One problem with just learning how long it takes you to stop though is motorbikes, a decent one can stop from 100km/h (60mpg) to dead halt in less than 10m... catch is, there is almost no chance in hell the car behind you would be able to stop that fast a rear ending is not fun.
the idea of 'safely reading' a text message I agree is stupid. However you can very safely compose a text message while driving an automatic at least. Assuming you have a regular non-touch phone and have memorized the position of all the letters, you can write a text without your eyes ever leaving the road, with your left hand on the phone and right hand on the wheel.
Thing is if you do that right nobody can even tell you are using a phone, obviously a lot of people fail at it though.
Even Sony could not program Cell for what their originally perceived uses
I seem to remember ibm touting cell as a multi-media chip? for those kind of fixed pipeline things with no branching or jumping around in memory too much the cell is perfect. Yes the SPU's are not full fledged general purpose units, but they are perfect for use as DSP's in media bits.
The problem with the wii is similar to the problem with the ps2 towards the end of it's life, yes there are plenty of awesome games, but they are drowned out in a sea of crap.
As per usual the only games people can trust tend to be nintendo first party games, with others being hit and miss (usually missing).
Apple is run by a guy who saw employees staring to legendary macs and decided to "throw them away" to computer museum saying they should look to future instead of past.
Like or not, that is the attitude and in fact, if you ask me, it always pays off.
Those who do not know the past, are doomed to repeat it.
even if your company uses a central SVN repo, you can still use git yourself, 'man git-svn' it allows you basically all of the advantages of git without any svn users even knowing that you're using it.
When you get used to the workflow you'll wonder how people ever used svn.
Git and Mercurial are more popular than Subversion? That's the big news to me,
For more recent projects, hell yes, subversion still has the larger installed base at the moment, but the speed with which git is being adopted is scary.
After learning git myself though I can see why, it's just a superior system. Even when working with SVN repositories I now use git because of the better functionality.
Instead, they chose to build off of proprietary software.
Incorrect, they chose to make their program interoperable with proprietary software. No proprietary software was distributed by them.
By your logic, OpenOffice should not be able to open word documents because they reverse engineered a proprietary protocol.
Also by your logic, samba should be illegal, because it allows linux/mac users to interoperate with windows servers which are proprietary. With all of it being new code written by oss developers.
It is this groupthink attitude that just because something is open source it is inherently good and that all proprietary software is bad.
Being closed source does not mean it is bad.. it means it is limiting, which is why people make their own software that is open source that does a similar function, so they can do with it as they wish WITHOUT having to do illegal things with proprietary software.
A lot of open source people completely respect the rights of copyright owners etc, but that being said, they should respect our right to write whatever we like when we are not infringing theirs.
Depends on how much they like the game, quake 3 for instance, I bought two copies, I have a friend who bought 15 copies, so when he encountered someone who didn't have a legit copy, he would hand it to them.
So when you talk about making a cutting edge DirectX FPS and making a native Linux port, you are really talking about taking a DirectX 9-11 level game and trying to make it work with a DirectX 7-8 level API, which is what OpenGL is about at last time I checked.
No offence, but you do realize the rage engine is already using openGL.. and is one of those cutting edge game engines.. right?
Companies love directx because it's a nice and complete package, 3d, audio, input, etc. SDL comes close, but there still is not a complete kit like that for linux.
I just don't see how the newer games won't be prohibitively expensive to port considering the state of OpenGL VS DirectX.
again, correlation is not causation, just because a lot of game studios use directx does not necessarily mean it's 'better' nor does every single other thing besides microsoft (the ps3, the wii, mac, etc) make opengl 'better' (does make it more portable though).
I find it a bit odd that PC users are complaining that Apple improves their system too quickly.
As a linux user I find this statement odd, as a heavy CLI user I still find their system nearly unusable in it's default state, I mean hell you guys only got wget in 10.5
On brief examination of snow leopard though, I can't see any improvements that I wouldn't call minor. gui refinements? nice but superfluous. 64-bit addressing space? welcome to 2003 or so for linux, and 2005 or so for windows.Cups updated? looks more like a service pack than something major to me.
