IMO, we've never had more choices or viable platforms as gamers - my first console was an Odyssey 2, and my first computer gaming was on an Apple II+, so I've been doing this a while now. Anyone who is longing for days long gone really needs to take off the rose-coloured glasses. Most of those older games were, if you look at it objectively, pretty trite and repetitive by today's standards. They were amazing to us largely because of their novelty, and we've elevated them on the pedestal of nostalgia.
Nothing against the classics - they were amazing for their day, but I do think a bit of perspective is in order. When I was a kid, I would have killed for an amazing RPG like Skyrim, or an MMO like Guild Wars 2, or for the sheer creativity to be found in Minecraft. I picked up Limbo the other day, and have been immensely enjoying myself - it's an incredibly clever and atmospheric platformer/puzzler. I'm still playing Puzzle Quest too, a relatively low-budget but fun puzzle-RPG hybrid. More recently, I've been going through my "bought a while ago but haven't played" list like Halo 4 and Uncharted 3, and on the PC side recently picked up The Witcher 1 & 2 in a Steam deal. I've enjoyed all these games immensely so far.
Granted, there's a lot of crap out there too. Freemium games? Yeah, I stay the hell away from those too. But I don't see how crowdfunding can be blamed when it's simply opened up the market to more niche games. Sure, some of those bets won't pay off, but welcome to venture capitalism. I'm not sure how that should be a surprise to anyone. 80% of everything is crap, anyhow. It holds true now, and it was true in the past as well. You just need to look for the products that rise to the surface... you know, read reviews, judge based on developer history.
Some old icons in the industry are now past their prime. Blizzard, Bioware, and id, longstanding favorites of mine, have all sold out. I'll no longer expect anything great from them, although I'm always willing to be surprised. Instead, younger and hungrier development shops will take their place... maybe ArenaNet and Bungie. And garage development is no longer relegated to the past either thanks to crowdfunding and improvement in tools, technology, and especially distribution platforms.
Personally, I think it's a pretty exciting time for the gaming industry, and I'm happy I'm in the middle of it.
In the process of rewriting, it's inevitable that a ton of brand-new bugs will be introduced in the new codebase, and you'll have lost all the time and effort hardening the library and fixing all of the thousands of previously exploitable issues.
I think talk of scrapping or rewriting the library is a bit of an overreaction caused by the scale and scope of the issue, and is certainly not plausible in the short term anyhow. I'd say the proper thing to do is to halt development of new features for a time and investigate the viability of addressing some of the underlying issues that have been pointed out which may have contributed to this bug: Remove the custom memory allocator, or ensure it's off by default. Start writing and using a proper unit test and fuzz testing framework. Document and clean up source with proper variable names and comments to make things easier for those reviewing/auditing code. Make sure the library compiles cleanly. Pay more attention to code that dynamically allocates memory or accepts data from user. Create a better review process. Etc, etc.
Every time I make a programming mistake or introduce a bug, I ask myself "What could I have done that would have prevented this from happening in the first place? What can I realistically do now to make sure it doesn't happen again?" The OpenSSL team really needs to be asking themselves these questions right now.
Note that questions like these have to be addressed in a realistic manner as well. "It needs to be thrown out and rewritten from scratch" or "we shouldn't be using C in the first place" are not realistic solutions. Whatever merits Ada has as a language (as one example I've heard), it's simply not going to replace C as a low-level systems and library language anytime in the near future. Language choice is also impacted by issues such as efficiency, programmer availability, interoperability, shared libraries and sample/test code availability, and so on.
I don't think this is the time to throw hyperbolic accusations or wildly impractical "solutions" around. It's a great time for some serious introspection and development process review, however, not only for the OpenSSL team, but for any sort of project like theirs with similar responsibilities. Even conservative fields of study such as civil engineering have had their spectacular disasters/failures. The thing to do is to assess the situation, learn from your mistakes, and then rigorously apply what you've learned so that you don't make those same mistakes again. It often takes a serious catalyst for that to happen, so in some ways, perhaps we should be glad that this happened sooner rather than later.
Actually that's the planned idea, that when "win9" rolls out that's the "eol" for 32bit.
I'd love to see a source for that assertion you're making. There are hundreds of thousands of legacy 32-bit Windows apps that users continue to rely on. MS is not simply going to "eol" them starting with Windows 9. Seeing how near-perfect 32-bit compatibility is already built into both Windows as well as all modern 64-bit processors, they would have to actively remove that existing feature to break compatibility in the future. Why in world would they do that and destroy their own OS's ecosystem? That just makes no sense to me.
Straight C++ is effectively platform agnostic, and that includes 32/64-bit flavors of Windows, of course. As I mentioned, I can compile my game for either 32-bit or 64-bit platforms without any changes to the source code. That's what I meant by "flip a switch" - I didn't mean using the same binary, in case that wasn't clear (you're correct in that regard). A better way to phrase it would be "flip a switch and recompile the project".
No I'm not misunderstanding. You're simply not paying attention to what's going on. There's a difference between an emulation layer, and native support. Currently we have multiple flavors of OS's with native support in either flavor, in a few years we're going to have a single flavor of OS support with an extreme drop off in support for x32. We're already seeing this in gaming with x32 binaries being thrown into the trashbin, and the entire codebase thrown and ditched. The most recent example in gaming of zero x32 support is Watch Dogs for the PC.
Your post seemed to imply that 32-bit apps would fail to run in Windows 9, which is simply not the case. Also, I fail to see the problem with the world moving to 64-bit native OSes with a 32-bit compatibility mode. And what do you mean "an extreme dropoff" of support? 32-bit applications run flawlessly under 64-bit Windows. It's not some soft of half-assed software emulation. 64-bit processors still support the original x86 instruction sets all the way back to the original 8086 and executes those natively. The emulation layer (Windows on Windows) is for the Windows API, not for the binary's instruction set, so it's fairly minimal in terms of overhead.
Also, you seem to be under the impression that you need to completely rewrite your game engine for 64-bits, which isn't true. My current game engine is both 64-bit and 32-bit compatible with zero differences in the codebase itself. Simply throw a switch in the configuration and it's done. There's some types of code you do have to actually port, such as inline assembly, which is not allowed in 64-bit, or any tricks using pointers that rely on a 32-bit size, but for most C/C++ code, there's no difference at all if written correctly. If a game company decides to abandon 32-bit platforms, it's because they've determined that the market can now move ahead with 64-bit platform. This allows them to push beyond the 2GB memory limit of 32-bit applications, which is becoming a serious bottleneck for modern PC games (we had to work pretty hard on my last commercial title to fit in this limit).
Anyhow, I'm not quite sure of your overall point. Do you feel that MS should continue releasing 32-bit operating systems even though there are no 32-bit-only processors being manufactured for desktop or laptop computers, and haven't been for years?
But it's the content of the steps you provide and not even their number which cause the consternation with Windows 8. What about the bottom right corner is so magical that it compels people to move their mouse there in the first place to discover this menu? What about "Settings" would lead people to believe that this is where the power control is? Yes, these are easily learned, but the more of these non-intuitive steps there are, the more frustrating things are for the user. I remember how frustrated I was trying to figure out how to shut down a full screen metro app for the first time.
The best user interfaces have a sense of intuitive discovery about them. Have you ever been to a "mystery meat" website? That's where the designer was being hip and minimalistic, and forced the user to hover over a bunch of obscure icons to figure out what the hell each one of those do before they click. Generally speaking, it's a usability disaster that no serious web designer would make today, yet Microsoft managed to do exactly this.
That's why the "Start" menu worked so well when when it was introduced in Windows 95 and continued forward. It was a reliable fallback for users in order to access all functionality on their computer. Not necessarily the fastest or most efficient, but it was all right there, easily discoverable with few clicks right from there. Every application, every computer setting one would commonly use, and yes, also functionality for shutting down the computer. At the time, the start button got some mild ribbing for being the method used for shutting down your computer, but by and large, that was largely just playing for laughs.
