I thought the last mighty mouse had no 'buttons', but it did have touch sensitive areas. It sucked for a lot of people tho as a lot of us (me included) tend to rest our fingers on the buttons even when not clicking, and that throws the mouse off.
Why don't you just write 'front' and 'back' on a couple of your function keys and then bind those keys to cycling the windows? I'm pretty sure there are built in options for that in stuff like Metacity - and no matter the OS or window manager, you could always write an app or plugin to do the same thing. Personally I am happy with a combination of alt-tab and multiple desktops - I like to group different applications on different windows rather than have to cycle through everything to get to a specific app. I use super-left/super-right to flick between desktops and alt-tab for app switching.
In these days of games with crazy amounts of particles and other objects flying around with fairly realistic physics calculations (via just the CPU, phsyics cards, and now graphics cards with physics APIs) in a lot of games, I think your "limited resources" argument is a little silly. I expect even the Nintendo DS could handle a game with vaguely realistic bullet trajectories.
Try operation flashpoint, you needed to fire ahead of your opponent and also use the markings on the scope to judge how far above your target to point the crosshairs to account for the pull of gravity on the bullet. Really messed me up for going back to stuff like Counter-Strike, but I still regard the 3 days going through the single player campaign as the best of any game I've played (I had 8 hours total sleep over those 3 days):)
I just realised The Settlers could be counted as an RTS, but it's the only one I've ever enjoyed. It did ultimately involve destroying your opponents as there wasn't much else to do after setting up your villages, but the game itself was just fun. I haven't ever really enjoyed any other RTSes. I prefer to be working on something directly rather than managing other entities. Having said that I enjoyed Operation Flashpoint where you basically worked up from a grunt to being a general with tanks and infantry squads at your command, but only because you still got to take part in the action.
It kind of is when he himself is mocking others for their lack of knowledge.
I believe him though - I use VirtualBox now but a few months ago I'd never actually seen a machine running a VM. I knew it was possible, and have been running full emulators for decades, but I still think VMs are cool.
Yes. That must be the only reason. Windows is obviously just as secure as OSX and other Unix based OSes. *rolls eyes*
With the amount of people that hate Mac fanboys you'd think that virus writers would be well on their way by now if there were any real remote exploits they could make use of. I'm not saying it's impossible to write a virus for Macs or Linux - the authors of any software are only human after all. But the whole design ethos is just much better than that of Windows. If I were a virus writer I would try to write a virus for Macs/Linux just for the challenge and the geek cred.
It boils down to whether you want to satisfy some psychological need, or want to earn the trust of both your employer and your customers. The latter is usually more satisfying.
Strange way to put it. Satisfying for what? Your psychological needs, perhaps? Those putting in Easter Eggs don't necessarily know that someone will ever even find them or even know who put them in. So it's not always about a desire for attention - though "wanting to earn the trust of both your employer and your customers" certainly is a form of wanting to attract attention. We all have 'childish' desires, but we don't all satisfy them in the same ways.
I don't disagree with your professionalism, and I personally have never put any easter eggs into my software (perhaps slightly casually phrased error messages sometimes, but my software is often for internal use only anyway). I also would have a problem with every developer on a project adding in their own little message, picture or game. I'm not a fan of unnecessary bloat.
But he talks of how any kind of hatred or divisiveness against a particular group is wrong, and then goes on to say that a certain group are a scourge and must be 'eliminated'.. it all seems like a joke to me, especially when you look at his signature.
I wish I knew what an ilsnad is (perhaps a gonad shaped object in an Instrument Landing System?), and how to tell if it is being represented in its entirety..
I have an HDTV and PS3. I buy most movies on DVD, with only the occasional modern sci-fi flick and CGI rendered movie on blu-ray. You especially notice the difference on the rendered movies, since film quality and poor lighting etc don't really come into play. Ratatouille in HD really looked fantastic.