Nothing at all wrong with that, but to say that each os x version is an uber upgrade with lots of features is a bit of a stretch
While I'm not from blizzard, I can answer some questions for you
Q4) Is it so hard to develope the same engine on both D3D and OpenGL?
The WoW engine already does opengl, as does warcraft 3 and as will starcraft 2, and diablo 3.
Q6) Would you reccomend to a young ISV to use OpenGL or better both D3D and OpenGL to create a multi-platform game?
Unless you count the xbox360 and windows as 'multi platform' you more or less have to use opengl for multi platform games, it runs on anything with 3d hardware, and some things without (slowly of course). If blizzard did not have an opengl backend also, they would not have any mac ports even.
When it is known and established that there was in fact a linux client for WoW when in beta, what obstables hindered you from releasing it as an unsupported extra? was it maintained and if so what obstacles still remain to this day?
This argument illustrates the larger point very well, namely that you've already made up your mind, you think you are right,
And you are saying you have not?, with the fervour of your replies?
Yes, I understand how the scientific method works. And yes, there certainly is such science done, though it rarely survives the nearly ad-hom bitch-fest which occurs with unpopular studies.
That's the thing with science... if people bitch at you because X wasn't taken into account, you do it with X taken into account and they tend to shut up and accept things when you get repeatable scientific results
This is actually one of those thousand year-old unprovable philosophical problems. You cannot prove that the world really exists beyond your own mind.
I also cannot prove there is no tooth fairy, or god, it is impossible to prove negatives such as this.
Proponents of chi energy etc strike me as similar people to those who willingly believe in god, it is all well and good to believe in whatever you like, but don't pretend that science is on your side in these things.
so.. even though you could get it going on one screen, you'd rather try something it really wasn't designed for and use both for 3d?
As far as the DS is concerned, if you want it to be a polished game that uses the touch screen/mike etc anyway there would have to be serious platform specific additions. But the base features of what the engine was already doing should work well with a little effort.
Having an engine be easily portable does not entail supporting every single little thing weird ass hardware does, it's easily supporting enough to get the game/engine going, letting the porters put in the effort for the tiny platform specific details.
Example, do I expect a random pc game to support wiimote gestures? not really, it is beyond the scope of the original design and superfluous for what they intended.
If the engine was designed well it could run on the wii with graphical reduction, but supporting the platforms unique weird ass controller would have to be done by the porters, and that part would be platform specific.
Back to the psp vs ds thing, your app for PSP would have been made for single screen, analog joystick, by trying to do it with two screens, and a touch input, you are changing the engine requirements, changing engine requirements means rewriting parts of it... amazingly enough.
Something to look into if you love analog, high end analog projectors, you can get ones that do 3000x2000 + resolution, and your screen then becomes your wall. Plus a quality one will last you fifteen plus years before you have to replace the tubes.
So how can an engine be portable from one handheld platform that uses what is essentially OpenGL ES to another handheld platform that uses a tile-map-and-sprites paradigm?
If you are talking about the PSP vs DS, the DS 3d hardware is pretty much like an openGL state machine just with some different implementation details (the thing has no floating point unit, it's all fixed point arithmetic). The datasets would have to be changed to support the new format or on the fly conversion would have to be done, and it would take a severe graphical hit to be able to run at playable speeds etc.
Portability should be done within reason, I mean, you aren't going to try to get Doom3 running on your c64 are you? If you are then I commend you but it is out of the scope of what is technically feasible.
Also, last console to solely use tile maps and sprites? gameboy colour, trying to port a full 3d game from psp to gameboy colour is in the realm of 'silly'.
The saddest bit of gamenews for me was when i read about CryEngine 3, that isn't built to finally step forwards again, but to be able to run on Xbox and PS3.