When I bought a mac mini recently and used OSX for the first time (I hadn't used an Apple computer since my Apple II+), my experience was completely different. Everything was slightly unfamiliar, but it was a gorgeous visual experience and not at all hard to figure out because of the shared paradigm of most all modern desktop environments (closing a window - I'll guess the red X in the upper left corner). Once I wrapped my head around a few conceptual differences (such as the top-most window, and the separation between the app window and instance), I pretty much felt at home.
It's pretty incredible to me that, as a longtime Windows user (since 3.0), I felt roughly the same level of discomfort when learning an entire new operating system as when simply upgrading from Windows 7 to Windows 8, which has never happened before. In previous version upgrades, I always felt like the UI was evolving and improving for the better (like with the Windows 7 taskbar - only took me a day or two and I fell in love with it). In OSX, I don't feel like I'm being bludgeoned with an IOS-wanna-be interface every time I have to start up an application or perform any sort of OS-related task. Apple understands that these are two wildly different computing paradigms. Why didn't MS figure this out?
Yep. I'll skip Win8 altogether, I think, and wait for 9.
Don't worry, I'm sure you'll enjoy the bitching and moaning when Win9 is released since it's supposed to be x64 only. Just imagine the whining and crying... "Y U NO SUPPORT x32!!!1111ELEVENTYONE1111!!!" Oh I can see it now...good times, it's just going to be like the nuts who couldn't be bothered to build/buy a new $250 PC and move to Win7 away from XP, you know the ones who only use their PC's for email and browsing. And then cry about the EoL for XP...and the 4 year extension date they got. It *might* almost be as good as when we dumped the old 16-bit legacy code...maybe...might even be better.
You're misunderstanding... a 64-bit OS doesn't mean 32-bit code won't run. It's nothing like when 16-bit legacy code was ditched - there was comparatively little of it in the real world compared to the overwhelming volume of modern Windows software that is still 32-bit, and there were good security-related reasons to ditch that compatibility layer. The 32-bit Windows emulation layer is probably going to be around for decades to come.
The Ribbon is an eye-candy solution to a problem that only existed in focus groups. Microsoft may have been legitimately worried that OpenOffice and others were encroaching on its turf, productivity apps increasingly looking the same, and wanted something to look new and different. And that's fine, but they made it mandatory, and also yanked the menus and other, customizable interfaces people had gotten used to for getting their work done.
Seriously, a very important feature of Microsoft products was the ability to customize them to a particular job or work environment. That's one way businesses got locked into Microsoft.
The ribbon shot that in the foot at the expense of precious screen space. Shills and trolls just say "learn something new". Thousands of offices still using Office 2003 respond "we're real productive with what we've got, and don't have down-time to gamble on something new." Microsoft has it backward. You don't fish for one or two consumers who want a pretty ribbon to buy one license... you cater to what businesses need, and sell site-licenses at tens, hundreds, thousands of seats at a time. Then, the consumer will buy a copy because that's what he or she trained on at work.
But that's Office. Sticking the ribbon into the File/Windows Explorer is just weird, like an attempt to brand everything in some effort to evangelize one-interface-to-rule-them-all, as if putting it everywhere is going to make people like it. I'm hoping Microsoft is gonna stop forcing it's homegrown ideas down people's throats, and get back to making software people actually want to use to get work done. Clue: busy people don't have time to participate in focus groups.
The ribbon make sense for Office, IMO, although obviously not everyone will like such a significant change. It took a bit for me to get used to, but I didn't mind so much. That being said, I can empathize with many power users who feel like the rug was pulled out from under them since they had to retrain themselves for the new paradigm. Unlearning old habits is often harder then learning from scratch.
Ribbons do have some actual practical advantages over menus and toolbars. They dynamically and predictably scale to fill available screen space, they can provide more detailed and context-sensitive on-screen cues than traditional fixed-sized toolbar buttons and controls, and are generally more easily discoverable than multi-nested menus. While it's true they do potentially use more screen space, you have to weigh that against the general increasing trend of desktop resolutions and what benefits the new UI provides. I'm pretty sure the designers understood that it would cause short-term pain in the hopes that it would provide longer-term usability benefits.
That being said, I completely agree that adding a ribbon to file explorer is questionable judgement at best. There's no good reason to use a ribbon there - for smaller applications, ribbons don't provide any real advantage - they're a solution to a very specific issue (massive complexity) the office team was trying to combat. In fact, they ignored their own interface guidelines in this regard, when they note that a ribbon control isn't a good fit for every application. When a ribbon was proposed, someone should have asked "Why? What problems currently exist with the menu and toolbars that a ribbon would solve?" As controversial as the Office ribbons were, I could understand why there was design pressure for an improved paradigm with it's near-overwhelming complexity.
Whenever I see a name like DarkFyre, SoulRe4ver, or some other ridiculously angsty and pretentious name, you can bet it's a 12-15 yr old boy who thinks that name he came up with is the coolest thing ever. Bonus points if he's created a logo with black, red, and flames of any sort. I have fun imagining how embarrassed he'll be of that handle a few years from now.
I mean, admit it. When you were 13 you thought "DarkFyre" was a pretty awesome name too, right?
-7.5% compound annual growth rate is massive, especially considering the growth rate of smartphones, tablets and chromeos. And that is not even taking into account the likelihood of productivity apps showing up on chromeos and android to further accelerate the trend. IDC's numbers are basically just talking about people who defect because they care more about media consumption than spreadsheets. That's a relatively small hole in the Windows bucket compared to having the whole bottom fall out when Android moves into the office.
I don't really see how productivity apps on tablets can replace actual PCs running actual business software within a corporate environment. Productivity software on a tablet means that you can access/view/share corporate documents perhaps, but create them? I'm not sure what you use a computer for in your work day, but I certainly couldn't possibly use a tablet to do my work. There's a LOT of business software out there that will simply never be ported to another OS either, and until it's depreciated completely, Windows will be around in force.
It seems safer to bet on what's already proven and established, especially when you're talking about rather conservative customers like businesses. Like I mentioned earlier, you can barely wean those guys off XP or IE6, and you're talking about a pretty radical jump in technology. I'm afraid I just don't buy it. Of course, I'm just guessing about the future like everyone else is, and could be totally wrong, but people have been predicting the imminent death of MS for years, yet they're still a behemoth, and still very relevant.
People like him never know the meaning of words they use... they just use them because they know that their brain dead, head up ass friends will agree with them.
Socialism is less-advanced communism, often described by early communist practitioners and advocates as an intermediate stage between capitalism and communism. Both systems advocate social ownership of the means of production. Communism differs by degree, as it aims to completely re-invent society in some rather fundamental ways (i.e. ultimately wages are no longer paid, for instance).
While I'd love to hear your thoughts on the matter and how they differ from mine, I'd imagine you'd rather just call me (and apparently my friends, too) disparaging names.
...or Totalitarianism, which is what he's actually describing.
You actually got my point (sort of), which is that communism in name often turns into what is effectively totalitarianism. Socialism and communism aren't precisely of course, but share some significant traits - namely, a significant amount of state control over means of production.
The market is significantly broadening, no doubt, to include non-desktop/laptop computing platforms
Read the next sentence please. I'm not disagreeing with you, but all these starry-eyed predictions I've heard from the media / tech bloggers that the desktop will practically disappear completely is nonsense. The reason the desktop market is declining is that many light computing tasks (essentially, simple communication or the consumption of content) can be accomplished much better by phones and tablets, which are obviously a lot cheaper and more convenient than computers. These are the computers of the masses for the future.
