Re:No more compound documents?
on
XHTML 2 Cancelled
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· Score: 3, Informative
"XHTML 1 is basically HTML4 with the added requirement that the document must also be well-formed XML"
It also deprecated a lot of the older tags that were made obsolete by CSS hence encouraging better separation of document structure and presentation. Unfortunately HTML5 undoes this particular good work because it caters to the lowest common denominator (i.e. bad developers who don't "get" separation of concerns and trivially parsable markup).
"HTML 5 is an evolution of HTML 4 backed by people who actually implement these standards and developed in a more incremental way."
The problem is, those people implementing those standards have proven time and time again how incompetent they are at implementing those standards. The state of standards compliance in browsers has for well over a decade been utterly shameful and that really goes for Firefox as much as it does IE. I'd argue it's those who use the standards that know best - people building the biggest sites on the net because they're the ones who need the markup to be able to support large scale application development. Browser vendors need to be able to implement that standard, don't get me wrong, but putting faith in them as the ones who guide the standards has time and time again proven disastrous - look at the HTML5 video tag debacle for perhaps the most recent example.
I'm not disagreeing with you though, XHTML2 wasn't brilliant, but I'm not convinced HTML5 is even any better than XHTML1 which was also an evolution of HTML4 and IMHO a better one. It was designed with those people building enterprise applications for the web in mind rather than joe average, who is more content using the likes of MySpace and Facebook to manage their content for them in the first place.
Of course, HTML5 can do everything XHTML does for the reasons you state, but sadly it seems to encourage bad practice whereas XHTML discouraged it. One final beef I have with HTML5 is that accessibility seems to have been ignored in it's creation, for example there were no real efforts to ensure easy inclusion of subtitles the previously proposed audio/video formats. Again, we really just don't seem to be any further on with web standards than we were at the start of the decade and again, the people to blame are the browser vendors as much as the W3C and it's allowed not particularly ideal or portable proprietary tools such as Flash to gain a lot of ground as a result.
Perhaps not but the point in knowing code is that it helps allows you to understand the technological boundaries on certain ideas, so whilst he may not have written any code he presumably at least knows what the limits are on his designs from having an understanding of the technical hurdles.
I want to be a game designer and then... "Finally, is C++ the way to go? ASP? LUA?"
Sorry, lets start from the beginning. Do you want to be a game designer or a games programmer? If it's the former then language isn't really important, you should be focussing on being able to create a good interactive story so you probably really need to study something like literature or perhaps even a screenwriting class would help if you can't get an explicit game design class. Don't expect to get far though, really there's a lot of people who want to be game designers, in fact, probably too many, because everyone wants to be in control of a team that will make their dream game for them, very few actually come up with ideas that everyone else thinks is awesome too. You have to be able to develop games that everyone will enjoy, not that you think would be cool which isn't as easy a skill as many probably assume. Programming will be a help to some extent, but it's not the first thing to worry about if you want to be a designer.
If you in fact want to be a programmer, then you need to get some basic knowledge of programming, the fact you suggested ASP is puzzling, I'm not even aware of any web based games written in ASP - I've only ever seen them written in PHP. I can only guess then that you're just throwing around terms you've seen about the net to make it look like you're anywhere near close to even beginning to work towards your ideal career. The issue is you can't even get started as you don't even seem to have a basic idea of what you want to do, or what is involved in these roles.
So here's the best advice anyone can give based on your question - go read some places like Gamedev.net or Gamasutra.com. Actually figure out what you want to do first. Don't come back and say I want to be a programmer, come back and say "I want to be an engine programmer", or "I want to be an AI programmer" or whatever else.
If you're wondering why a lot of responses here seem hostile, it's because you seem to be expecting answers without even bothering to put as little effort is required to even figure out what you need to ask first. If you had at least done that and figured out if you want to be a designer or a programmer you'd probably find better responses.
Still, the Slashdot editors should've at least picked that up, I'd like to think they vet questions to see if they make sense first but judging by this one it seems like it was streamed straight from their inbox onto the front page.
I hope this response will in itself give you a good start though as again you really need to figure out what it is you actually want. When you do finally figure out what you want, may I suggest you start by working with an indie or a mod team to at least get an idea of the facets involved in building a game first hand. I'd suggest you also read some books and so on, but most importantly perhaps - just get involved in a community like that at Gamedev.net or somewhere that produces indie focussed engines like Garagegames or the C4 engine community at terathon.com or perhaps even get involved with an open source rendering engine like ogre.
"Why is this a problem? For the employers, it's great. For the employees, it's not good, because it drives down wages and the level of acceptable working conditions."
That argument doesn't really seem to apply to the EU. The EU imposes some pretty employee friendly laws in terms of working conditions that are based around those that workers in say France have who have some of the best working conditions in the world. For most Europeans working conditions will drastically improve, even in Britain this looked set to be the case when Europe tried to do away with our maximum working hours opt-out, that isn't really an opt-out because it's written into most employees contracts. It may lower wages in the short term in a specific country but it'll normalise wages across the whole of the EU in the long term and as the European economy improves so do wages/standards of living, as the EU already has a strong economy then even normalisation of wages across it isn't going to be a problem.
"Manufacturing jobs were globalized and they end up poorly paid in poor conditions."
But again, that's a different scenario. The reason for that is that manufacturing could be exported to places where there were no laws regarding workers rights so workers could easily be exploited. In the EU we again have strong supporting laws for workers (almsot certainly helped by the fact the major players in the EU are big on Unions) so it's not the case that you can pay someone like $0.50 an hour as you can in India or China, you still have to shell out for a minimum wage that isn't far off what you were paying anyway and the cost of moving everything undoubtedly outweighs that in many cases.
Normalisation of wages is happening quite rapidly too so it's not a slow process, already there has been a decent amount of immigration from for example the Polish migrant population in the UK back to Poland because a lot of decently paid jobs that would never be dreamt of being available only a few years ago before entry into the EU.
Effectively many cases of "they're taking our jobs" turn out to simply be that the people taking their jobs are taking them because they're harder workers and often aren't taking any kind of decrease in pay, they simply just make better employees.
"The "solutions" they propose are as sharp as a brick, but the problems they raise are real."
They are? I suppose that depends if you dislike foreign immigrants who often work harder (particularly the Polish) than 90% of the native British population simply because they're not British. If you think stirring up sectarian violence in Northern Island is a good idea and if you think having no idea about running the budget of a country but decide it's a good idea to have a French style subsidised agricultural system and a massive military with no regard for the rest of the worlds opinion on how and when you decide to use it are all good things.
The BNP doesn't really raise any problems that aren't raised elsewhere and better dealt with unless you have a racist or xenophobic mindset and think the rest of the world is inferior and want to blame other races for the problems rather than realising that there are millions of white, British born chavs that are far more of a problem for the country than most immigrants.
If it's anything like driving licenses or passports they'd eventually make you renew it too.