Has it ever occurred to you, that having your engine be portable amongst architectures/platforms is a part of good design? It improves code quality.
Old but good example, quake 3 engine, ran on superHitachi processors (dreamcast) powerpc (mac) mips (ps2) and now after it has been open sourced sparc (sun workstations). To get those to work you have to make sure your endianness is handled, that different integer sizes per architecture don't break your code.
You need clean separation of platform dependent code to the rest of it, which should be minimal, etc... in the end, more effort for a better product, by having the engine be portable, you get better quality.
It uses STUN which is a lot more recent invention than SIP, (STUN is Simple Traversal of UDP through Nat protocol). Most modern sip implementations use STUN.
Here is how I use sip on my n95 to another n95
Register and setup sip account on phone for ekiga (can be whoever but used ekiga since it's free etc) friend with second phone do the same
call them by their blah@ekiga.net number, and it magically works!, very simple
I know they didn't copy it, or steal it, I was saying that they didn't, what I wrote was that IF they DID 'steal' i4i's product, it would be a copyright infringement, not patent. Re-read the conversation if necessary.
But the idea behind that code is valuable and needs to be protected by a patent.
So what your saying is, that the first person to come up with sin/cos/tan should have patented it and not let the world use the idea? Mathematics are except from patents for a reason, they are ideas, and not implementations of ideas
You seem to think that ideas (not a novel implementation of an idea) should be protected by patents, I would hate to think what the world of science and academia would be like if your world view was true, I imagine something like the middle ages.
If they did that, i4i would have sued them for copyright infringement, not over patents. They did not 'steal' the product, they made their own product from scratch that did something similar
Slashdot Mirror
and so we should remove all gps's and car stereos from cars, also disallow passengers to speak? (cone of silence type thing)
they are all distractions, and arguably more distracting than typing with one hand while looking at the road.
One problem with just learning how long it takes you to stop though is motorbikes, a decent one can stop from 100km/h (60mpg) to dead halt in less than 10m... catch is, there is almost no chance in hell the car behind you would be able to stop that fast a rear ending is not fun.
the idea of 'safely reading' a text message I agree is stupid. However you can very safely compose a text message while driving an automatic at least. Assuming you have a regular non-touch phone and have memorized the position of all the letters, you can write a text without your eyes ever leaving the road, with your left hand on the phone and right hand on the wheel.
Thing is if you do that right nobody can even tell you are using a phone, obviously a lot of people fail at it though.
Even Sony could not program Cell for what their originally perceived uses
I seem to remember ibm touting cell as a multi-media chip? for those kind of fixed pipeline things with no branching or jumping around in memory too much the cell is perfect. Yes the SPU's are not full fledged general purpose units, but they are perfect for use as DSP's in media bits.
The problem with the wii is similar to the problem with the ps2 towards the end of it's life, yes there are plenty of awesome games, but they are drowned out in a sea of crap.
As per usual the only games people can trust tend to be nintendo first party games, with others being hit and miss (usually missing).
Apple is run by a guy who saw employees staring to legendary macs and decided to "throw them away" to computer museum saying they should look to future instead of past. Like or not, that is the attitude and in fact, if you ask me, it always pays off.
Those who do not know the past, are doomed to repeat it.
even if your company uses a central SVN repo, you can still use git yourself, 'man git-svn' it allows you basically all of the advantages of git without any svn users even knowing that you're using it.
When you get used to the workflow you'll wonder how people ever used svn.
Git and Mercurial are more popular than Subversion? That's the big news to me,
For more recent projects, hell yes, subversion still has the larger installed base at the moment, but the speed with which git is being adopted is scary.
After learning git myself though I can see why, it's just a superior system. Even when working with SVN repositories I now use git because of the better functionality.
I'm sorry, but do you really think someone will "hack in" LAN a couple hours after release?
Couple hours may be pushing it, but a couple days, perhaps, they'd likely do it by adding support for it to PvPGN bnetd's spiritual successor.
Instead, they chose to build off of proprietary software.