However, when you need to create content (i.e. get real work done), you use a netbook, a laptop, or a desktop. When you don't need mobility, such as at home or work, or need the most powerful CPU/GPU available, then the desktop still makes the most sense, both ergonomically and economically. I don't see any viable replacement for desktop computers on the horizon, so it will remain a decent market, albeit more specialized than before. And unless there's some sort of radical shakeup, we'll still be seeing Windows there as a major player for a long time.
The media keeps playing up the "death of the desktop", but what we're seeing is a simple market adjustment. It doesn't mean the desktop is going to disappear by any means. Microsoft can do quite well relying on nothing but their desktop / laptop sales if they so desired, but obviously they realize it's a declining market, so are (somewhat unsuccessfully so far) scrambling to stay relevant in the tablet/mobile space as well. Even if those efforts flop, they're going to remain a behemoth (like IBM), but will simply be far less relevant than they are today.
Obamacare allows everyone in the country to share ownership of the means of production? Sweet. I'm going to tour some of the factories that I'm now part owner of.
Shared ownership of land/factories/etc is fairy-land communism that college professors dream of. Here in the real world, communism just means means that the state controls your life.
Even if they pissed off the retail customers, MS has one spot that they are virtually impossible to dislodge from, and that is the enterprise. For example, Exchange. There are other solutions (Zimba or Google Apps), but for scalability and management, there is no other messaging system that can handle the sheer amount of users that Exchange handles on a daily basis.
Same with Active Directory. LDAP is used in some small firms, but AD has scalability on its side.
There are alternatives to MS, but there isn't anything that can do the group policies to desktops on the massive scales that what is done with Windows.
Plus, MS knowledge is easy to find. I can pay $16,000/year and get a H-1B with a MCSE who is extremely competant, far more than local talent on average. Good luck with trying to find that with Linux.
Well, they were pissing off their corporate customers too, who are refusing to upgrade to Windows 8, even in the face of XP end of service looming. That being said, don't take my last comment for anything but tongue-in-cheek. MS is not stupid. Arrogant, yes, but smart enough to understand that they can't continue the "my way or the highway" act in perpetuity. In fact, they're already showing signs of relenting. In Windows 9 the start menu is coming back, metro apps can now be windowed, etc, etc.
As you indicated, I don't think the corporate users are really going anywhere else for the time being. I mean, it's hard enough to get them off of IE6. A full OS switch is simply not going to happen overnight. If it happens, it will be a decades-long transition.
I'll have to take your word on the infrastructure issues. I'm a application developer, not an IT guy, so I have no idea about that sort of stuff.
is for the diva to sing the operatic conclusion and for cats and dogs to get along.
Microsoft is so doomed. Who really needs them? Not most people.
Have you seen the latest Samsung tablets? Holy cow the better than Hi-def resolution, vivid colors, awesome performance, none of them running Windows, all of them running Android. I saw them recently and my first reaction was: Microsoft is so doomed.
Yeah, all except for that pesky near 90% desktop market share, and the millions of applications people rely on that use a Windows operating system to do their work. The market is significantly broadening, no doubt, to include non-desktop/laptop computing platforms, but make no mistake, Windows is still very firmly entrenched on the desktop. And regular old computers where people still need to get work done on a day to day basis is still a lucrative market, if not as sexy as phones and tablets. The fact that it makes Slashdot headlines when a company or government branch moves away from Windows tells you that it's not exactly happening all over the place either.
Not trying to sound like a shill here, but let's try to stay realistic. MS is going nowhere for the foreseeable future. Unless, of course, they keep pissing off their desktop customers with garbage like Windows 8.
"The bulk of the German forces were driven back by Patton's third army (who were about as well equipped as they came) as he wheeled up from the south, and by Monty, who took control Bradley's army group in addition to his own, since he was cut off from them. I don't see how you could characterize these armies as under-equipped or poorly trained either."
American deaths 19,276 American wounded 47493
German deaths 15,652. Wounded 41,600.
Doesn't look very well equipped to me.
The Germans were tough and smart soldiers - considered to be the best in the world at the time. They essentially gathered the last of their strength and pounded at the allies weakest point in the line, catching them by surprise (the Allies were very overconfident at that point) and inflicting a great deal of damage. However, the Battle of the Bulge was, in reality, their last ability to perform anything but defensive holding actions.
Keep in mind that during WW2 we didn't have the overwhelming technical superiority that our modern US army has, where we now have ridiculous casualty ratios of 1000 to 1 or so. Against a tough and determined foe, a lot of lives were expended in order to take ground from the enemy. The technology we employ today which saves our soldiers lives simply didn't exist. Also, it's important to understand that WW2 was fought at a scale and intensity that's hard for us to understand nowadays, where dozens of nations were embroiled in total war.
If you want to call them ill-equipped based on a simple comparison of some historic numbers, feel free, but I think it's a ridiculous assertion to make.
Britain killed more people around the world than Stalin ever did. and they were the ones who invented the concentration camp
The very fact that you're trying to compare a single dictator versus the collective actions of a world wide empire over their entire history should tell you something.
they started so many wars that they didn't have enough people to replace their losses and after a while the allies' industrial might out produced the german army
battle of the bulge the US army was sending high school kids straight off the boat with no equipment and no training into battle. when they died, there were more of them. not so for german losses
Although Germany was indeed dealing with manpower shortages, the US didn't have overwhelming manpower to throw at Germany either - that describes Russia better than the US. What we did have was vastly better equipped soldiers, and an overwhelming material advantage. Our forces were highly mobile by comparison, and had vastly superior artillery support and air dominance at that point. I don't believe the US sent our soldiers into battle with "no equipment and no training." In all the interviews I've seen with vets, they seemed to indicate that they were well equipped and well trained.
I'm guessing "no equipment" may refer to the 101st airborne infantry holding Bastogne with little winter equipment and only light equipment and artillery, but that was a desperate and unexpected battle, and bad weather prevented resupply from the air, at least initially. While they were poorly equipped for that battle, they were among the most elite and well-trained of fighting forces.
The bulk of the German forces were driven back by Patton's third army (who were about as well equipped as they came) as he wheeled up from the south, and by Monty, who took control Bradley's army group in addition to his own, since he was cut off from them. I don't see how you could characterize these armies as under-equipped or poorly trained either.
While better than saying, "We don't want women," I think it is odd to see this idea that women should be wanted for a different viewpoint, as opposed to just wanting people in general with different viewpoints. Opinions and viewpoints seem to be largely influenced by upbringing and life experiences. While there are still plenty of women around who were raised differently as girls than a typical boy was, and there are many women around with different experiences than that. There is still plenty of crap that women put up with when older, but experiences vary there too.
The article, if you read it, was largely about an artificial attempt to inject sexism and conflict into the show where none at all existed. Thus, I'm commenting on women's roles as game developers as I've seen it from inside the game industry as a programmer.
I simply feel that women tend to bring a unique viewpoint to the table. I would never pretend to be able to represent the viewpoint of a black man or a gay man. Nor would I be able to represent the viewpoint of a women, because those factors tend to fundamentally alter one's life experience, giving people unique perspectives. Don't read into it any more than that.
Anyhow, the entire point of my post was that, in my experience, most game developers *don't* actually give this much thought in a professional environment. We're too busy trying to make fun games that we (and hopefully others) will enjoy. I'm also not claiming sexism hasn't been a problem either - just that I've never seen it personally. All I have is a perspective of one person's life, so take that for what it is.
I've been a professional game programmer for quite a while. Yes, female programmers are rare. I've worked with only three or four in the last fifteen years or so if I recall correctly. They're mostly to be found in the art, design, QA, and production/management departments. To be honest, this always made me a little sad, because one of the big strengths of working on teams comes from having different skill sets of course, but also different opinions and viewpoints. As with anyone else, their actual skills varied quite a bit from person to person. But I really don't think it comes down to sexism or anything that people should freak out about - it's just not a job that appeals, for whatever reason, to a large number of women.