I was quite suprised when I got a letter from the DVLA the other day saying I had to renew my driving license because photos now have to be updated every 10 years at the cost of £20. Not a massive amount of cash, but £20 for every driver in the UK every 10 years probably amounts to £250 million or so for them over that period (or £25 million a year in other words) so clearly just a cash grab. No one's ever had to renew their photo before so why now? It's not like the photo even matters, if someone wants to check your license they can do so without needing your photo and it's not as if it's hard to fake one anyway.
I'd imagine the same would happen with ID cards eventually, probably £50 every 10 years to renew it or something too which is another reason I didn't want one to be honest.
I have to agree. I've never actually sold a game second hand and in fact have pre-ordered most new games out for the 360 for the last 2 years spending thousands on games, but I've always thought it seems odd that if say someone in my family became massively ill and I had to dig up as much cash as possible from somewhere I'd be able to sell everything from my house to my toaster to my car to my XBox 360 games, but oddly would be unable to sell my Steam based DRM'd games.
The fact is games that impose technical measures to try and prevent resale such as hard copy games that require Steam activation are fairly unique as products across pretty much every single market in that they prevent a second hand sale. I can think of very few (well, actually none of the top of my head) other physical products that have a measure in place to prevent second hand sale.
It's not only that though, I have a friend that I do not believe is unique, he buys a few games, but really just doesn't have the cash to buy new titles all the time, he can just about afford it if he can trade the last game he bought for £10 - £20 or so and buy the new one at £35 - £40. Effectively then I think preventing second hand sale could be self defeating, certainly he would be unable to buy new games outright at £40 a piece, they've got a scenario as so:
- Person 1 buys game at £40 - Person 1 sells game for £10 and buys new game for £40 when value of sold game is now only £20 - Person 2 buys traded in game for £20
So the games industry has made £80 of profit, but "lost" £20, whilst without the second hand sale they may have halved their profits to £40 if neither person could then afford to buy the new game or the second hand game. The problem is the games industry is assuming that if the second hand sales go that both people will just buy the game new making them £100 to £120. It's possible, but I think it's unrealistic. I think the best case scenario is that you could say goodbye to high release week sales as everyone who couldn't afford full priced games just waited for games to come down to second hand style prices anyway.
Really, I'm amazed it's taking companies like Sega to take the lead on this.
Nintendo captured the casual market this console generation with an innovative controller style whilst Sony and Microsoft have fought over the hardcore market who tend to prefer these type of games.
Both Sony and Microsoft have announced their competing products to the Wii mote, and both certainly appear better than the Wii mote, although perhaps not with the Wii motion plus addon. They've also taken strides to increase their casual offerings (i.e. Microsoft's investment in games like Lips on the 360). It's clear Microsoft and Sony realise that whilst the hardcore market has more cash in it, it doesn't have enough when they're fighting each over over it so to make the kind of profits Nintendo has with the Wii they seem to understand they've got to start taking from Nintendo's market too.
The problem is Nintendo doesn't seem to recognise this, and are sticking with their casual market despite the fact it'll slowly start getting eaten away. It's hard to know if they have a trick up their sleeves or if they've become complacent with their success, but certainly I'm suprised they haven't pushed more mature games themselves to try and pull in some of the hardcore gamers from Sony and Microsoft. The problem for Nintendo is it's not as if this is the first time they've had a massive success and then just fallen back into obscurity for a few years, with something like the Wii I think many had wondered if they'd finally broken this cycle and had moved into a new era of innovation to stay permanently ahead, but right now, particularly judging by their rather weak E3 showing where they basically just showed more of the same that doesn't look like it's the case.
I suppose though historically we should probably not be suprised that it's Sega taking the lead here and not Nintendo, whilst Sega dropped out of the hardware market they always seemed to produce generally more mature games than Nintendo, so perhaps Sega are even doing it as part of a deal with Nintendo that Nintendo will remain a producer of casual games and Sega make mature games. Who knows, hopefully they're not that blind to the competition and do have a trick or two up their sleeves, but at face value this seems to absolutely not be the case right now.
Anyone remember I think it was Loki torrent or something where he asked for donations to fight an RIAA court case but instead just took the money and ran?
The movement for change to copyright, or the piracy movement or whatever you want to call it doesn't need idols for exactly the reason P2P works so well - it's decentralised.
Similarly I think the guys purchasing TPB are idiots, no one in their right mind would trust a torrent site that is corporately owned and says it wants to turn into a legitimate service (not that it wasn't technically legitimate under Swedish law anyway).
Another site will step up and take it's place, the TPB guys will have traded this deal for public support, and no one will frankly care now if they end up going to jail. P2P will continue, with a new site, or perhaps even an existing one - BTJunkie already had a bigger userbase afaik and TPB will be a site no one uses anymore.
Ultimately TPB guys are human, but that doesn't mean this is a stupid move. Even if as they say it is to get money to continue the fight it's a severe blow to their credibility. The best they can do now is be 100% transparent and provide evidence of where every penny goes, if not it's only fair people assume it's gone into their pockets.
I'm not sure what your point is. Nothing you said detracts from my point at all. Other forces with weapons i.e. the FBI are in exactly the same situation as the army.
Look at the situation in Honduras for an example of my point. An armed force will side with the people long before they side with a bad leader in a nation even as poor as Honduras, let alone one as modern as the US or any European state.
"What planet in the Propaganda system is that from? Isreal's whole existence as a place for European Jews to go"
Yes and where do you think those European Jews descended from, or why do you think they were in Europe in the first place? Nothing to do with persecution back in their homeland before Israel even existed?
Don't even try and pretend it's clear cut. There's a long history of fighting back and forth and persecution back and forth. If you could at least spell the country name right I'd have a bit more respect for your opinion but as you can't do that and as your opinion is horribly ignorant and biased against Israel I can only guess you're yet another victim of the rather good Hamas propaganda machine, a machine whose success stems from the fact it doesn't worry about international law so someone wearing civilian clothes firing rockets or bullets at Israeli's can be turned into a poor innocent civilian gunned down by Israelis just by removing his AK47.
Frankly I think the Israelis are fucking stupid voting in the government they now have, that really wasn't helpful. I also think Fatah are now probably the most sensible force in the region (bar Egypt and Jordan of course).
To suggest Israel is the only problem when you have players like Hamas, Hezbollah and Syria in the area just shows outright ignorance of the situation there and it's a sad reflection of how good the terrorist (Hamas/Hezbollah) propaganda machine has become and how stupid Israel has become for playing into their hands all too often. Syria assassinated Lebanon's elected leader, so to pretend the problem is limited to arabs vs. jews is also ignorant. There are far worse players in the region than Israel (Hamas, Hezbollah, Syria) but again, there are far better (Jordan, Egypt and nowadays Fatah).
Again, to suggest it's all about Israel vs. Arabs is stupid - Hamas have made it quite clear that once (if) they destroy Israel, they will then move on to attack the Egyptian leadership and it's supporters (i.e. most the population) also. You'd still have Syria and Iran sponsoring Hezbollah in Lebanon despite the fact the majority of the population in Lebanon even in the face of Hezbollah coercion has voted for a pro-Western government twice now. Lebanon has a perfectly good secular military much like Turkey and so the only reason for Hezbollah's existence is to force the Syrian/Iranian and minority Lebanese viewpoint on the remaining majority of the country.