Incorrect, they chose to make their program interoperable with proprietary software. No proprietary software was distributed by them.
By your logic, OpenOffice should not be able to open word documents because they reverse engineered a proprietary protocol.
Also by your logic, samba should be illegal, because it allows linux/mac users to interoperate with windows servers which are proprietary. With all of it being new code written by oss developers.
It is this groupthink attitude that just because something is open source it is inherently good and that all proprietary software is bad.
Being closed source does not mean it is bad.. it means it is limiting, which is why people make their own software that is open source that does a similar function, so they can do with it as they wish WITHOUT having to do illegal things with proprietary software.
A lot of open source people completely respect the rights of copyright owners etc, but that being said, they should respect our right to write whatever we like when we are not infringing theirs.
Depends on how much they like the game, quake 3 for instance, I bought two copies, I have a friend who bought 15 copies, so when he encountered someone who didn't have a legit copy, he would hand it to them.
So when you talk about making a cutting edge DirectX FPS and making a native Linux port, you are really talking about taking a DirectX 9-11 level game and trying to make it work with a DirectX 7-8 level API, which is what OpenGL is about at last time I checked.
No offence, but you do realize the rage engine is already using openGL.. and is one of those cutting edge game engines.. right?
Companies love directx because it's a nice and complete package, 3d, audio, input, etc. SDL comes close, but there still is not a complete kit like that for linux.
I just don't see how the newer games won't be prohibitively expensive to port considering the state of OpenGL VS DirectX.
again, correlation is not causation, just because a lot of game studios use directx does not necessarily mean it's 'better' nor does every single other thing besides microsoft (the ps3, the wii, mac, etc) make opengl 'better' (does make it more portable though).
Ah my bad, it's that GrandCentral thing that was/is U.S. residents only and provides free pots calls within the country.
I find it a bit odd that PC users are complaining that Apple improves their system too quickly.
As a linux user I find this statement odd, as a heavy CLI user I still find their system nearly unusable in it's default state, I mean hell you guys only got wget in 10.5
On brief examination of snow leopard though, I can't see any improvements that I wouldn't call minor. gui refinements? nice but superfluous. 64-bit addressing space? welcome to 2003 or so for linux, and 2005 or so for windows.Cups updated? looks more like a service pack than something major to me.
Nothing at all wrong with that, but to say that each os x version is an uber upgrade with lots of features is a bit of a stretch
Talkonaut, open source, does google voice, and runs native on s60 3rd edition.
While I'm not from blizzard, I can answer some questions for you
Q4) Is it so hard to develope the same engine on both D3D and OpenGL?
The WoW engine already does opengl, as does warcraft 3 and as will starcraft 2, and diablo 3.
Q6) Would you reccomend to a young ISV to use OpenGL or better both D3D and OpenGL to create a multi-platform game?
Unless you count the xbox360 and windows as 'multi platform' you more or less have to use opengl for multi platform games, it runs on anything with 3d hardware, and some things without (slowly of course). If blizzard did not have an opengl backend also, they would not have any mac ports even.
Another good question on that topic is:
When it is known and established that there was in fact a linux client for WoW when in beta, what obstables hindered you from releasing it as an unsupported extra? was it maintained and if so what obstacles still remain to this day?
This argument illustrates the larger point very well, namely that you've already made up your mind, you think you are right,
And you are saying you have not?, with the fervour of your replies?
Yes, I understand how the scientific method works. And yes, there certainly is such science done, though it rarely survives the nearly ad-hom bitch-fest which occurs with unpopular studies.
That's the thing with science... if people bitch at you because X wasn't taken into account, you do it with X taken into account and they tend to shut up and accept things when you get repeatable scientific results
This is actually one of those thousand year-old unprovable philosophical problems. You cannot prove that the world really exists beyond your own mind.
I also cannot prove there is no tooth fairy, or god, it is impossible to prove negatives such as this.