I've never even heard anyone at work malign someone on the job because they were female. Granted, I'm not exactly in the position to hear that sort of thing, but most developers I know don't have that sort of mind set to begin with. They're there because they love making games, and don't really care about whether someone is male or female. It never really made much of a difference to me, at least.
I'm proud of the devs for not taking the bait and declining to participate in this idiotic "Pepsi Consultant's" little drama show. What a fucking moron.
Unless you're using a one time pad, don't bother... You're only slowing down the script kiddies.
Funny, I wasn't aware that PGP, TwoFish, AES, and ECC have all been broken by script kiddies. Thank God we still have the ole one-time pad to fall back on!
In all seriousness, no matter how smart the hacker or how well funded the organization, modern encryption standards, implemented correctly, are essentially unbreakable. Please don't discourage people from encrypting their data online, as it's absolutely essential for properly protecting your data. If you encrypt your data locally with a well-vetted standard, there's nothing ANYONE can do to retrieve it (other than circumventing it by stealing the key, etc), which, as far as we know, even includes the likes of the NSA.
I take it you've never looked into what a DAW has to do? You know, the ones where there is realtime feedback of spectral envelopes, realtime compressor displays etc.
They have the same basic premise as games (low latency process input, compute output, display output with synchronised audio). I'll grant that games place a heavier burden on GPU resources and non-realtime threads as compared to low latency audio. However, I won't agree they are fundamentally different regimes.
I never said they were fundamentally different - as you indicate, there are many similarities. In fact, game audio programming has been moving closer and closer to what DAWs are doing. I was trying to emphasize the main difference was in extreme resource constraints, and for game programmers, it tends to color everything they do. You were scoffing at the idea that they couldn't afford to take up a core for decompression, and I just don't think you understand the significance of that, when DAWs can very well assume they'll most likely be running on a high-end workstation, and can assume they own nearly 100% of the computer resources for processing audio. It's not unreasonable to assume that, for all practical purposes, game audio is about a decade behind what DAWs can do, since that's about the equivalent amount of processing power they're allocated. We have to make a lot of tradeoffs to keep the game running at a reasonably fast, glitch-free frame rate.
The audio part of the game industry rotates around the rotting corpses of push model APIs that should have died years ago. Stop propping them up!
I mean, you think FMOD provides a _low level API_ and that you were lucky to create something on top of that. Like you said, no offense eh!
I'm curious, to which APIs are you referring exactly? Most of the modern audio engine APIs I've looked at recently use pull models to retrieve data. Or are you talking about system level mixer APIs?
Oh, and no, I don't take offense when people say they know better than the professionals who have spent their entire lives making games. It sort of comes with the territory, for whatever reason.;-)
That's sadly a byproduct of how game engines are developed, I'm afraid. For the most part, game engines originate from graphics engine (so just graphics and then stuff tacked onto it), which means the vast majority of programmers working on the engine will be either generalist programmers or graphics programmers. In both cases, it's unlikely that they'll know how to deal with audio in any real capacity (I know I don't), so they'll use the same model that graphics uses: pushing commands.
Now, I'm sure that the larger devs have dedicated sound engineers, but I'm not sure just how much leeway they have with designing (and most likely, scrapping and completely redoing) the sound engine. It's also likely that their bosses will come from either a managerial background or a generalist programming or graphics programming background. Game development could use more specialists and needs to give them the flexibility they need.
Audio programming specialists like me are rare, but not unheard of. For most games, though, using a commercially available 3rd party engine is not only sufficient but probably preferred. So, the "audio programming" one is likely to do is mostly a case of resource management and integration with game development tools. It's the same reasoning as to how most games don't really require a custom-built game engine anymore - it's probably best left to the most specialized of games.
In my case, I was able to build a custom audio engine from scratch (yes, throwing away our old one) on top of the low-level audio API FMOD provides, but I think that's probably fairly rare nowadays, and for fairly good reasons. Our game was massive in scope, and had some pretty specific audio requirements and constraints, so it made sense to do this. I'd be pretty surprised if Titanfall had the sort of extreme requirements that we had, though, so they could probably get away with doing this. The fact that they could even fit all the uncompressed audio in a reasonable space demonstrates that there actually wasn't a lot of audio to begin with, at least not compared to the monster I was working on.
BTW, pushing commands works just fine for audio engines. In fact, it's the only sane way to do things at the high-level API, because that lets you efficiently and safely queue commands across a thread boundary. You're probably talking about push-vs-pull model audio processing, which is a complete non-issue, because game programmers almost never get down to that level of detail in the audio code. That's entirely handled by the low-level audio engine.
It is as retarded as it sounds. There is absolutely no justification for it in this is this day and age. Using look ahead decompression and caching would be a net equal, or perhaps a smidgeon higher CPU usage. It means they are in effect wasting DMA bandwidth and CPU cache by streaming uncompressed files.
I'm a DSP guy by trade, and it's one thing that's obvious - game programmers don't know how to do sound properly.
They continue to insist on driving audio by the "main" game engine thread (see Valve's games with looping audio and stutters when things get busy). Or even when they dedicate a thread, they continue to use a push model for sound - when almost all modern audio APIs have agreed that a callback based model is the "correct" way. (The notable exception being OSS which is broken for this reason).
The pro-audio guys have pretty much nailed how you do low latency high priority audio, and the game programmers continue to get it wrong.
As a professional game audio programmer, let me say that you're painting with a pretty large brush when you say that "game programmers don't know how to do sound." No offense intended, but you really shouldn't try to sound like an expert on game audio about unless you've worked on a AAA game engine. There are demands that games place on hardware systems that you really wouldn't understand. It's not like a DAW system where you can devote nearly 100% of the system resources to processing the audio. Yes, of course there are similarities, but the constraints and requirements are very different.
First of all, unless they're absolutely retarded, no audio programmer would push any sort of audio processing on the main thread. Sorry, but it just wouldn't, and isn't, happening. I don't even have to look at the source code to know that, because I know these guys aren't utter morons or incompetents.
Secondly, if you're a DSP guy, you're largely working at a level that game audio programmers do NOT typically work at - that is, the DSP and mixing level. Most game engines use professional third-party mixing/decoding engines with excellent, highly tuned code developed by specialists over many years of work, and are every bit as optimized as pro audio engines. Having used FMOD in our own game, I know it can decode and mix real-time compressed data in dozens of streams simultaneously, applying lowpass, highpass, reverb, echo, etc to them, and still only take up a small percentage of a single core. I believe Valve licenses the Miles Sound System, but I don't know for certain that this is the engine used in question.
That being said, I agree that leaving audio uncompressed seems unnecessary, at least for technical reasons. Having said that, I don't like to question the programmers judgment because I'm not there working on the project, and don't have all the fact. I have some recent experience with this, having recently shipped a game with a new, custom game engine I wrote that sits on top of the low-level FMOD mixing engine. We decided to keep all our samples compressed in memory, and were pretty impressed with the overall performance.
MP3 was used for most samples, as it has the most efficient decoder, and Vorbis was used when required for either seamless looping or multichannel audio. Additionally, each voice also had lowpass and highpass filtering performed on it. Dynamically calculated reverb settings and a custom echo filter I wrote was applied to the mix as well, plus the overhead of basic mixing operations, of which I used the highest quality 5-point spline-based mixing variation. We found that, on average, audio processing tended to take between 10 and 40 percent of a single core on a typical mid-grade PC (of about two years ago), depending on the level of activity going on at the time, with the vast majority of the CPU time used for audio decoding. Overall, it was pretty impressive to see all that being done in real-time without substantially impacting the rest of the game.
