain about having a bad sore throat, they will probably throw some anti-biotic your way. The ironic part is that anti-biotics actually kill the beneficial flora in your intestinal tract that is used to maintain a strong immune system and kill off bad infectious bugs that infest us in the first place. In alternative medicine thinking, the main steps in combating an infectious bacteria based disease is to use high doses of PRO-BIOTICS (which fortify the bodies flora as well as using silver colloidal which is lethal to germs and bad bacteria while keeping the good bacteria intact. In fact alot of hospitals use it where common anti-biotics fail. There are even natural anti-biotics which are way less taxing on the system such as garlic concentrate, olive leaf and grapefruit seed extract
Another interesting thing to note is the fact that there are some very powerful bacteria found in the earth that will strongly fortify human flora. These are known as homeostatic soil organisms. This company makes such a product:
Slashdot Mirror
It's a nice engine for people who want to get going quickly and it's very artist friendly which is ideal as coders shouldn't be fucking around with art related tasks. On PC/Mac, I could definitely look into Unity but for mobile I'll avoid it for another little while as it IS pretty CPU heavy. Their C# like script language (mono) runs on a mono-emulation layer which interprets the byte code at run time which is nice to make it platform agnostic but it will cost you! I'm not sure if this has been upgraded to do JIT compiling.. I would hope they did but a lot of coders I know who are doing mobile projects with unity have speed as their biggest complaint! Even simple games with minimal geometry and shaders doesn't run nearly as quick as it should!
As a soon to be full-time mobile game developer, I had done some research into the Android platform and it turns out targeting version 2.1 and up is the way to go: http://developer.android.com/resources/dashboard/platform-versions.html 12.6% are still running 1.6 and 1.7. Not only that 2.1 devices are much more capable with faster CPU and GPUs. In my case, I plan to make an engine that run OpenGL ES 2.0 only. Screw 1.1 and it's fixed function pipeline and its wimpy ARM 9 CPU's!
If only it were so simple. As a kid I was always in the middle of dirt and germs. I was a filthy kid... guess what, that didn't do SHIT as I still had plenty of food allergies to contend with. Granted nothing life threatening but food allergies are not pleasant at all.
Good acid... he takes a lot! I'm guessing a super dose of white clinical.. that shit will really make your mind bend space and time or so you think.
I've always enjoyed coding with MS build chains. Coding the XBOX360 is so straight forward as is making Win32 apps that use D3D. Same with the Windows Mobile devices. It's a breeze to write and debug apps with Visual Studio. However, hardware support is another story. They introduced Direct3D Mobile in Windows Mobile 5 but because WinMo up to now has been something of a wild west, some devices had D3D drivers while others didn't. And the ones that did weren't the best. Very few did OpenGL ES. You could however, quite easily get access to the linear frame buffer and just write your own rasterizers which worked quite well! I've talked with some WinMobile insiders and they told me that WinMo 7 would be way stricter when it came to hardware and device variance. OpenGL ES would be the norm and would replace Direct3D Mobile. If they can sort the hardware issues and force manufactures (HTC you listening, you ass clowns) to implement quality drivers, they could very much regain from 4th spot where they are now!
I didn't expect the Conservatives to do a fucking thing on this one! Goodness forbid they tell a Canadian company that they can't fuck over their clients. The NDP and Greens have been the most vocal about making a big change in the Telco industry! The Liberals.... meh I'm sure if you pressured hard enough they would do something.
Ironically it was the US who was principally involved in the formation of the Taliban in the first place.
Actually that was the Unreal 1 engine that did that.
STAPH doesn't stand a chance against it and it won't fuck up your bacterial flora in your gut like anti-biotics will (thus further weakening your immune system).
Unless I'm coding some high speed spASM code... In regular C/C++ I stick to commenting a whole block as opposed to each line. I've worked with overly anal coders who code each line.. I want to kick them in the teeth.
I've had mixed success with it as far as cognitive functioning goes. Taken alone, I've noticed a little improvement but nothing drastic. Depending on the brand I would actually get a big of an allergic reaction from it! Im trying a new formula called Memory Essentials. It contains: Alpha-Glycerylphosphorycholine (alpha-GPC) (from soy) - 250 mg Vitamin B6 (as pyridoxine HCI) - 76 mg Folic Acid - 100 mcg Vitamin B12 (as cyanocobalamin, methycobalamin) - 50 mcg Pantothenic Acid (as calcium panthothenate) - 100 mg Phosphatidylserine Complex (from soy) - 100 mg Green Tea Extract (leaf) - 100 mg Blueberry Powder - 50 mg Ginkgo Biloba Extract - 100 mg Giving it a try this month. It;s making a difference no doubt but not sure how big. I'll go without it next month and compare. How ever one supplement that DEFINITLY makes a difference for me is L-Tyrosine as it's a precursor to L-Dopa aka dopamine. My main problem area has always been focus over memory retention. Used to take ritalin as a kid, that shit made me into a zombie!
With C++ filming it all....
The reason the byte code runs so fast is that ARM cpu's with the Jazelle extension can execute byte code directly on the CPU! Oh and ya very good point about NOT going crazy with malloc/frees in your code... that's just retarded!
I'm SO happy about this! Do they allow for ARM assembler code in the NDK as well? That'd be TIGHT!
Objective C is the retarded inbred child of C and C++ after that one night they hit the sake and redbull!
