Of note to your interests. something that was skillfully left out of this slashdot article but is mentioned many times over and over in the original article. its only installed on OEM installations. the ones that are customized by canonical for use by oems. its not enabled/installed on your ubuntu install if you just download ubuntu or upgrade. geez...
Getting fustrated at/.'s constant missreporting in its headlines and articles these days, its worse than digg and thats saying something. It was ported to linux years ago, the series has always been a multiplatform game. this is just a combination of all three games into one pack. its worth the money easly but still, stop with the missleading headlines.
html was never really designed to do much more than have a single "document" that can link to other "documents" on the internet. over time dynamic ideas were tacked on such as javascript but it still has never been designed in such a way that 'app-y' ideas can be created without hacking up the 'document' model.
Thus html 5 attempts to correct this by modifying the original 'document' model so that it now supports 'documents' and 'app-y' ideas. its not evil, its progress.
Its a show stopper for me? I was looking into mobile phone development a few months ago, no native C = no open source C libraries i can use (glib/gobject/gtk/clutter etc...)
I don't want to have to reinvent the wheel over and over again in java when my C stack does it fine just now.
Mostly I just don't want my freedom of choice removed, this is supposed to be the worlds open source mobile OS, but in reality it feels just as closed off as anything else, Its their way or the highway.
Remeber - its a neat little tag that is really quite powerful in the right hands, everything supports it but internet explorer, google made a plugin for IE but still no website uses canvas because you can't ignore the fact that no IE user has it (until HTML 5 if IE stays standards complient).
I would *love* opengl ES like 3d rendering in javascript, with a fast enough javascript engine you could do some great things, at the last you could make fluid websites without the need for a flash plugin eating up cpu... but alas i feel this is doomed to the same fate as our old google canvas plugin for IE.
I liked games for the previous generation, I liked $500,000 games, hell i liked games made for 10p written in someone's bedroom for the zx spectrum.
I think the movie industry analogy can play in here, Stop making 100 million dollar block busters that are supposed to appeal to everyone but ultimately make everyone not care, just remove the controlled explosions, the CGI and the stupidly expensive actors that bring nothing and go back to your roots, diversify and find a new audience.
Making something smaller that a small group of people will love and defiantly buy is a much sounder plan than making something huge and hoping that magically it will appeal to everyone (because it damn well better, it cost you 25 million dollars!)
Actually there are shader techniques to allow for just this using raster techniques, such techniques are used in modern games. Take a look at the nvidia GPUGems books for examples (i forget which one, at a guess the second).
I would just like to point out, Ray tracing is not some holy grail of perfection, far from it. Indeed buck for buck, rasterisation provides the same or higher image quality for a much lower cost.
Now obviously there are instances where raytracing helps, reflections and refractions can be generated on a per-pixel bases rather than rendering the reflection/refraction as a separate image and stretching/squishing said images in order to produce a similar effect. But saying this, if you render these separate images at a high enough quality you will get the same detail as a raytraced image, and still at a much lower cost than raytracing.
Ray tracing also does not help with shadows; For example, soft shadows. To raytrace a soft shadow you have to send out at least 16 rays per shadow calculation, for each light and even then your gonna suffer from nasty artefacts. Compared to the raster solution which involves rendering the zbuffer of any given light source and merely doing some blurring. same quality, much reduced cost.
I just wish that instead of investing so much time and effort into raytracing solutions people would instead apply the hardware that's generating these raytracing engines to a raster solution, if you took a conservative estimate of raster being 10x than raytracing for any given operation, then we are talking a huge leap forward in quality, a much larger leap than ray-traced reflections/refractions would give us.
Comparing in-development software to old releases of software is not really a fair test, I would like to see a fair comparison against gecko's new javascript engine.
It has applications further than that, the SIMD architecture of gpus makes them almost perfect as a hugely powerful non general purpose processor. Do you want to use this to handle AI? no. do you want to use this to enable millions of crates to go flying every which way when you fire a rocket? yes.
Its essentially what glsl is to Nvidia's Cg, but instead of cg its an open (that's the important thing) CUDA replacement.
Its not that hard, it just requires effort. me and a friend entered the last pyweek (thats a game development competition) and generated tons of assets in just seven days. (see http://www.pyweek.org/e/CS-L/)
The point is, procedural content generation should be used when you want an infinate amount of content, when you want the skybox to be constantly changing. when you want the landscape to go on forever. not because your lazy, it will just end up showing itself in your artwork. can you imagine if rembrandt had just copy pasted everything?
erm, is it just me, or is this just mipmapping? hell isn't google maps and the variants just the ultimate 'deep zoom'? i really fail to see how this is something new.