Of course, even singling out Israel as a country is ignorant, there was about 3 million Palestinians in Israel, some even in government. Whilst many of those sympathise and/or support the Palestinian goals, they too support their own country over Hamas.
No, the real problem in the region is murderous religious zealots and they exist in the region amongst Jews, Christians, Sunni and Shiite muslims alike. Dismantling any one country or set of countries would have no effect on the level of violence there, in fact it's been a violent place for the last couple of thousand years at very least. At best you'd need to eliminate Hamas, Hezbollah, Israel, Syria and Iran from the equation to have anything even roughly resembling peace in the region. Even if you could turn them all into atheists and do away with the religious divide and hatred that comes with it you'd still have some battles simply because there is also a scarcity of resources there, although one might argue that the only reason people try and live there in the first place is their spiritual attachment to the area so maybe they would all just realise the majority of the place (i.e. the areas not adjacent to water) isn't even worth fighting over anyway.
Still, Israel is quite a big player when it comes to technology too and you can be rest assured you're making use of Israeli produced or designed technology when using the internet. If you really want to make a point then maybe you should boycott all their goods including that. Or are you just going to remain a hypocrit and blame the jews for everything whilst simultaneously consuming products of Israel when there are many equally bad, and some worse, some better players in the region who have just as much involvement?
There's a lot of money in government contracts, rest assured if the US bans Nokia/Siemens from bidding on US government contracts Europe will respond by banning Cisco from government contracts across Europe.
It's a slippery slope, that's the problem and it IS about protectionism. Would these senators be proposing the same if there was no embargo on US companies bidding for contracts in Iran? If it was Cisco that fulfilled these contracts? Judging by the actions of US companies across the world (e.g. arms manufacturers) the answer would have to be a resounding no.
Probably because the guy who has been ousted was trying to defy the constitution, defy the courts and sacked military heads who wouldn't assist him in doing so.
Effectively what is happening in Honduras is an example of what should ideally happen if a leader attempts to become a dictator (i.e. he gets removed), whilst Iran is an example of what shouldn't happen (i.e. the people get violently supressed).
The Honduras result is really a good one, he was trying to copy Chavez, the difference is he didn't have the support to do so. It's probably worth realising that copying Chavez isn't a good thing because Chavez is really no better than Ahmadinejad. Ignoring the fact they're best of friends it's probably worth noting that Chavez, like Ahmadinejad, has supressed opposition using militia etc. so again, seeing someone who wanted to follow this path ousted through a country's legal and constitutional procedures is probably a good thing.
It's the same with everything, there are good implementations and bad implementations, age of game IMO has nothing to do with it.
In terms of FPS games, Quake 1 was always my favourite online for the reasons you state, the physics just felt nice, the game was fun to play with it's rocket jumping and the likes, it didn't need complex physics.
Yet whilst Half-Life 1 was an excellent game I always felt the physics in it absolutely sucked, compare it to something like Crackdown on the XBox 360 where the physics pretty much make the game and you see that a good physics system can make a world of difference. For those who haven't played Crackdown, the content of the game is pretty poor it's basically an open world and you have to kill about 18 "bosses" across the open world, you can do them in any order you want, there's not really much of a storyline there. The fact you can jump your way up sky scrapers, ramp cars off of transporters, throw scud missile launchers at enemies to crush them just generally have fun stacking together random explosive objects into a pile to make a massive explosion still leaves you with a pretty fun game.
Even Call of Duty 4 and 5 and also Halo 3 just feel much nicer to play than many older games with simpler physics engines.
As you say, it's the gameplay that matters, but realistic or complex physics do not in any way have to detract from the gameplay, in fact, in recent years it's really come into it's own in actually making the gameplay in a handful of games - see games like Prey, Portal, the gravity gun in Half-Life 2, Crackdown and so on.
I think the thing to bear in mind is that when you look to the games you enjoyed in the past as fine examples of how a game should be you only remember the good ones, you don't remember the countless bad or at least mediocre and hence easily forgettable ones. It's easy to pick some great games from the past and compare a specific element against the average level of games today, but I believe if you take the average quality of games from that period and compare to the average quality now you'll notice that again, as always there's good games and there's bad games.
I'd argue the issue now is that increased complexity does make it much more challenging for developers to get all those complex systems right and to work together well to make a nice game, but it's certainly not impossible again as many great games in recent years have shown.
Because America is a relatively free country where the troops are the people, rather than somewhere like say North Korea or Iran where the troops are above the people any attempt by an American government to impose tyranny to the point of rebellion would actually see their own military turn on them and overthrow them. This is not far fetched - we have seen it in places like Turkey and similarly Lebanon's secular military is the only thing really preventing the country becoming a Hezbollah stronghold.
People seem to assume the army would be against them, but unlike North Korea where the troops are troops because otherwise they and their families starve to death troops in the US have little to lose by defying government.
I think the 2nd amendment is irrelevant then not just for the reasons you state, but because civilians would never need to do any fighting against the military because it'd be on their side in the first place.
It would take a massive culture change to get the military to blindly follow the government, a change that would ultimately require the government to find some severe leverage over the armed forces - like the risk of starvation for soldiers and their families if they don't comply. But I cannot think of any way they could really get that leverage without the support of the military in the first place.
Well, most people talk about stuff like Thriller, Smooth Criminal, Billie Jean etc.
It wasn't until the mid 80s that Jackson really peaked which is around the same time that GnR came about which is why the comparison. The earlier stuff wasn't anywhere near as popular and most Jackson fans almost certainly didn't become so until the mid 80s, that's probably why the 80s are commonly referred to as being the period that defines the Jackson generation because it was the period that really defined his career.
Er, I'm British, I'm not sure why you'd assume I'm American.
Manchester United (British football team) are also prominent world wide including places ranging from Somalia to China to Pallestine, but it doesn't mean they really are that important in the grant scheme of things.
You can say what you want about my opinion of Michael Jackson but do not forget there are still hundreds of millions out there who agree with me.
It is stupid to pretend everyone liked him. Yes he had a massive following but it is not universal, it's naive to think that would ever be the case when we're talking about something as subjective as music.
Er, I'm of the "Michael Jackson" generation, except to me he's still forgettable when he's not in the media because of a child molestation case or for dangling a baby over a balcony or for managing to blow hundreds of millions of dollars mostly on tat.
Age has nothing to do with it, it's just whilst all the pop fans were listening to Jacko the rest of us were listening to things like Guns and Roses.
To many of us, the only reason Jacko wasn't forgettable was the fact he was always getting himself in the media by doing something pretty stupid.
I think you'll find it's your assumption that just because you seem to like Michael Jackson that he must universally be liked that's wrong. Not everyone has the same tastes.
If I had to pick some favourite tracks from the 80s then stuff by U2, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Guns and Roses, Bon Jovi would come well ahead of anything by Michael Jackson. They're slightly different genres, but frankly if I had to pick something cheesy which is the category I'd personally put Jacko's songs into I'd probably even choose something more catchy and recognisable such as A-ha's "Take on me".