If you have a decent upscaler then SD content can look great on a HDTV too. The Freeview receiver built into the TV has a pretty poor upscaling algorithm (I think it suffered from aliasing issues so that faces seemed to shimmer and stretch when moving sometimes), but using the PlayTV system on my PS3 (which is clearly anti-aliased as it has a very slightly blurred quality to it) you can get some really good looking pictures if the channel signal is strong and uses good quality encoding.
My only problem with old VHS tapes is the simultaneously muffled and hissy sound. It's much easier to deal with a movie where you can't see everything clearly than a movie where you have a constant whining, or can't make out what people are saying properly.
the source for creative and innovative things will no longer be the U.S
Yeah, because there was a time when the only place where humans were able to be creative and innovative was the US. That's not even a slightly bigoted opinion.
Actually I think installing PlayTV on PS3 will be even easier than setting up your own system - plug in USB tuner to aerial and PS3, run the setup CD, done. I always imagined setting up a PC based PVR would be quite a bit of effort if only because you have to find a nice quiet PC, get a TV card, get MythTV or some other PVR distro or app for Windows.. the things that the PS3 doesn't do that a PC could do, is access network shares, and stream media to other devices. I'm not bothered about the streaming, but I'd like to be able to run backups to a network share.
I agree with the rest. Yes pretty much everyone has access to a computer these days, but as you point out the specs are wildly varying. It's more effort to make a game that degrades gracefully across a range of hardware than it is to be able to program for a single system, even if those systems do go out of date every few years. The PS2 is still going pretty strongly though, with new games still being made for it. It has probably been around as long as Win2K if not longer.
The fact remains that no matter how many PCs, Macs, whatever are out there, consoles are built just for games, and the console games market is huge compared to the PC games market. If it weren't for the fact that there is no console equivalent of a laptop, I think we'd see a lot of home users moving towards using their consoles for everything instead of PCs. With these day of google docs and such online services, it's pretty much already possible to do everything the average home user does each day on any device with a decent browser. Digital convergence is upon us at last - I remember plenty of talk about it a few years ago, but now we're actually getting somewhere!:P
Well, depending on the system you use for making mods, you might not need to have any knowledge of how to code for PS3. Quake 1 at least had its own C based scripting language, making all mods for it basically cross-platform by default. With a system with as many cores as the PS3, dedicating one SPE just for interpreting scripting would mean less of a performance hit than if you only had one core like in the Quake days.
By Quake III it did use compiled DLLs though, so they were platform specific, but I think you could compile for both Windows and Linux from the same source just by changing some compiler flags. I get that the Cell processor is a completely different kettle of fish to x86, but with a good compiler wouldn't that be pretty irrelevant from the mod-maker's point of view - considering that with mods you don't have to write any system specific code for graphics and sound processing etc? You can just send everything to the game's built-in functions for that kind of thing.
You don't have to open up the entire source to make mods - so it doesn't necessarily make it any easier to crack copy protection on a game (which people seem to do quite easily without any source anyway).
You could write a proxy dll to go inbetween the main game executable and a library such as a mod to cheat for you if you have the SDK, but that would still be possible (though more awkward) without any SDK too.
It is a bit of extra work for the developers to make a game that is designed to work extensibly with other mods, but lots of games these days are designed with mods in mind anyway. I think the main problem would be getting Sony to agree to let 3rd parties compile their own code for the system without certain limitations (like the ones they impose on running secondary OSes). They aren't going to be making money directly from any of the thousands of mods that could/would be made, only from the base game. Mods can sell a game though, so it wouldn't be such a dumb move on their part to allow it.
Hopefully we will see more developers expand on the LittleBigPlanet concept and include built in level/object editors, scripting and creation distribution options in their console games:)
OpenGL is apparently more of a pain to develop for than DirectX (I've never tried DirectX so I don't know).
As was pointed out to myself here on/. : consoles have a much larger market and earn way more money than releasing on PC or Mac.