Slashdot Mirror
IMO, we've never had more choices or viable platforms as gamers - my first console was an Odyssey 2, and my first computer gaming was on an Apple II+, so I've been doing this a while now. Anyone who is longing for days long gone really needs to take off the rose-coloured glasses. Most of those older games were, if you look at it objectively, pretty trite and repetitive by today's standards. They were amazing to us largely because of their novelty, and we've elevated them on the pedestal of nostalgia.
Nothing against the classics - they were amazing for their day, but I do think a bit of perspective is in order. When I was a kid, I would have killed for an amazing RPG like Skyrim, or an MMO like Guild Wars 2, or for the sheer creativity to be found in Minecraft. I picked up Limbo the other day, and have been immensely enjoying myself - it's an incredibly clever and atmospheric platformer/puzzler. I'm still playing Puzzle Quest too, a relatively low-budget but fun puzzle-RPG hybrid. More recently, I've been going through my "bought a while ago but haven't played" list like Halo 4 and Uncharted 3, and on the PC side recently picked up The Witcher 1 & 2 in a Steam deal. I've enjoyed all these games immensely so far.
Granted, there's a lot of crap out there too. Freemium games? Yeah, I stay the hell away from those too. But I don't see how crowdfunding can be blamed when it's simply opened up the market to more niche games. Sure, some of those bets won't pay off, but welcome to venture capitalism. I'm not sure how that should be a surprise to anyone. 80% of everything is crap, anyhow. It holds true now, and it was true in the past as well. You just need to look for the products that rise to the surface... you know, read reviews, judge based on developer history.
Some old icons in the industry are now past their prime. Blizzard, Bioware, and id, longstanding favorites of mine, have all sold out. I'll no longer expect anything great from them, although I'm always willing to be surprised. Instead, younger and hungrier development shops will take their place... maybe ArenaNet and Bungie. And garage development is no longer relegated to the past either thanks to crowdfunding and improvement in tools, technology, and especially distribution platforms.
Personally, I think it's a pretty exciting time for the gaming industry, and I'm happy I'm in the middle of it.
In the process of rewriting, it's inevitable that a ton of brand-new bugs will be introduced in the new codebase, and you'll have lost all the time and effort hardening the library and fixing all of the thousands of previously exploitable issues.
I think talk of scrapping or rewriting the library is a bit of an overreaction caused by the scale and scope of the issue, and is certainly not plausible in the short term anyhow. I'd say the proper thing to do is to halt development of new features for a time and investigate the viability of addressing some of the underlying issues that have been pointed out which may have contributed to this bug: Remove the custom memory allocator, or ensure it's off by default. Start writing and using a proper unit test and fuzz testing framework. Document and clean up source with proper variable names and comments to make things easier for those reviewing/auditing code. Make sure the library compiles cleanly. Pay more attention to code that dynamically allocates memory or accepts data from user. Create a better review process. Etc, etc.
Every time I make a programming mistake or introduce a bug, I ask myself "What could I have done that would have prevented this from happening in the first place? What can I realistically do now to make sure it doesn't happen again?" The OpenSSL team really needs to be asking themselves these questions right now.
Note that questions like these have to be addressed in a realistic manner as well. "It needs to be thrown out and rewritten from scratch" or "we shouldn't be using C in the first place" are not realistic solutions. Whatever merits Ada has as a language (as one example I've heard), it's simply not going to replace C as a low-level systems and library language anytime in the near future. Language choice is also impacted by issues such as efficiency, programmer availability, interoperability, shared libraries and sample/test code availability, and so on.
I don't think this is the time to throw hyperbolic accusations or wildly impractical "solutions" around. It's a great time for some serious introspection and development process review, however, not only for the OpenSSL team, but for any sort of project like theirs with similar responsibilities. Even conservative fields of study such as civil engineering have had their spectacular disasters/failures. The thing to do is to assess the situation, learn from your mistakes, and then rigorously apply what you've learned so that you don't make those same mistakes again. It often takes a serious catalyst for that to happen, so in some ways, perhaps we should be glad that this happened sooner rather than later.
Actually that's the planned idea, that when "win9" rolls out that's the "eol" for 32bit.
I'd love to see a source for that assertion you're making. There are hundreds of thousands of legacy 32-bit Windows apps that users continue to rely on. MS is not simply going to "eol" them starting with Windows 9. Seeing how near-perfect 32-bit compatibility is already built into both Windows as well as all modern 64-bit processors, they would have to actively remove that existing feature to break compatibility in the future. Why in world would they do that and destroy their own OS's ecosystem? That just makes no sense to me.
Straight C++ is effectively platform agnostic, and that includes 32/64-bit flavors of Windows, of course. As I mentioned, I can compile my game for either 32-bit or 64-bit platforms without any changes to the source code. That's what I meant by "flip a switch" - I didn't mean using the same binary, in case that wasn't clear (you're correct in that regard). A better way to phrase it would be "flip a switch and recompile the project".
No I'm not misunderstanding. You're simply not paying attention to what's going on. There's a difference between an emulation layer, and native support. Currently we have multiple flavors of OS's with native support in either flavor, in a few years we're going to have a single flavor of OS support with an extreme drop off in support for x32. We're already seeing this in gaming with x32 binaries being thrown into the trashbin, and the entire codebase thrown and ditched. The most recent example in gaming of zero x32 support is Watch Dogs for the PC.
Your post seemed to imply that 32-bit apps would fail to run in Windows 9, which is simply not the case. Also, I fail to see the problem with the world moving to 64-bit native OSes with a 32-bit compatibility mode. And what do you mean "an extreme dropoff" of support? 32-bit applications run flawlessly under 64-bit Windows. It's not some soft of half-assed software emulation. 64-bit processors still support the original x86 instruction sets all the way back to the original 8086 and executes those natively. The emulation layer (Windows on Windows) is for the Windows API, not for the binary's instruction set, so it's fairly minimal in terms of overhead.
Also, you seem to be under the impression that you need to completely rewrite your game engine for 64-bits, which isn't true. My current game engine is both 64-bit and 32-bit compatible with zero differences in the codebase itself. Simply throw a switch in the configuration and it's done. There's some types of code you do have to actually port, such as inline assembly, which is not allowed in 64-bit, or any tricks using pointers that rely on a 32-bit size, but for most C/C++ code, there's no difference at all if written correctly. If a game company decides to abandon 32-bit platforms, it's because they've determined that the market can now move ahead with 64-bit platform. This allows them to push beyond the 2GB memory limit of 32-bit applications, which is becoming a serious bottleneck for modern PC games (we had to work pretty hard on my last commercial title to fit in this limit).
Anyhow, I'm not quite sure of your overall point. Do you feel that MS should continue releasing 32-bit operating systems even though there are no 32-bit-only processors being manufactured for desktop or laptop computers, and haven't been for years?
Search youtube for "wii remote accident"
Different cause and effect.
Rage -> Throw controller through wall.
Throw Wii remove through wall -> Rage
Still worse than Win7:
1. Click Start Button
2: Click Shut Down
But it's the content of the steps you provide and not even their number which cause the consternation with Windows 8. What about the bottom right corner is so magical that it compels people to move their mouse there in the first place to discover this menu? What about "Settings" would lead people to believe that this is where the power control is? Yes, these are easily learned, but the more of these non-intuitive steps there are, the more frustrating things are for the user. I remember how frustrated I was trying to figure out how to shut down a full screen metro app for the first time.
The best user interfaces have a sense of intuitive discovery about them. Have you ever been to a "mystery meat" website? That's where the designer was being hip and minimalistic, and forced the user to hover over a bunch of obscure icons to figure out what the hell each one of those do before they click. Generally speaking, it's a usability disaster that no serious web designer would make today, yet Microsoft managed to do exactly this.