You're welcome to like Jacko, but don't assume everyone else does and assume that if they don't they're from the wrong generation. I distinctly remember even at the time friends were pretty split about him - sure some loved him, but there were still plenty that hated him even when he was in his prime.
No, you don't understand what the "IR Camera" does. It's actually a projector and a sensor that can project IR and use it to sense actual depth in the scene it's "looking" at. It is not a simple IR camera, it's full blown depth sensing kit.
"Mocap too expensive? What the fuck? Most games with a decent budget use motion capture for animations!"
Presumably you missed the "indie" part from my comment? Indie developers cannot for the most part afford mocap for exactly the reason india games don't have a decent budget. There are still a lot of good indie games out there though and giving them access to mocap tech. makes their lives even easier and allows their games to be even better.
"If you think Natal will be able to scan your car or your house, well, get ready for disappointment."
Well no, I'm not. I don't expect Natal to do it itself because it's designed to be sat under a TV near the XBox, but the technology that Natal comprises of most definitely can do that. As I stated if that tech makes it into mobile phones with GPS kit, tilt sensors and so on it would be trivial to use it to produce maps of real 3D objects that could be imported / exported.
Again the only real issue here regarding Natal is you don't actually seem to understand the technology that it makes use of. If you can't understand the tech. how can you possibly comment on it's potential?
Yes, I know the company is still there, but is the team really still relevant? The company that's there now just doesn't seem to have much in common the id we always knew and loved, largely because of talent drain.
id lost a lot of it's best people years ago, Carmack is still there but hardly any of the greats from the Wolf/Doom/Quake days are still there. Romero? McGee? Petersen? Carmack (Adrian)? Steed?
It seems they lost their key people in various areas, sure people like Romero became laughing stocks when they left because the guy clearly wasn't a CEO when it came to, that doesn't mean of course he wasn't a great designer and developer when working at id. McGee and Petersen - almost certainly their greatest level builders. Steed, their best 3D artist. Even people like David Kirsch who did the Quakeworld netcode that is still the foundation of the netcode in many modern FPS such as HL2.
Carmack was always id's best programmer when it came to visualisation, but the loss of other key characters seems to sum up what id Software has become - a developer of games that are graphically impressive, but hollow beyond that. With the rise of the newer versions of the Unreal engine and developers like Crytek even Carmack's prowess in the graphics world seems to be lagging a bit.
It's sad in a way, I'll always respect id for what they were, but I think the loss of so many key figures was a big deal. I don't mean to detract from the staff working there now, id still has some brilliant people but I think what id doesn't have anymore is a dream team which I think it did have back in the old Wolf/Doom/Quake days.
I'd love to see that team reunite for one more game but that's little more than a dream.
Yes, enough to make a useful map of the relevant parts of someone's skeletal structure in a way that can be adapted to a game. It has proper depth sensing technology so it doesn't not suffer from problems of ambiguity as to where a particular part of the body sits in relation to other parts in a full 3 dimensions. This differs from the likes of the Eyetoy or the XBox vision camera in that they only work with a 2D image of the body and have to try and figure out from that where everything is, which as you say, is a much tougher problem in relation to tegra because extrapolating 3D data from 2D isn't easy or even possible at all in some cases. Again, Natal builds a full 3D model of what it can "see". It can't of course product a full skeletal representation, only what is obvious from the front and obvious externally to the human body, that's enough to do what needs to be done for Natal though and that's integrating it with games.
"If by sophisticated, you mean "primitive", sure."
Well, I suppose it depends how you define sophisticated/primitive. But I'd say being able to track the limbs of multiple bodies around a room in real 3D space rather than just working from a 2D image is pretty damn sophisticated. Working with a 2D image is what I would call primitive but Natal does not do that.
"Not really, we've had this shit for ages, and it's never really taken off outside of fixed machines (arcades, real sports, etc.)"
No we really haven't. I'm not aware of any consumer product that does full blown depth sensing to create a 3D map and can apply it to something useful like a game.
"I'd say the next step is launching the damned thing."
Agreed, dev kits only went out to developers last month though so I'd say we're at least 18 months off there being any games developed to make it worth releasing though so I doubt we'll see it for a while yet. Christmas 2010 would be the earliest I'd place my bets on but I'd be suprised if we see real usage before the next console generation in which Microsoft will probably make this a feature of the system.
Your issue with Natal seems to be that you believe it's just taking 2D pictures rather than being able to build a 3D representation of the world. When you understand the difference with latter which is what Natal actually is you can begin to realise how big a step this is - you don't have ambiguity problems related to working things out from a 2D image. It's not perfect, it can't judge what's behind someone for example of course, but it's still a leap forward and is very much next gen technology, if not only because it's the first time we're seeing depth sensing tech. like that becoming cheap enough for this kind of usage.
We will begin to see much better usage for this kind of technology far beyond just Natal, when the tech gets small enough to fit in a mobile phone for example there's no reason you couldn't go out, wave your phone round your car from every angle and have your phone build a 3D map of it that you could load into a racing game in perfect detail - dents and all or even potentially do the same with your house and load it into an FPS. It's also good for indie developers or film makes, mocap was always far too expensive for them but that's not necessarily the case when this tech becomes cheap enough.
Well Microsoft have already shipped out 1000 dev kits to 3rd party developers so the technology is clearly ready to develop with.
I've not seen any evidence of CGI yet, there seems little reason to think what's shown isn't real, certainly the Milo demo was pre-scripted of course because AI isn't that advanced but certainly there's no reason it wasn't responding to the given inputs via Natal as was suggested. Similar if you have a look on YouTube there's a few videos of various people using the system at E3. It's not as if the technology that comprises Natal is even all that groundbreaking, it's just the fact they've used all these bits of technology (facial recognition, depth sensing etc.) in conjunction with each other to produce something capable of a lot more. We've seen things like the Eyetoy and Live vision cam, Natal is different only in that it adds depth sensing to the equation to make it a lot more useful so again although it looks impression there's nothing about it theoretically that suggests there is any reason Microsoft would need to fake demos of it.
I've said it before, I still think it's a way off, a good 18 months to two years away if not only because the 3rd party developers only got dev kits a month ago and they need at least that time to produce an AAA title that will make use of it.
Regarding Microsoft putting all their money on Natal, I don't think they are, at very least it just augments what's already there. There's no reason you couldn't play Ghost Recon as normal but then use hand signals to command your ghost and point at where they should take cover, or physically move to dodge incoming projectiles for example.
It doesn't have to be used as a full blown setup where the old is eliminated altogether somewhat like with the Wii but again, even that had the classic controllers produced for it and even the Wiimotes could be used in a similar fashion to a classic controller if really need be.
Slashdot Mirror
"XHTML 1 is basically HTML4 with the added requirement that the document must also be well-formed XML"
It also deprecated a lot of the older tags that were made obsolete by CSS hence encouraging better separation of document structure and presentation. Unfortunately HTML5 undoes this particular good work because it caters to the lowest common denominator (i.e. bad developers who don't "get" separation of concerns and trivially parsable markup).