In these days of consoles with built in networking and storage, you could easily make console games that allow you to use mods. That was what tipped me over the edge to becoming a console gamer. That and that I got sick fed up of MS pushing Vista so hard and decided I had to take action.
I'm now running Ubuntu as my primary OS at work and home. PC gaming doesn't really make sense to me anymore when I already have my PS3 set up in the lounge with a HDTV. Why hook up my laptop to the TV or set up a desk area just for gaming on my laptop or a new desktop machine dedicated to gaming; besides gaming on my PS3 I can watch DVDs, blu-rays, rip CDs, store all my music, pictures and video (I fitted a 320GB HD), browse the net if I need to, record TV with PlayTV.. I could live without a computer at home quite easily, if I wanted to. I just use my laptop as a bedroom media player at the moment.
Sure, it will probably soon be cheaper (if it isn't already) to build a PC that has better graphics than a PS3 for less money - though it won't have a better processor - but I'm happy with the current arrangement for now. The PS3 has more than enough CPU power to allow even more interesting physics and AI driven games to be made over the next few years, and its graphics will be good enough for me until the next generation of consoles comes out. I might reconsider PC gaming if there is decent Linux support by then, but otherwise there's no way in hell I'm going back.
You can kind of be into tech while also being interesting - posting my digital photos on deviantArt was how I met my first gf (though I wish I hadn't - turns out she was a sucky girlfriend, and not in a good way)
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I thought the last mighty mouse had no 'buttons', but it did have touch sensitive areas. It sucked for a lot of people tho as a lot of us (me included) tend to rest our fingers on the buttons even when not clicking, and that throws the mouse off.
application windows (needs a good metaphor that doesn't conflict with paper documents)
How about.. windows?
Why don't you just write 'front' and 'back' on a couple of your function keys and then bind those keys to cycling the windows? I'm pretty sure there are built in options for that in stuff like Metacity - and no matter the OS or window manager, you could always write an app or plugin to do the same thing. Personally I am happy with a combination of alt-tab and multiple desktops - I like to group different applications on different windows rather than have to cycle through everything to get to a specific app. I use super-left/super-right to flick between desktops and alt-tab for app switching.
Just a 360 rigged with some timers hooked up to reset buttons and coin mechs
It it a reputable establishment? That kind of thing sounds pretty illegal to me, unless they got Activision's permission.
It is informative if you didn't know what Page 3 of the sun referred to before. It's pretty infamous here in the UK.
In these days of games with crazy amounts of particles and other objects flying around with fairly realistic physics calculations (via just the CPU, phsyics cards, and now graphics cards with physics APIs) in a lot of games, I think your "limited resources" argument is a little silly. I expect even the Nintendo DS could handle a game with vaguely realistic bullet trajectories.
Try operation flashpoint, you needed to fire ahead of your opponent and also use the markings on the scope to judge how far above your target to point the crosshairs to account for the pull of gravity on the bullet. Really messed me up for going back to stuff like Counter-Strike, but I still regard the 3 days going through the single player campaign as the best of any game I've played (I had 8 hours total sleep over those 3 days) :)
I just realised The Settlers could be counted as an RTS, but it's the only one I've ever enjoyed. It did ultimately involve destroying your opponents as there wasn't much else to do after setting up your villages, but the game itself was just fun. I haven't ever really enjoyed any other RTSes. I prefer to be working on something directly rather than managing other entities. Having said that I enjoyed Operation Flashpoint where you basically worked up from a grunt to being a general with tanks and infantry squads at your command, but only because you still got to take part in the action.
why doesn't that surprise me, the bloody bastards still drive on the wrong side of the road too
That's like saying we butter the wrong side of our bread slices (not counting the end pieces of course).
Can I have a 50/50? Otherwise I'm going to have to phone a friend.
It kind of is when he himself is mocking others for their lack of knowledge.