That's why the "Start" menu worked so well when when it was introduced in Windows 95 and continued forward. It was a reliable fallback for users in order to access all functionality on their computer. Not necessarily the fastest or most efficient, but it was all right there, easily discoverable with few clicks right from there. Every application, every computer setting one would commonly use, and yes, also functionality for shutting down the computer. At the time, the start button got some mild ribbing for being the method used for shutting down your computer, but by and large, that was largely just playing for laughs.
When I bought a mac mini recently and used OSX for the first time (I hadn't used an Apple computer since my Apple II+), my experience was completely different. Everything was slightly unfamiliar, but it was a gorgeous visual experience and not at all hard to figure out because of the shared paradigm of most all modern desktop environments (closing a window - I'll guess the red X in the upper left corner). Once I wrapped my head around a few conceptual differences (such as the top-most window, and the separation between the app window and instance), I pretty much felt at home.
It's pretty incredible to me that, as a longtime Windows user (since 3.0), I felt roughly the same level of discomfort when learning an entire new operating system as when simply upgrading from Windows 7 to Windows 8, which has never happened before. In previous version upgrades, I always felt like the UI was evolving and improving for the better (like with the Windows 7 taskbar - only took me a day or two and I fell in love with it). In OSX, I don't feel like I'm being bludgeoned with an IOS-wanna-be interface every time I have to start up an application or perform any sort of OS-related task. Apple understands that these are two wildly different computing paradigms. Why didn't MS figure this out?
Yep. I'll skip Win8 altogether, I think, and wait for 9.
Don't worry, I'm sure you'll enjoy the bitching and moaning when Win9 is released since it's supposed to be x64 only. Just imagine the whining and crying... "Y U NO SUPPORT x32!!!1111ELEVENTYONE1111!!!" Oh I can see it now...good times, it's just going to be like the nuts who couldn't be bothered to build/buy a new $250 PC and move to Win7 away from XP, you know the ones who only use their PC's for email and browsing. And then cry about the EoL for XP...and the 4 year extension date they got. It *might* almost be as good as when we dumped the old 16-bit legacy code...maybe...might even be better.
You're misunderstanding... a 64-bit OS doesn't mean 32-bit code won't run. It's nothing like when 16-bit legacy code was ditched - there was comparatively little of it in the real world compared to the overwhelming volume of modern Windows software that is still 32-bit, and there were good security-related reasons to ditch that compatibility layer. The 32-bit Windows emulation layer is probably going to be around for decades to come.
THIS!
The Ribbon is an eye-candy solution to a problem that only existed in focus groups. Microsoft may have been legitimately worried that OpenOffice and others were encroaching on its turf, productivity apps increasingly looking the same, and wanted something to look new and different. And that's fine, but they made it mandatory, and also yanked the menus and other, customizable interfaces people had gotten used to for getting their work done.
Seriously, a very important feature of Microsoft products was the ability to customize them to a particular job or work environment. That's one way businesses got locked into Microsoft.
The ribbon shot that in the foot at the expense of precious screen space. Shills and trolls just say "learn something new". Thousands of offices still using Office 2003 respond "we're real productive with what we've got, and don't have down-time to gamble on something new." Microsoft has it backward. You don't fish for one or two consumers who want a pretty ribbon to buy one license... you cater to what businesses need, and sell site-licenses at tens, hundreds, thousands of seats at a time. Then, the consumer will buy a copy because that's what he or she trained on at work.
But that's Office. Sticking the ribbon into the File/Windows Explorer is just weird, like an attempt to brand everything in some effort to evangelize one-interface-to-rule-them-all, as if putting it everywhere is going to make people like it. I'm hoping Microsoft is gonna stop forcing it's homegrown ideas down people's throats, and get back to making software people actually want to use to get work done. Clue: busy people don't have time to participate in focus groups.
The ribbon make sense for Office, IMO, although obviously not everyone will like such a significant change. It took a bit for me to get used to, but I didn't mind so much. That being said, I can empathize with many power users who feel like the rug was pulled out from under them since they had to retrain themselves for the new paradigm. Unlearning old habits is often harder then learning from scratch.
Ribbons do have some actual practical advantages over menus and toolbars. They dynamically and predictably scale to fill available screen space, they can provide more detailed and context-sensitive on-screen cues than traditional fixed-sized toolbar buttons and controls, and are generally more easily discoverable than multi-nested menus. While it's true they do potentially use more screen space, you have to weigh that against the general increasing trend of desktop resolutions and what benefits the new UI provides. I'm pretty sure the designers understood that it would cause short-term pain in the hopes that it would provide longer-term usability benefits.
That being said, I completely agree that adding a ribbon to file explorer is questionable judgement at best. There's no good reason to use a ribbon there - for smaller applications, ribbons don't provide any real advantage - they're a solution to a very specific issue (massive complexity) the office team was trying to combat. In fact, they ignored their own interface guidelines in this regard, when they note that a ribbon control isn't a good fit for every application. When a ribbon was proposed, someone should have asked "Why? What problems currently exist with the menu and toolbars that a ribbon would solve?" As controversial as the Office ribbons were, I could understand why there was design pressure for an improved paradigm with it's near-overwhelming complexity.
Whenever I see a name like DarkFyre, SoulRe4ver, or some other ridiculously angsty and pretentious name, you can bet it's a 12-15 yr old boy who thinks that name he came up with is the coolest thing ever. Bonus points if he's created a logo with black, red, and flames of any sort. I have fun imagining how embarrassed he'll be of that handle a few years from now.
I mean, admit it. When you were 13 you thought "DarkFyre" was a pretty awesome name too, right?
-7.5% compound annual growth rate is massive, especially considering the growth rate of smartphones, tablets and chromeos. And that is not even taking into account the likelihood of productivity apps showing up on chromeos and android to further accelerate the trend. IDC's numbers are basically just talking about people who defect because they care more about media consumption than spreadsheets. That's a relatively small hole in the Windows bucket compared to having the whole bottom fall out when Android moves into the office.
I don't really see how productivity apps on tablets can replace actual PCs running actual business software within a corporate environment. Productivity software on a tablet means that you can access/view/share corporate documents perhaps, but create them? I'm not sure what you use a computer for in your work day, but I certainly couldn't possibly use a tablet to do my work. There's a LOT of business software out there that will simply never be ported to another OS either, and until it's depreciated completely, Windows will be around in force.
It seems safer to bet on what's already proven and established, especially when you're talking about rather conservative customers like businesses. Like I mentioned earlier, you can barely wean those guys off XP or IE6, and you're talking about a pretty radical jump in technology. I'm afraid I just don't buy it. Of course, I'm just guessing about the future like everyone else is, and could be totally wrong, but people have been predicting the imminent death of MS for years, yet they're still a behemoth, and still very relevant.
People like him never know the meaning of words they use... they just use them because they know that their brain dead, head up ass friends will agree with them.
Socialism is less-advanced communism, often described by early communist practitioners and advocates as an intermediate stage between capitalism and communism. Both systems advocate social ownership of the means of production. Communism differs by degree, as it aims to completely re-invent society in some rather fundamental ways (i.e. ultimately wages are no longer paid, for instance).
While I'd love to hear your thoughts on the matter and how they differ from mine, I'd imagine you'd rather just call me (and apparently my friends, too) disparaging names.
...or Totalitarianism, which is what he's actually describing.
You actually got my point (sort of), which is that communism in name often turns into what is effectively totalitarianism. Socialism and communism aren't precisely of course, but share some significant traits - namely, a significant amount of state control over means of production.
The market is significantly broadening, no doubt, to include non-desktop/laptop computing platforms
Read the next sentence please. I'm not disagreeing with you, but all these starry-eyed predictions I've heard from the media / tech bloggers that the desktop will practically disappear completely is nonsense. The reason the desktop market is declining is that many light computing tasks (essentially, simple communication or the consumption of content) can be accomplished much better by phones and tablets, which are obviously a lot cheaper and more convenient than computers. These are the computers of the masses for the future.