"HTML 5 is an evolution of HTML 4 backed by people who actually implement these standards and developed in a more incremental way."
The problem is, those people implementing those standards have proven time and time again how incompetent they are at implementing those standards. The state of standards compliance in browsers has for well over a decade been utterly shameful and that really goes for Firefox as much as it does IE. I'd argue it's those who use the standards that know best - people building the biggest sites on the net because they're the ones who need the markup to be able to support large scale application development. Browser vendors need to be able to implement that standard, don't get me wrong, but putting faith in them as the ones who guide the standards has time and time again proven disastrous - look at the HTML5 video tag debacle for perhaps the most recent example.
I'm not disagreeing with you though, XHTML2 wasn't brilliant, but I'm not convinced HTML5 is even any better than XHTML1 which was also an evolution of HTML4 and IMHO a better one. It was designed with those people building enterprise applications for the web in mind rather than joe average, who is more content using the likes of MySpace and Facebook to manage their content for them in the first place.
Of course, HTML5 can do everything XHTML does for the reasons you state, but sadly it seems to encourage bad practice whereas XHTML discouraged it. One final beef I have with HTML5 is that accessibility seems to have been ignored in it's creation, for example there were no real efforts to ensure easy inclusion of subtitles the previously proposed audio/video formats. Again, we really just don't seem to be any further on with web standards than we were at the start of the decade and again, the people to blame are the browser vendors as much as the W3C and it's allowed not particularly ideal or portable proprietary tools such as Flash to gain a lot of ground as a result.
Perhaps not but the point in knowing code is that it helps allows you to understand the technological boundaries on certain ideas, so whilst he may not have written any code he presumably at least knows what the limits are on his designs from having an understanding of the technical hurdles.
The question is horribly muddled.
I want to be a game designer and then... "Finally, is C++ the way to go? ASP? LUA?"
Sorry, lets start from the beginning. Do you want to be a game designer or a games programmer? If it's the former then language isn't really important, you should be focussing on being able to create a good interactive story so you probably really need to study something like literature or perhaps even a screenwriting class would help if you can't get an explicit game design class. Don't expect to get far though, really there's a lot of people who want to be game designers, in fact, probably too many, because everyone wants to be in control of a team that will make their dream game for them, very few actually come up with ideas that everyone else thinks is awesome too. You have to be able to develop games that everyone will enjoy, not that you think would be cool which isn't as easy a skill as many probably assume. Programming will be a help to some extent, but it's not the first thing to worry about if you want to be a designer.
If you in fact want to be a programmer, then you need to get some basic knowledge of programming, the fact you suggested ASP is puzzling, I'm not even aware of any web based games written in ASP - I've only ever seen them written in PHP. I can only guess then that you're just throwing around terms you've seen about the net to make it look like you're anywhere near close to even beginning to work towards your ideal career. The issue is you can't even get started as you don't even seem to have a basic idea of what you want to do, or what is involved in these roles.
So here's the best advice anyone can give based on your question - go read some places like Gamedev.net or Gamasutra.com. Actually figure out what you want to do first. Don't come back and say I want to be a programmer, come back and say "I want to be an engine programmer", or "I want to be an AI programmer" or whatever else.
If you're wondering why a lot of responses here seem hostile, it's because you seem to be expecting answers without even bothering to put as little effort is required to even figure out what you need to ask first. If you had at least done that and figured out if you want to be a designer or a programmer you'd probably find better responses.
Still, the Slashdot editors should've at least picked that up, I'd like to think they vet questions to see if they make sense first but judging by this one it seems like it was streamed straight from their inbox onto the front page.
I hope this response will in itself give you a good start though as again you really need to figure out what it is you actually want. When you do finally figure out what you want, may I suggest you start by working with an indie or a mod team to at least get an idea of the facets involved in building a game first hand. I'd suggest you also read some books and so on, but most importantly perhaps - just get involved in a community like that at Gamedev.net or somewhere that produces indie focussed engines like Garagegames or the C4 engine community at terathon.com or perhaps even get involved with an open source rendering engine like ogre.
"Why is this a problem? For the employers, it's great. For the employees, it's not good, because it drives down wages and the level of acceptable working conditions."
That argument doesn't really seem to apply to the EU. The EU imposes some pretty employee friendly laws in terms of working conditions that are based around those that workers in say France have who have some of the best working conditions in the world. For most Europeans working conditions will drastically improve, even in Britain this looked set to be the case when Europe tried to do away with our maximum working hours opt-out, that isn't really an opt-out because it's written into most employees contracts. It may lower wages in the short term in a specific country but it'll normalise wages across the whole of the EU in the long term and as the European economy improves so do wages/standards of living, as the EU already has a strong economy then even normalisation of wages across it isn't going to be a problem.
"Manufacturing jobs were globalized and they end up poorly paid in poor conditions."
But again, that's a different scenario. The reason for that is that manufacturing could be exported to places where there were no laws regarding workers rights so workers could easily be exploited. In the EU we again have strong supporting laws for workers (almsot certainly helped by the fact the major players in the EU are big on Unions) so it's not the case that you can pay someone like $0.50 an hour as you can in India or China, you still have to shell out for a minimum wage that isn't far off what you were paying anyway and the cost of moving everything undoubtedly outweighs that in many cases.
Normalisation of wages is happening quite rapidly too so it's not a slow process, already there has been a decent amount of immigration from for example the Polish migrant population in the UK back to Poland because a lot of decently paid jobs that would never be dreamt of being available only a few years ago before entry into the EU.
Effectively many cases of "they're taking our jobs" turn out to simply be that the people taking their jobs are taking them because they're harder workers and often aren't taking any kind of decrease in pay, they simply just make better employees.
I would argue a good start would be not creating a situation where they can live off the dole or child benefits in the first place ;)
"The "solutions" they propose are as sharp as a brick, but the problems they raise are real."
They are? I suppose that depends if you dislike foreign immigrants who often work harder (particularly the Polish) than 90% of the native British population simply because they're not British. If you think stirring up sectarian violence in Northern Island is a good idea and if you think having no idea about running the budget of a country but decide it's a good idea to have a French style subsidised agricultural system and a massive military with no regard for the rest of the worlds opinion on how and when you decide to use it are all good things.
The BNP doesn't really raise any problems that aren't raised elsewhere and better dealt with unless you have a racist or xenophobic mindset and think the rest of the world is inferior and want to blame other races for the problems rather than realising that there are millions of white, British born chavs that are far more of a problem for the country than most immigrants.
£100 to start with.
If it's anything like driving licenses or passports they'd eventually make you renew it too.
I was quite suprised when I got a letter from the DVLA the other day saying I had to renew my driving license because photos now have to be updated every 10 years at the cost of £20. Not a massive amount of cash, but £20 for every driver in the UK every 10 years probably amounts to £250 million or so for them over that period (or £25 million a year in other words) so clearly just a cash grab. No one's ever had to renew their photo before so why now? It's not like the photo even matters, if someone wants to check your license they can do so without needing your photo and it's not as if it's hard to fake one anyway.