I believe him though - I use VirtualBox now but a few months ago I'd never actually seen a machine running a VM. I knew it was possible, and have been running full emulators for decades, but I still think VMs are cool.
Yes. That must be the only reason. Windows is obviously just as secure as OSX and other Unix based OSes. *rolls eyes*
With the amount of people that hate Mac fanboys you'd think that virus writers would be well on their way by now if there were any real remote exploits they could make use of. I'm not saying it's impossible to write a virus for Macs or Linux - the authors of any software are only human after all. But the whole design ethos is just much better than that of Windows. If I were a virus writer I would try to write a virus for Macs/Linux just for the challenge and the geek cred.
you wouldn't expect one user to run all of the anti virus products on one machine.
It seems you've never had to do IT support for any rich old clueless porn addicts. Lucky you.
It boils down to whether you want to satisfy some psychological need, or want to earn the trust of both your employer and your customers. The latter is usually more satisfying.
Strange way to put it. Satisfying for what? Your psychological needs, perhaps? Those putting in Easter Eggs don't necessarily know that someone will ever even find them or even know who put them in. So it's not always about a desire for attention - though "wanting to earn the trust of both your employer and your customers" certainly is a form of wanting to attract attention. We all have 'childish' desires, but we don't all satisfy them in the same ways.
I don't disagree with your professionalism, and I personally have never put any easter eggs into my software (perhaps slightly casually phrased error messages sometimes, but my software is often for internal use only anyway). I also would have a problem with every developer on a project adding in their own little message, picture or game. I'm not a fan of unnecessary bloat.
I don't even have a right mouse button! Damn you, Steve.. you win again.
But he talks of how any kind of hatred or divisiveness against a particular group is wrong, and then goes on to say that a certain group are a scourge and must be 'eliminated'.. it all seems like a joke to me, especially when you look at his signature.
No man is an ilsnad, entire of itself...
I wish I knew what an ilsnad is (perhaps a gonad shaped object in an Instrument Landing System?), and how to tell if it is being represented in its entirety..
Seems to me more like he was trying to be ironic with the divisiveness at the end while railing against divisiveness.
I have an HDTV and PS3. I buy most movies on DVD, with only the occasional modern sci-fi flick and CGI rendered movie on blu-ray. You especially notice the difference on the rendered movies, since film quality and poor lighting etc don't really come into play. Ratatouille in HD really looked fantastic.
If you have a decent upscaler then SD content can look great on a HDTV too. The Freeview receiver built into the TV has a pretty poor upscaling algorithm (I think it suffered from aliasing issues so that faces seemed to shimmer and stretch when moving sometimes), but using the PlayTV system on my PS3 (which is clearly anti-aliased as it has a very slightly blurred quality to it) you can get some really good looking pictures if the channel signal is strong and uses good quality encoding.
My only problem with old VHS tapes is the simultaneously muffled and hissy sound. It's much easier to deal with a movie where you can't see everything clearly than a movie where you have a constant whining, or can't make out what people are saying properly.
the source for creative and innovative things will no longer be the U.S
Yeah, because there was a time when the only place where humans were able to be creative and innovative was the US. That's not even a slightly bigoted opinion.
Actually I think installing PlayTV on PS3 will be even easier than setting up your own system - plug in USB tuner to aerial and PS3, run the setup CD, done. I always imagined setting up a PC based PVR would be quite a bit of effort if only because you have to find a nice quiet PC, get a TV card, get MythTV or some other PVR distro or app for Windows.. the things that the PS3 doesn't do that a PC could do, is access network shares, and stream media to other devices. I'm not bothered about the streaming, but I'd like to be able to run backups to a network share.
I agree with the rest. Yes pretty much everyone has access to a computer these days, but as you point out the specs are wildly varying. It's more effort to make a game that degrades gracefully across a range of hardware than it is to be able to program for a single system, even if those systems do go out of date every few years. The PS2 is still going pretty strongly though, with new games still being made for it. It has probably been around as long as Win2K if not longer.