Slashdot Mirror
Of note to your interests. something that was skillfully left out of this slashdot article but is mentioned many times over and over in the original article. its only installed on OEM installations. the ones that are customized by canonical for use by oems. its not enabled/installed on your ubuntu install if you just download ubuntu or upgrade. geez...
well. once opencl is more previlant, opencl decoding of anything is perfectly viable.
even then, the end user doesn't care if its accelerated decoding or not, they just care that it plays smooth
Getting fustrated at /.'s constant missreporting in its headlines and articles these days, its worse than digg and thats saying something. It was ported to linux years ago, the series has always been a multiplatform game. this is just a combination of all three games into one pack. its worth the money easly but still, stop with the missleading headlines.
html was never really designed to do much more than have a single "document" that can link to other "documents" on the internet. over time dynamic ideas were tacked on such as javascript but it still has never been designed in such a way that 'app-y' ideas can be created without hacking up the 'document' model.
Thus html 5 attempts to correct this by modifying the original 'document' model so that it now supports 'documents' and 'app-y' ideas. its not evil, its progress.
Maybe this should be reworded "When does it become OK to make games about an american war". Seems to be A-OK to make games about anything else
Its a show stopper for me? I was looking into mobile phone development a few months ago, no native C = no open source C libraries i can use (glib/gobject/gtk/clutter etc...)
I don't want to have to reinvent the wheel over and over again in java when my C stack does it fine just now.
Mostly I just don't want my freedom of choice removed, this is supposed to be the worlds open source mobile OS, but in reality it feels just as closed off as anything else, Its their way or the highway.
Try googling it, and come up with dozens of tutorials and howtos dated variously over the past 5+ years
yeah.. wubi has not existed for anywhere near that long and basically hasn't changed since it was invented (maybe a year ago now?).
http://wubi-installer.org/ - it will install ubuntu without needing to burn a cd.
the tag that is, forgot about /. formatting
Remeber - its a neat little tag that is really quite powerful in the right hands, everything supports it but internet explorer, google made a plugin for IE but still no website uses canvas because you can't ignore the fact that no IE user has it (until HTML 5 if IE stays standards complient).
I would *love* opengl ES like 3d rendering in javascript, with a fast enough javascript engine you could do some great things, at the last you could make fluid websites without the need for a flash plugin eating up cpu... but alas i feel this is doomed to the same fate as our old google canvas plugin for IE.
I liked games for the previous generation, I liked $500,000 games, hell i liked games made for 10p written in someone's bedroom for the zx spectrum. I think the movie industry analogy can play in here, Stop making 100 million dollar block busters that are supposed to appeal to everyone but ultimately make everyone not care, just remove the controlled explosions, the CGI and the stupidly expensive actors that bring nothing and go back to your roots, diversify and find a new audience. Making something smaller that a small group of people will love and defiantly buy is a much sounder plan than making something huge and hoping that magically it will appeal to everyone (because it damn well better, it cost you 25 million dollars!)
Actually there are shader techniques to allow for just this using raster techniques, such techniques are used in modern games. Take a look at the nvidia GPUGems books for examples (i forget which one, at a guess the second).
I would just like to point out, Ray tracing is not some holy grail of perfection, far from it. Indeed buck for buck, rasterisation provides the same or higher image quality for a much lower cost.
Now obviously there are instances where raytracing helps, reflections and refractions can be generated on a per-pixel bases rather than rendering the reflection/refraction as a separate image and stretching/squishing said images in order to produce a similar effect. But saying this, if you render these separate images at a high enough quality you will get the same detail as a raytraced image, and still at a much lower cost than raytracing.
Ray tracing also does not help with shadows; For example, soft shadows. To raytrace a soft shadow you have to send out at least 16 rays per shadow calculation, for each light and even then your gonna suffer from nasty artefacts. Compared to the raster solution which involves rendering the zbuffer of any given light source and merely doing some blurring. same quality, much reduced cost.
I just wish that instead of investing so much time and effort into raytracing solutions people would instead apply the hardware that's generating these raytracing engines to a raster solution, if you took a conservative estimate of raster being 10x than raytracing for any given operation, then we are talking a huge leap forward in quality, a much larger leap than ray-traced reflections/refractions would give us.
Comparing in-development software to old releases of software is not really a fair test, I would like to see a fair comparison against gecko's new javascript engine.
It has applications further than that, the SIMD architecture of gpus makes them almost perfect as a hugely powerful non general purpose processor. Do you want to use this to handle AI? no. do you want to use this to enable millions of crates to go flying every which way when you fire a rocket? yes. Its essentially what glsl is to Nvidia's Cg, but instead of cg its an open (that's the important thing) CUDA replacement.
Its not that hard, it just requires effort. me and a friend entered the last pyweek (thats a game development competition) and generated tons of assets in just seven days. (see http://www.pyweek.org/e/CS-L/) The point is, procedural content generation should be used when you want an infinate amount of content, when you want the skybox to be constantly changing. when you want the landscape to go on forever. not because your lazy, it will just end up showing itself in your artwork. can you imagine if rembrandt had just copy pasted everything?
erm, is it just me, or is this just mipmapping? hell isn't google maps and the variants just the ultimate 'deep zoom'? i really fail to see how this is something new.