I'd imagine the same would happen with ID cards eventually, probably £50 every 10 years to renew it or something too which is another reason I didn't want one to be honest.
I have to agree. I've never actually sold a game second hand and in fact have pre-ordered most new games out for the 360 for the last 2 years spending thousands on games, but I've always thought it seems odd that if say someone in my family became massively ill and I had to dig up as much cash as possible from somewhere I'd be able to sell everything from my house to my toaster to my car to my XBox 360 games, but oddly would be unable to sell my Steam based DRM'd games.
The fact is games that impose technical measures to try and prevent resale such as hard copy games that require Steam activation are fairly unique as products across pretty much every single market in that they prevent a second hand sale. I can think of very few (well, actually none of the top of my head) other physical products that have a measure in place to prevent second hand sale.
It's not only that though, I have a friend that I do not believe is unique, he buys a few games, but really just doesn't have the cash to buy new titles all the time, he can just about afford it if he can trade the last game he bought for £10 - £20 or so and buy the new one at £35 - £40. Effectively then I think preventing second hand sale could be self defeating, certainly he would be unable to buy new games outright at £40 a piece, they've got a scenario as so:
- Person 1 buys game at £40
- Person 1 sells game for £10 and buys new game for £40 when value of sold game is now only £20
- Person 2 buys traded in game for £20
So the games industry has made £80 of profit, but "lost" £20, whilst without the second hand sale they may have halved their profits to £40 if neither person could then afford to buy the new game or the second hand game. The problem is the games industry is assuming that if the second hand sales go that both people will just buy the game new making them £100 to £120. It's possible, but I think it's unrealistic. I think the best case scenario is that you could say goodbye to high release week sales as everyone who couldn't afford full priced games just waited for games to come down to second hand style prices anyway.
Really, I'm amazed it's taking companies like Sega to take the lead on this.
Nintendo captured the casual market this console generation with an innovative controller style whilst Sony and Microsoft have fought over the hardcore market who tend to prefer these type of games.
Both Sony and Microsoft have announced their competing products to the Wii mote, and both certainly appear better than the Wii mote, although perhaps not with the Wii motion plus addon. They've also taken strides to increase their casual offerings (i.e. Microsoft's investment in games like Lips on the 360). It's clear Microsoft and Sony realise that whilst the hardcore market has more cash in it, it doesn't have enough when they're fighting each over over it so to make the kind of profits Nintendo has with the Wii they seem to understand they've got to start taking from Nintendo's market too.
The problem is Nintendo doesn't seem to recognise this, and are sticking with their casual market despite the fact it'll slowly start getting eaten away. It's hard to know if they have a trick up their sleeves or if they've become complacent with their success, but certainly I'm suprised they haven't pushed more mature games themselves to try and pull in some of the hardcore gamers from Sony and Microsoft. The problem for Nintendo is it's not as if this is the first time they've had a massive success and then just fallen back into obscurity for a few years, with something like the Wii I think many had wondered if they'd finally broken this cycle and had moved into a new era of innovation to stay permanently ahead, but right now, particularly judging by their rather weak E3 showing where they basically just showed more of the same that doesn't look like it's the case.
I suppose though historically we should probably not be suprised that it's Sega taking the lead here and not Nintendo, whilst Sega dropped out of the hardware market they always seemed to produce generally more mature games than Nintendo, so perhaps Sega are even doing it as part of a deal with Nintendo that Nintendo will remain a producer of casual games and Sega make mature games. Who knows, hopefully they're not that blind to the competition and do have a trick or two up their sleeves, but at face value this seems to absolutely not be the case right now.
Not the first time either.
Anyone remember I think it was Loki torrent or something where he asked for donations to fight an RIAA court case but instead just took the money and ran?
The movement for change to copyright, or the piracy movement or whatever you want to call it doesn't need idols for exactly the reason P2P works so well - it's decentralised.
Similarly I think the guys purchasing TPB are idiots, no one in their right mind would trust a torrent site that is corporately owned and says it wants to turn into a legitimate service (not that it wasn't technically legitimate under Swedish law anyway).
Another site will step up and take it's place, the TPB guys will have traded this deal for public support, and no one will frankly care now if they end up going to jail. P2P will continue, with a new site, or perhaps even an existing one - BTJunkie already had a bigger userbase afaik and TPB will be a site no one uses anymore.
Ultimately TPB guys are human, but that doesn't mean this is a stupid move. Even if as they say it is to get money to continue the fight it's a severe blow to their credibility. The best they can do now is be 100% transparent and provide evidence of where every penny goes, if not it's only fair people assume it's gone into their pockets.
The only thing I managed to take away from that article is the guy buying it has sharp elbows and teeth.
This sounds like it could be very beneficial if it ever comes down to hand to hand combat against the music industry.
Oh and I think there was something about not eating Danish people with seaweed or something too.
I'm not sure what your point is. Nothing you said detracts from my point at all. Other forces with weapons i.e. the FBI are in exactly the same situation as the army.
Look at the situation in Honduras for an example of my point. An armed force will side with the people long before they side with a bad leader in a nation even as poor as Honduras, let alone one as modern as the US or any European state.
Yes it it is real, but it's spelt Israel.
"What planet in the Propaganda system is that from? Isreal's whole existence as a place for European Jews to go"
Yes and where do you think those European Jews descended from, or why do you think they were in Europe in the first place? Nothing to do with persecution back in their homeland before Israel even existed?
Don't even try and pretend it's clear cut. There's a long history of fighting back and forth and persecution back and forth. If you could at least spell the country name right I'd have a bit more respect for your opinion but as you can't do that and as your opinion is horribly ignorant and biased against Israel I can only guess you're yet another victim of the rather good Hamas propaganda machine, a machine whose success stems from the fact it doesn't worry about international law so someone wearing civilian clothes firing rockets or bullets at Israeli's can be turned into a poor innocent civilian gunned down by Israelis just by removing his AK47.
Frankly I think the Israelis are fucking stupid voting in the government they now have, that really wasn't helpful. I also think Fatah are now probably the most sensible force in the region (bar Egypt and Jordan of course).
To suggest Israel is the only problem when you have players like Hamas, Hezbollah and Syria in the area just shows outright ignorance of the situation there and it's a sad reflection of how good the terrorist (Hamas/Hezbollah) propaganda machine has become and how stupid Israel has become for playing into their hands all too often. Syria assassinated Lebanon's elected leader, so to pretend the problem is limited to arabs vs. jews is also ignorant. There are far worse players in the region than Israel (Hamas, Hezbollah, Syria) but again, there are far better (Jordan, Egypt and nowadays Fatah).
Again, to suggest it's all about Israel vs. Arabs is stupid - Hamas have made it quite clear that once (if) they destroy Israel, they will then move on to attack the Egyptian leadership and it's supporters (i.e. most the population) also. You'd still have Syria and Iran sponsoring Hezbollah in Lebanon despite the fact the majority of the population in Lebanon even in the face of Hezbollah coercion has voted for a pro-Western government twice now. Lebanon has a perfectly good secular military much like Turkey and so the only reason for Hezbollah's existence is to force the Syrian/Iranian and minority Lebanese viewpoint on the remaining majority of the country.