ACTUALLY... the last time this happened was RIGHT before Iran was to make the official announcement of the secondary oil bourse being converted from US dollars to Euros. The secondary oil bourse is used for indirect petroleum products like pharmaceuticals, tires, rubber, plastic and what not. Their (Iran's) plan was to trade secondary and eventually primary oil products on a fair trade market in Euros rather than US dollars. This little stunt does harm to the US green back as it devalues it but the Europeans don't have much of a problem with that! Coincidence that wire was cut RIGHT before this announcement? Maybe!
I FUCKING HATE: if (condition) { } else { } OR any variation there of. It's: if (condition) { } else { } AND THAT'S IT! I WILL FIGHT YOU ALL!!!
As an engine coder for Windows Mobile.. all I ask of nVidia (and all hardware manufactureres) is to PROVIDE PROPER Direct 3D mobile drivers! There are SO many devices on the market that feature 3D hardware yet it's dormant because there are no drivers for it!
I hate you all....
I actually thought the iPhone was shit until I finally saw the specs. Damn that thing is packing some nice power!
The CPU is an ARM1176 that features vector floating point capability and Jazelle technology (the CPU natively runs Java bytecode). It's also clocked anywhere between 524 and 667 MHz.
The graphics chip is a PowerVR MBX which is a very decent mobile 3D accelerator that is also found in some Windows Mobile devices as well. Apparently they (apple) have provided an interface to the accelerator via OpenGL ES. Lets hope the upcoming SDK is open enough to let us write some good games for that little fucker!
The Texas Instruments OMAP 850 SoC (System on Chip) is actually a pretty decent platform! I code a lot on the Windows Mobile platform and this chipset is featured in quite a few SmartPhones like the Samsung BlackJack and many PocketPC devices from HTC.
The OMAP 850 has an ARM926EJ-S CPU at it's core that features Jazelle technology (thats the J) that is capable of executing Java bytecode in HARDWARE! The E stands for Extended instructions which allow for saturated arithemetic type operations... very useful! The 850 chipset also includes hardware 2D acceleration but is useless unless there is on board video memory which hopefully they have SOME! This SoC also features the ARM MMU (memory management unit) so this primes it for multi-tasking OS's. I'm guessing the Linux Kernal runs natively while all apps run Java. I'm not sure if how ARM does Java instructions, they are pretty hush on that.
The big bottleneck in these devices is usually the bus speed so hopefully they've clocked the bus at the rate of the CPU.
Actually, this isn't some flakey hack by any means. I'm a coder at this company and currently working in our mobile division. The technology has been perfected and runs efficiently (and even more so once I'm done optimizing key functions in ARM assembler). We have done quite a bit of testing and even in situations where there is lots of motion in the scene, the software is able to compensate quite nicely! We actually use the lowest resolution of the camera so power consumption is minimized. Sure accelerometers are more accurate BUT because they are so expensive, manufacturers are reluctant to use it and we offer a good alternative so long as you have a camera handy on your phone.
h tml eID=23946
As for the technology, we can do quite a lot of cool things with it. As the article stated, we have 3 distinct types of motion we can detect - rock, roll and shake.
Roll can be used for ball rolling games, UI navigation or even as FPS controls. Shake has been used for shuffling an MP3 play list but can be used for rolling dice in an RPG or shooting virtual craps! The rock is perfect for "reloading" a gun or maybe throwing something in game. We had one app which allowed you to launch virtual pies at people. That was a popular one!
One thing is certain... we have done something right for Japan's LARGEST cell phone carrier to have picked us up for use in 2 major game releases using their phones - Crash Bandicoot and Katamari Damashii not to mention our tech has been in used in alot of other games already. We have our camera tracking on many platforms including the PS2, XBOX 360 and PC.
Here is the docomo press release:
http://www.nttdocomo.com/pr/2007/001335.html
What others are saying:
http://www.tmcnet.com/usubmit/2007/04/25/2553676.
http://www.digitalmediaasia.com/default.asp?Artic
The French hate the Americans way to much to ever become like them. :) I totally applaud their move to open source and I'm hoping one day to see my government (Canada... once we get rid of the conservatives) move toward open source. The cost of switching would be initially high but once we stop forking out shitloads of $$$ to M$ we would for sure come out ahead. Create a nice chunk of IT related work too!
I would even like to see a distro that caters to multiple levels. One for home users, another for goverment, another for law-enforcement, health care, intel, military.. etc. Has this idea ever been looked at before?
It's true.. he's being totally serial...
Woot.. I had a dumbed down version of the Trash 80.... the MC-10! It was a small and very sleek little unit.... couldn't do to much with it. THen got a Vic-20.. and then a second Vic-20 and fuck I loved them... I hand entered so many games from those magazines... and when you misplaced just ONE digit... ka-boom! Then came my first 8086 and the rest is history...
The infectious bacteria on this planet are very quickly becoming anti-biotic resistant because humans gulp down anti-biotics for damn well anything (north Americans especially). You go see a doctor and complain about having a bad sore throat, they will probably throw some anti-biotic your way. The ironic part is that anti-biotics actually kill the beneficial flora in your intestinal tract that is used to maintain a strong immune system and kill off bad infectious bugs that infest us in the first place. In alternative medicine thinking, the main steps in combating an infectious bacteria based disease is to use high doses of PRO-BIOTICS (which fortify the bodies flora as well as using silver colloidal which is lethal to germs and bad bacteria while keeping the good bacteria intact. In fact alot of hospitals use it where common anti-biotics fail. There are even natural anti-biotics which are way less taxing on the system such as garlic concentrate, olive leaf and grapefruit seed extract
n se.shtml/
Another interesting thing to note is the fact that there are some very powerful bacteria found in the earth that will strongly fortify human flora. These are known as homeostatic soil organisms. This company makes such a product:
http://www.gardenoflifeusa.com/detail_primal_defe