The fact remains that no matter how many PCs, Macs, whatever are out there, consoles are built just for games, and the console games market is huge compared to the PC games market. If it weren't for the fact that there is no console equivalent of a laptop, I think we'd see a lot of home users moving towards using their consoles for everything instead of PCs. With these day of google docs and such online services, it's pretty much already possible to do everything the average home user does each day on any device with a decent browser. Digital convergence is upon us at last - I remember plenty of talk about it a few years ago, but now we're actually getting somewhere! :P
Well, depending on the system you use for making mods, you might not need to have any knowledge of how to code for PS3. Quake 1 at least had its own C based scripting language, making all mods for it basically cross-platform by default. With a system with as many cores as the PS3, dedicating one SPE just for interpreting scripting would mean less of a performance hit than if you only had one core like in the Quake days.
By Quake III it did use compiled DLLs though, so they were platform specific, but I think you could compile for both Windows and Linux from the same source just by changing some compiler flags. I get that the Cell processor is a completely different kettle of fish to x86, but with a good compiler wouldn't that be pretty irrelevant from the mod-maker's point of view - considering that with mods you don't have to write any system specific code for graphics and sound processing etc? You can just send everything to the game's built-in functions for that kind of thing.
You don't have to open up the entire source to make mods - so it doesn't necessarily make it any easier to crack copy protection on a game (which people seem to do quite easily without any source anyway).
You could write a proxy dll to go inbetween the main game executable and a library such as a mod to cheat for you if you have the SDK, but that would still be possible (though more awkward) without any SDK too.
It is a bit of extra work for the developers to make a game that is designed to work extensibly with other mods, but lots of games these days are designed with mods in mind anyway. I think the main problem would be getting Sony to agree to let 3rd parties compile their own code for the system without certain limitations (like the ones they impose on running secondary OSes). They aren't going to be making money directly from any of the thousands of mods that could/would be made, only from the base game. Mods can sell a game though, so it wouldn't be such a dumb move on their part to allow it.
Hopefully we will see more developers expand on the LittleBigPlanet concept and include built in level/object editors, scripting and creation distribution options in their console games :)
OpenGL is apparently more of a pain to develop for than DirectX (I've never tried DirectX so I don't know).
As was pointed out to myself here on /. : consoles have a much larger market and earn way more money than releasing on PC or Mac.
In these days of consoles with built in networking and storage, you could easily make console games that allow you to use mods. That was what tipped me over the edge to becoming a console gamer. That and that I got sick fed up of MS pushing Vista so hard and decided I had to take action.
I'm now running Ubuntu as my primary OS at work and home. PC gaming doesn't really make sense to me anymore when I already have my PS3 set up in the lounge with a HDTV. Why hook up my laptop to the TV or set up a desk area just for gaming on my laptop or a new desktop machine dedicated to gaming; besides gaming on my PS3 I can watch DVDs, blu-rays, rip CDs, store all my music, pictures and video (I fitted a 320GB HD), browse the net if I need to, record TV with PlayTV.. I could live without a computer at home quite easily, if I wanted to. I just use my laptop as a bedroom media player at the moment.
Sure, it will probably soon be cheaper (if it isn't already) to build a PC that has better graphics than a PS3 for less money - though it won't have a better processor - but I'm happy with the current arrangement for now. The PS3 has more than enough CPU power to allow even more interesting physics and AI driven games to be made over the next few years, and its graphics will be good enough for me until the next generation of consoles comes out. I might reconsider PC gaming if there is decent Linux support by then, but otherwise there's no way in hell I'm going back.
It's 'Swedish' by the way. At least in English it is.
You can kind of be into tech while also being interesting - posting my digital photos on deviantArt was how I met my first gf (though I wish I hadn't - turns out she was a sucky girlfriend, and not in a good way)