Of course, even singling out Israel as a country is ignorant, there was about 3 million Palestinians in Israel, some even in government. Whilst many of those sympathise and/or support the Palestinian goals, they too support their own country over Hamas.
No, the real problem in the region is murderous religious zealots and they exist in the region amongst Jews, Christians, Sunni and Shiite muslims alike. Dismantling any one country or set of countries would have no effect on the level of violence there, in fact it's been a violent place for the last couple of thousand years at very least. At best you'd need to eliminate Hamas, Hezbollah, Israel, Syria and Iran from the equation to have anything even roughly resembling peace in the region. Even if you could turn them all into atheists and do away with the religious divide and hatred that comes with it you'd still have some battles simply because there is also a scarcity of resources there, although one might argue that the only reason people try and live there in the first place is their spiritual attachment to the area so maybe they would all just realise the majority of the place (i.e. the areas not adjacent to water) isn't even worth fighting over anyway.
Still, Israel is quite a big player when it comes to technology too and you can be rest assured you're making use of Israeli produced or designed technology when using the internet. If you really want to make a point then maybe you should boycott all their goods including that. Or are you just going to remain a hypocrit and blame the jews for everything whilst simultaneously consuming products of Israel when there are many equally bad, and some worse, some better players in the region who have just as much involvement?
There's a lot of money in government contracts, rest assured if the US bans Nokia/Siemens from bidding on US government contracts Europe will respond by banning Cisco from government contracts across Europe.
It's a slippery slope, that's the problem and it IS about protectionism. Would these senators be proposing the same if there was no embargo on US companies bidding for contracts in Iran? If it was Cisco that fulfilled these contracts? Judging by the actions of US companies across the world (e.g. arms manufacturers) the answer would have to be a resounding no.
Probably because the guy who has been ousted was trying to defy the constitution, defy the courts and sacked military heads who wouldn't assist him in doing so.
Effectively what is happening in Honduras is an example of what should ideally happen if a leader attempts to become a dictator (i.e. he gets removed), whilst Iran is an example of what shouldn't happen (i.e. the people get violently supressed).
The Honduras result is really a good one, he was trying to copy Chavez, the difference is he didn't have the support to do so. It's probably worth realising that copying Chavez isn't a good thing because Chavez is really no better than Ahmadinejad. Ignoring the fact they're best of friends it's probably worth noting that Chavez, like Ahmadinejad, has supressed opposition using militia etc. so again, seeing someone who wanted to follow this path ousted through a country's legal and constitutional procedures is probably a good thing.
Unfortunately something else doesn't always support the software that people just want to be able to run without any hassle.
I don't think that's true.
It's the same with everything, there are good implementations and bad implementations, age of game IMO has nothing to do with it.
In terms of FPS games, Quake 1 was always my favourite online for the reasons you state, the physics just felt nice, the game was fun to play with it's rocket jumping and the likes, it didn't need complex physics.
Yet whilst Half-Life 1 was an excellent game I always felt the physics in it absolutely sucked, compare it to something like Crackdown on the XBox 360 where the physics pretty much make the game and you see that a good physics system can make a world of difference. For those who haven't played Crackdown, the content of the game is pretty poor it's basically an open world and you have to kill about 18 "bosses" across the open world, you can do them in any order you want, there's not really much of a storyline there. The fact you can jump your way up sky scrapers, ramp cars off of transporters, throw scud missile launchers at enemies to crush them just generally have fun stacking together random explosive objects into a pile to make a massive explosion still leaves you with a pretty fun game.
Even Call of Duty 4 and 5 and also Halo 3 just feel much nicer to play than many older games with simpler physics engines.
As you say, it's the gameplay that matters, but realistic or complex physics do not in any way have to detract from the gameplay, in fact, in recent years it's really come into it's own in actually making the gameplay in a handful of games - see games like Prey, Portal, the gravity gun in Half-Life 2, Crackdown and so on.
I think the thing to bear in mind is that when you look to the games you enjoyed in the past as fine examples of how a game should be you only remember the good ones, you don't remember the countless bad or at least mediocre and hence easily forgettable ones. It's easy to pick some great games from the past and compare a specific element against the average level of games today, but I believe if you take the average quality of games from that period and compare to the average quality now you'll notice that again, as always there's good games and there's bad games.
I'd argue the issue now is that increased complexity does make it much more challenging for developers to get all those complex systems right and to work together well to make a nice game, but it's certainly not impossible again as many great games in recent years have shown.
I think reality is even more subtle than that.
Because America is a relatively free country where the troops are the people, rather than somewhere like say North Korea or Iran where the troops are above the people any attempt by an American government to impose tyranny to the point of rebellion would actually see their own military turn on them and overthrow them. This is not far fetched - we have seen it in places like Turkey and similarly Lebanon's secular military is the only thing really preventing the country becoming a Hezbollah stronghold.
People seem to assume the army would be against them, but unlike North Korea where the troops are troops because otherwise they and their families starve to death troops in the US have little to lose by defying government.
I think the 2nd amendment is irrelevant then not just for the reasons you state, but because civilians would never need to do any fighting against the military because it'd be on their side in the first place.
It would take a massive culture change to get the military to blindly follow the government, a change that would ultimately require the government to find some severe leverage over the armed forces - like the risk of starvation for soldiers and their families if they don't comply. But I cannot think of any way they could really get that leverage without the support of the military in the first place.
Well, most people talk about stuff like Thriller, Smooth Criminal, Billie Jean etc.
It wasn't until the mid 80s that Jackson really peaked which is around the same time that GnR came about which is why the comparison. The earlier stuff wasn't anywhere near as popular and most Jackson fans almost certainly didn't become so until the mid 80s, that's probably why the 80s are commonly referred to as being the period that defines the Jackson generation because it was the period that really defined his career.
Er, I'm British, I'm not sure why you'd assume I'm American.
Manchester United (British football team) are also prominent world wide including places ranging from Somalia to China to Pallestine, but it doesn't mean they really are that important in the grant scheme of things.
You can say what you want about my opinion of Michael Jackson but do not forget there are still hundreds of millions out there who agree with me.
It is stupid to pretend everyone liked him. Yes he had a massive following but it is not universal, it's naive to think that would ever be the case when we're talking about something as subjective as music.
Er, I'm of the "Michael Jackson" generation, except to me he's still forgettable when he's not in the media because of a child molestation case or for dangling a baby over a balcony or for managing to blow hundreds of millions of dollars mostly on tat.
Age has nothing to do with it, it's just whilst all the pop fans were listening to Jacko the rest of us were listening to things like Guns and Roses.
To many of us, the only reason Jacko wasn't forgettable was the fact he was always getting himself in the media by doing something pretty stupid.
I think you'll find it's your assumption that just because you seem to like Michael Jackson that he must universally be liked that's wrong. Not everyone has the same tastes.