Proponents of chi energy etc strike me as similar people to those who willingly believe in god, it is all well and good to believe in whatever you like, but don't pretend that science is on your side in these things.
Stuff like this clouded my judgement Unless you count severe mode7 scaling and rotation abuse as 3d you're right.
so.. even though you could get it going on one screen, you'd rather try something it really wasn't designed for and use both for 3d?
As far as the DS is concerned, if you want it to be a polished game that uses the touch screen/mike etc anyway there would have to be serious platform specific additions. But the base features of what the engine was already doing should work well with a little effort.
Having an engine be easily portable does not entail supporting every single little thing weird ass hardware does, it's easily supporting enough to get the game/engine going, letting the porters put in the effort for the tiny platform specific details.
Example, do I expect a random pc game to support wiimote gestures? not really, it is beyond the scope of the original design and superfluous for what they intended.
If the engine was designed well it could run on the wii with graphical reduction, but supporting the platforms unique weird ass controller would have to be done by the porters, and that part would be platform specific.
Back to the psp vs ds thing, your app for PSP would have been made for single screen, analog joystick, by trying to do it with two screens, and a touch input, you are changing the engine requirements, changing engine requirements means rewriting parts of it... amazingly enough.
Something to look into if you love analog, high end analog projectors, you can get ones that do 3000x2000 + resolution, and your screen then becomes your wall. Plus a quality one will last you fifteen plus years before you have to replace the tubes.
So how can an engine be portable from one handheld platform that uses what is essentially OpenGL ES to another handheld platform that uses a tile-map-and-sprites paradigm?
If you are talking about the PSP vs DS, the DS 3d hardware is pretty much like an openGL state machine just with some different implementation details (the thing has no floating point unit, it's all fixed point arithmetic). The datasets would have to be changed to support the new format or on the fly conversion would have to be done, and it would take a severe graphical hit to be able to run at playable speeds etc.
Portability should be done within reason, I mean, you aren't going to try to get Doom3 running on your c64 are you? If you are then I commend you but it is out of the scope of what is technically feasible.
Also, last console to solely use tile maps and sprites? gameboy colour, trying to port a full 3d game from psp to gameboy colour is in the realm of 'silly'.
The saddest bit of gamenews for me was when i read about CryEngine 3, that isn't built to finally step forwards again, but to be able to run on Xbox and PS3.
Has it ever occurred to you, that having your engine be portable amongst architectures/platforms is a part of good design? It improves code quality.
Old but good example, quake 3 engine, ran on superHitachi processors (dreamcast) powerpc (mac) mips (ps2) and now after it has been open sourced sparc (sun workstations). To get those to work you have to make sure your endianness is handled, that different integer sizes per architecture don't break your code.
You need clean separation of platform dependent code to the rest of it, which should be minimal, etc... in the end, more effort for a better product, by having the engine be portable, you get better quality.
It uses STUN which is a lot more recent invention than SIP, (STUN is Simple Traversal of UDP through Nat protocol). Most modern sip implementations use STUN.
Here is how I use sip on my n95 to another n95
Register and setup sip account on phone for ekiga (can be whoever but used ekiga since it's free etc) friend with second phone do the same
call them by their blah@ekiga.net number, and it magically works!, very simple
I know they didn't copy it, or steal it, I was saying that they didn't, what I wrote was that IF they DID 'steal' i4i's product, it would be a copyright infringement, not patent. Re-read the conversation if necessary.
But the idea behind that code is valuable and needs to be protected by a patent.
So what your saying is, that the first person to come up with sin/cos/tan should have patented it and not let the world use the idea? Mathematics are except from patents for a reason, they are ideas, and not implementations of ideas
You seem to think that ideas (not a novel implementation of an idea) should be protected by patents, I would hate to think what the world of science and academia would be like if your world view was true, I imagine something like the middle ages.
i4i created and sold a product that M$ stole.
If they did that, i4i would have sued them for copyright infringement, not over patents. They did not 'steal' the product, they made their own product from scratch that did something similar