However, when you need to create content (i.e. get real work done), you use a netbook, a laptop, or a desktop. When you don't need mobility, such as at home or work, or need the most powerful CPU/GPU available, then the desktop still makes the most sense, both ergonomically and economically. I don't see any viable replacement for desktop computers on the horizon, so it will remain a decent market, albeit more specialized than before. And unless there's some sort of radical shakeup, we'll still be seeing Windows there as a major player for a long time.
The media keeps playing up the "death of the desktop", but what we're seeing is a simple market adjustment. It doesn't mean the desktop is going to disappear by any means. Microsoft can do quite well relying on nothing but their desktop / laptop sales if they so desired, but obviously they realize it's a declining market, so are (somewhat unsuccessfully so far) scrambling to stay relevant in the tablet/mobile space as well. Even if those efforts flop, they're going to remain a behemoth (like IBM), but will simply be far less relevant than they are today.
Obamacare allows everyone in the country to share ownership of the means of production? Sweet. I'm going to tour some of the factories that I'm now part owner of.
Shared ownership of land/factories/etc is fairy-land communism that college professors dream of. Here in the real world, communism just means means that the state controls your life.
Devil's advocate time:
Even if they pissed off the retail customers, MS has one spot that they are virtually impossible to dislodge from, and that is the enterprise. For example, Exchange. There are other solutions (Zimba or Google Apps), but for scalability and management, there is no other messaging system that can handle the sheer amount of users that Exchange handles on a daily basis.
Same with Active Directory. LDAP is used in some small firms, but AD has scalability on its side.
There are alternatives to MS, but there isn't anything that can do the group policies to desktops on the massive scales that what is done with Windows.
Plus, MS knowledge is easy to find. I can pay $16,000/year and get a H-1B with a MCSE who is extremely competant, far more than local talent on average. Good luck with trying to find that with Linux.
Well, they were pissing off their corporate customers too, who are refusing to upgrade to Windows 8, even in the face of XP end of service looming. That being said, don't take my last comment for anything but tongue-in-cheek. MS is not stupid. Arrogant, yes, but smart enough to understand that they can't continue the "my way or the highway" act in perpetuity. In fact, they're already showing signs of relenting. In Windows 9 the start menu is coming back, metro apps can now be windowed, etc, etc.
As you indicated, I don't think the corporate users are really going anywhere else for the time being. I mean, it's hard enough to get them off of IE6. A full OS switch is simply not going to happen overnight. If it happens, it will be a decades-long transition.
I'll have to take your word on the infrastructure issues. I'm a application developer, not an IT guy, so I have no idea about that sort of stuff.
is for the diva to sing the operatic conclusion and for cats and dogs to get along.
Microsoft is so doomed. Who really needs them? Not most people.
Have you seen the latest Samsung tablets? Holy cow the better than Hi-def resolution, vivid colors, awesome performance, none of them running Windows, all of them running Android. I saw them recently and my first reaction was: Microsoft is so doomed.
Yeah, all except for that pesky near 90% desktop market share, and the millions of applications people rely on that use a Windows operating system to do their work. The market is significantly broadening, no doubt, to include non-desktop/laptop computing platforms, but make no mistake, Windows is still very firmly entrenched on the desktop. And regular old computers where people still need to get work done on a day to day basis is still a lucrative market, if not as sexy as phones and tablets. The fact that it makes Slashdot headlines when a company or government branch moves away from Windows tells you that it's not exactly happening all over the place either.
Not trying to sound like a shill here, but let's try to stay realistic. MS is going nowhere for the foreseeable future. Unless, of course, they keep pissing off their desktop customers with garbage like Windows 8.
"The bulk of the German forces were driven back by Patton's third army (who were about as well equipped as they came) as he wheeled up from the south, and by Monty, who took control Bradley's army group in addition to his own, since he was cut off from them. I don't see how you could characterize these armies as under-equipped or poorly trained either."
American deaths 19,276
American wounded 47493
German deaths 15,652.
Wounded 41,600.
Doesn't look very well equipped to me.
The Germans were tough and smart soldiers - considered to be the best in the world at the time. They essentially gathered the last of their strength and pounded at the allies weakest point in the line, catching them by surprise (the Allies were very overconfident at that point) and inflicting a great deal of damage. However, the Battle of the Bulge was, in reality, their last ability to perform anything but defensive holding actions.
Keep in mind that during WW2 we didn't have the overwhelming technical superiority that our modern US army has, where we now have ridiculous casualty ratios of 1000 to 1 or so. Against a tough and determined foe, a lot of lives were expended in order to take ground from the enemy. The technology we employ today which saves our soldiers lives simply didn't exist. Also, it's important to understand that WW2 was fought at a scale and intensity that's hard for us to understand nowadays, where dozens of nations were embroiled in total war.
If you want to call them ill-equipped based on a simple comparison of some historic numbers, feel free, but I think it's a ridiculous assertion to make.
Britain killed more people around the world than Stalin ever did. and they were the ones who invented the concentration camp
The very fact that you're trying to compare a single dictator versus the collective actions of a world wide empire over their entire history should tell you something.
they started so many wars that they didn't have enough people to replace their losses and after a while the allies' industrial might out produced the german army
battle of the bulge the US army was sending high school kids straight off the boat with no equipment and no training into battle. when they died, there were more of them. not so for german losses
Although Germany was indeed dealing with manpower shortages, the US didn't have overwhelming manpower to throw at Germany either - that describes Russia better than the US. What we did have was vastly better equipped soldiers, and an overwhelming material advantage. Our forces were highly mobile by comparison, and had vastly superior artillery support and air dominance at that point. I don't believe the US sent our soldiers into battle with "no equipment and no training." In all the interviews I've seen with vets, they seemed to indicate that they were well equipped and well trained.
I'm guessing "no equipment" may refer to the 101st airborne infantry holding Bastogne with little winter equipment and only light equipment and artillery, but that was a desperate and unexpected battle, and bad weather prevented resupply from the air, at least initially. While they were poorly equipped for that battle, they were among the most elite and well-trained of fighting forces.
The bulk of the German forces were driven back by Patton's third army (who were about as well equipped as they came) as he wheeled up from the south, and by Monty, who took control Bradley's army group in addition to his own, since he was cut off from them. I don't see how you could characterize these armies as under-equipped or poorly trained either.
While better than saying, "We don't want women," I think it is odd to see this idea that women should be wanted for a different viewpoint, as opposed to just wanting people in general with different viewpoints. Opinions and viewpoints seem to be largely influenced by upbringing and life experiences. While there are still plenty of women around who were raised differently as girls than a typical boy was, and there are many women around with different experiences than that. There is still plenty of crap that women put up with when older, but experiences vary there too.
The article, if you read it, was largely about an artificial attempt to inject sexism and conflict into the show where none at all existed. Thus, I'm commenting on women's roles as game developers as I've seen it from inside the game industry as a programmer.
I simply feel that women tend to bring a unique viewpoint to the table. I would never pretend to be able to represent the viewpoint of a black man or a gay man. Nor would I be able to represent the viewpoint of a women, because those factors tend to fundamentally alter one's life experience, giving people unique perspectives. Don't read into it any more than that.
Anyhow, the entire point of my post was that, in my experience, most game developers *don't* actually give this much thought in a professional environment. We're too busy trying to make fun games that we (and hopefully others) will enjoy. I'm also not claiming sexism hasn't been a problem either - just that I've never seen it personally. All I have is a perspective of one person's life, so take that for what it is.
I've been a professional game programmer for quite a while. Yes, female programmers are rare. I've worked with only three or four in the last fifteen years or so if I recall correctly. They're mostly to be found in the art, design, QA, and production/management departments. To be honest, this always made me a little sad, because one of the big strengths of working on teams comes from having different skill sets of course, but also different opinions and viewpoints. As with anyone else, their actual skills varied quite a bit from person to person. But I really don't think it comes down to sexism or anything that people should freak out about - it's just not a job that appeals, for whatever reason, to a large number of women.