If I had to pick some favourite tracks from the 80s then stuff by U2, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Guns and Roses, Bon Jovi would come well ahead of anything by Michael Jackson. They're slightly different genres, but frankly if I had to pick something cheesy which is the category I'd personally put Jacko's songs into I'd probably even choose something more catchy and recognisable such as A-ha's "Take on me".
You're welcome to like Jacko, but don't assume everyone else does and assume that if they don't they're from the wrong generation. I distinctly remember even at the time friends were pretty split about him - sure some loved him, but there were still plenty that hated him even when he was in his prime.
No, you don't understand what the "IR Camera" does. It's actually a projector and a sensor that can project IR and use it to sense actual depth in the scene it's "looking" at. It is not a simple IR camera, it's full blown depth sensing kit.
"Mocap too expensive? What the fuck? Most games with a decent budget use motion capture for animations!"
Presumably you missed the "indie" part from my comment? Indie developers cannot for the most part afford mocap for exactly the reason india games don't have a decent budget. There are still a lot of good indie games out there though and giving them access to mocap tech. makes their lives even easier and allows their games to be even better.
"If you think Natal will be able to scan your car or your house, well, get ready for disappointment."
Well no, I'm not. I don't expect Natal to do it itself because it's designed to be sat under a TV near the XBox, but the technology that Natal comprises of most definitely can do that. As I stated if that tech makes it into mobile phones with GPS kit, tilt sensors and so on it would be trivial to use it to produce maps of real 3D objects that could be imported / exported.
Again the only real issue here regarding Natal is you don't actually seem to understand the technology that it makes use of. If you can't understand the tech. how can you possibly comment on it's potential?
Yes, I know the company is still there, but is the team really still relevant? The company that's there now just doesn't seem to have much in common the id we always knew and loved, largely because of talent drain.
id lost a lot of it's best people years ago, Carmack is still there but hardly any of the greats from the Wolf/Doom/Quake days are still there. Romero? McGee? Petersen? Carmack (Adrian)? Steed?
It seems they lost their key people in various areas, sure people like Romero became laughing stocks when they left because the guy clearly wasn't a CEO when it came to, that doesn't mean of course he wasn't a great designer and developer when working at id. McGee and Petersen - almost certainly their greatest level builders. Steed, their best 3D artist. Even people like David Kirsch who did the Quakeworld netcode that is still the foundation of the netcode in many modern FPS such as HL2.
Carmack was always id's best programmer when it came to visualisation, but the loss of other key characters seems to sum up what id Software has become - a developer of games that are graphically impressive, but hollow beyond that. With the rise of the newer versions of the Unreal engine and developers like Crytek even Carmack's prowess in the graphics world seems to be lagging a bit.
It's sad in a way, I'll always respect id for what they were, but I think the loss of so many key figures was a big deal. I don't mean to detract from the staff working there now, id still has some brilliant people but I think what id doesn't have anymore is a dream team which I think it did have back in the old Wolf/Doom/Quake days.
I'd love to see that team reunite for one more game but that's little more than a dream.
"No it can't. It identifies a few joints."
Yes, enough to make a useful map of the relevant parts of someone's skeletal structure in a way that can be adapted to a game. It has proper depth sensing technology so it doesn't not suffer from problems of ambiguity as to where a particular part of the body sits in relation to other parts in a full 3 dimensions. This differs from the likes of the Eyetoy or the XBox vision camera in that they only work with a 2D image of the body and have to try and figure out from that where everything is, which as you say, is a much tougher problem in relation to tegra because extrapolating 3D data from 2D isn't easy or even possible at all in some cases. Again, Natal builds a full 3D model of what it can "see". It can't of course product a full skeletal representation, only what is obvious from the front and obvious externally to the human body, that's enough to do what needs to be done for Natal though and that's integrating it with games.
"If by sophisticated, you mean "primitive", sure."
Well, I suppose it depends how you define sophisticated/primitive. But I'd say being able to track the limbs of multiple bodies around a room in real 3D space rather than just working from a 2D image is pretty damn sophisticated. Working with a 2D image is what I would call primitive but Natal does not do that.
"Not really, we've had this shit for ages, and it's never really taken off outside of fixed machines (arcades, real sports, etc.)"
No we really haven't. I'm not aware of any consumer product that does full blown depth sensing to create a 3D map and can apply it to something useful like a game.
"I'd say the next step is launching the damned thing."
Agreed, dev kits only went out to developers last month though so I'd say we're at least 18 months off there being any games developed to make it worth releasing though so I doubt we'll see it for a while yet. Christmas 2010 would be the earliest I'd place my bets on but I'd be suprised if we see real usage before the next console generation in which Microsoft will probably make this a feature of the system.
Your issue with Natal seems to be that you believe it's just taking 2D pictures rather than being able to build a 3D representation of the world. When you understand the difference with latter which is what Natal actually is you can begin to realise how big a step this is - you don't have ambiguity problems related to working things out from a 2D image. It's not perfect, it can't judge what's behind someone for example of course, but it's still a leap forward and is very much next gen technology, if not only because it's the first time we're seeing depth sensing tech. like that becoming cheap enough for this kind of usage.
We will begin to see much better usage for this kind of technology far beyond just Natal, when the tech gets small enough to fit in a mobile phone for example there's no reason you couldn't go out, wave your phone round your car from every angle and have your phone build a 3D map of it that you could load into a racing game in perfect detail - dents and all or even potentially do the same with your house and load it into an FPS. It's also good for indie developers or film makes, mocap was always far too expensive for them but that's not necessarily the case when this tech becomes cheap enough.
Well Microsoft have already shipped out 1000 dev kits to 3rd party developers so the technology is clearly ready to develop with.
I've not seen any evidence of CGI yet, there seems little reason to think what's shown isn't real, certainly the Milo demo was pre-scripted of course because AI isn't that advanced but certainly there's no reason it wasn't responding to the given inputs via Natal as was suggested. Similar if you have a look on YouTube there's a few videos of various people using the system at E3. It's not as if the technology that comprises Natal is even all that groundbreaking, it's just the fact they've used all these bits of technology (facial recognition, depth sensing etc.) in conjunction with each other to produce something capable of a lot more. We've seen things like the Eyetoy and Live vision cam, Natal is different only in that it adds depth sensing to the equation to make it a lot more useful so again although it looks impression there's nothing about it theoretically that suggests there is any reason Microsoft would need to fake demos of it.
I've said it before, I still think it's a way off, a good 18 months to two years away if not only because the 3rd party developers only got dev kits a month ago and they need at least that time to produce an AAA title that will make use of it.
Regarding Microsoft putting all their money on Natal, I don't think they are, at very least it just augments what's already there. There's no reason you couldn't play Ghost Recon as normal but then use hand signals to command your ghost and point at where they should take cover, or physically move to dodge incoming projectiles for example.
It doesn't have to be used as a full blown setup where the old is eliminated altogether somewhat like with the Wii but again, even that had the classic controllers produced for it and even the Wiimotes could be used in a similar fashion to a classic controller if really need be.