I've never even heard anyone at work malign someone on the job because they were female. Granted, I'm not exactly in the position to hear that sort of thing, but most developers I know don't have that sort of mind set to begin with. They're there because they love making games, and don't really care about whether someone is male or female. It never really made much of a difference to me, at least.
I'm proud of the devs for not taking the bait and declining to participate in this idiotic "Pepsi Consultant's" little drama show. What a fucking moron.
Unless you're using a one time pad, don't bother... You're only slowing down the script kiddies.
Funny, I wasn't aware that PGP, TwoFish, AES, and ECC have all been broken by script kiddies. Thank God we still have the ole one-time pad to fall back on!
In all seriousness, no matter how smart the hacker or how well funded the organization, modern encryption standards, implemented correctly, are essentially unbreakable. Please don't discourage people from encrypting their data online, as it's absolutely essential for properly protecting your data. If you encrypt your data locally with a well-vetted standard, there's nothing ANYONE can do to retrieve it (other than circumventing it by stealing the key, etc), which, as far as we know, even includes the likes of the NSA.
I take it you've never looked into what a DAW has to do? You know, the ones where there is realtime feedback of spectral envelopes, realtime compressor displays etc.
They have the same basic premise as games (low latency process input, compute output, display output with synchronised audio). I'll grant that games place a heavier burden on GPU resources and non-realtime threads as compared to low latency audio. However, I won't agree they are fundamentally different regimes.
I never said they were fundamentally different - as you indicate, there are many similarities. In fact, game audio programming has been moving closer and closer to what DAWs are doing. I was trying to emphasize the main difference was in extreme resource constraints, and for game programmers, it tends to color everything they do. You were scoffing at the idea that they couldn't afford to take up a core for decompression, and I just don't think you understand the significance of that, when DAWs can very well assume they'll most likely be running on a high-end workstation, and can assume they own nearly 100% of the computer resources for processing audio. It's not unreasonable to assume that, for all practical purposes, game audio is about a decade behind what DAWs can do, since that's about the equivalent amount of processing power they're allocated. We have to make a lot of tradeoffs to keep the game running at a reasonably fast, glitch-free frame rate.
The audio part of the game industry rotates around the rotting corpses of push model APIs that should have died years ago. Stop propping them up!
I mean, you think FMOD provides a _low level API_ and that you were lucky to create something on top of that. Like you said, no offense eh!
I'm curious, to which APIs are you referring exactly? Most of the modern audio engine APIs I've looked at recently use pull models to retrieve data. Or are you talking about system level mixer APIs?
Oh, and no, I don't take offense when people say they know better than the professionals who have spent their entire lives making games. It sort of comes with the territory, for whatever reason. ;-)
That's sadly a byproduct of how game engines are developed, I'm afraid. For the most part, game engines originate from graphics engine (so just graphics and then stuff tacked onto it), which means the vast majority of programmers working on the engine will be either generalist programmers or graphics programmers. In both cases, it's unlikely that they'll know how to deal with audio in any real capacity (I know I don't), so they'll use the same model that graphics uses: pushing commands.
Now, I'm sure that the larger devs have dedicated sound engineers, but I'm not sure just how much leeway they have with designing (and most likely, scrapping and completely redoing) the sound engine. It's also likely that their bosses will come from either a managerial background or a generalist programming or graphics programming background. Game development could use more specialists and needs to give them the flexibility they need.
Audio programming specialists like me are rare, but not unheard of. For most games, though, using a commercially available 3rd party engine is not only sufficient but probably preferred. So, the "audio programming" one is likely to do is mostly a case of resource management and integration with game development tools. It's the same reasoning as to how most games don't really require a custom-built game engine anymore - it's probably best left to the most specialized of games.
In my case, I was able to build a custom audio engine from scratch (yes, throwing away our old one) on top of the low-level audio API FMOD provides, but I think that's probably fairly rare nowadays, and for fairly good reasons. Our game was massive in scope, and had some pretty specific audio requirements and constraints, so it made sense to do this. I'd be pretty surprised if Titanfall had the sort of extreme requirements that we had, though, so they could probably get away with doing this. The fact that they could even fit all the uncompressed audio in a reasonable space demonstrates that there actually wasn't a lot of audio to begin with, at least not compared to the monster I was working on.
BTW, pushing commands works just fine for audio engines. In fact, it's the only sane way to do things at the high-level API, because that lets you efficiently and safely queue commands across a thread boundary. You're probably talking about push-vs-pull model audio processing, which is a complete non-issue, because game programmers almost never get down to that level of detail in the audio code. That's entirely handled by the low-level audio engine.
It is as retarded as it sounds. There is absolutely no justification for it in this is this day and age. Using look ahead decompression and caching would be a net equal, or perhaps a smidgeon higher CPU usage. It means they are in effect wasting DMA bandwidth and CPU cache by streaming uncompressed files.
I'm a DSP guy by trade, and it's one thing that's obvious - game programmers don't know how to do sound properly.
They continue to insist on driving audio by the "main" game engine thread (see Valve's games with looping audio and stutters when things get busy). Or even when they dedicate a thread, they continue to use a push model for sound - when almost all modern audio APIs have agreed that a callback based model is the "correct" way. (The notable exception being OSS which is broken for this reason).
The pro-audio guys have pretty much nailed how you do low latency high priority audio, and the game programmers continue to get it wrong.
As a professional game audio programmer, let me say that you're painting with a pretty large brush when you say that "game programmers don't know how to do sound." No offense intended, but you really shouldn't try to sound like an expert on game audio about unless you've worked on a AAA game engine. There are demands that games place on hardware systems that you really wouldn't understand. It's not like a DAW system where you can devote nearly 100% of the system resources to processing the audio. Yes, of course there are similarities, but the constraints and requirements are very different.
First of all, unless they're absolutely retarded, no audio programmer would push any sort of audio processing on the main thread. Sorry, but it just wouldn't, and isn't, happening. I don't even have to look at the source code to know that, because I know these guys aren't utter morons or incompetents.
Secondly, if you're a DSP guy, you're largely working at a level that game audio programmers do NOT typically work at - that is, the DSP and mixing level. Most game engines use professional third-party mixing/decoding engines with excellent, highly tuned code developed by specialists over many years of work, and are every bit as optimized as pro audio engines. Having used FMOD in our own game, I know it can decode and mix real-time compressed data in dozens of streams simultaneously, applying lowpass, highpass, reverb, echo, etc to them, and still only take up a small percentage of a single core. I believe Valve licenses the Miles Sound System, but I don't know for certain that this is the engine used in question.
That being said, I agree that leaving audio uncompressed seems unnecessary, at least for technical reasons. Having said that, I don't like to question the programmers judgment because I'm not there working on the project, and don't have all the fact. I have some recent experience with this, having recently shipped a game with a new, custom game engine I wrote that sits on top of the low-level FMOD mixing engine. We decided to keep all our samples compressed in memory, and were pretty impressed with the overall performance.
MP3 was used for most samples, as it has the most efficient decoder, and Vorbis was used when required for either seamless looping or multichannel audio. Additionally, each voice also had lowpass and highpass filtering performed on it. Dynamically calculated reverb settings and a custom echo filter I wrote was applied to the mix as well, plus the overhead of basic mixing operations, of which I used the highest quality 5-point spline-based mixing variation. We found that, on average, audio processing tended to take between 10 and 40 percent of a single core on a typical mid-grade PC (of about two years ago), depending on the level of activity going on at the time, with the vast majority of the CPU time used for audio decoding. Overall, it was pretty impressive to see all that being done in real-time without substantially impacting the rest of the game.
The real constraint in o