Actually, the editing of gradients is really clunky in Inkscape, so I guess that is another thing that bugs me.
My experience with Illustrator has been that the gradient interface is absolutely horrid. Whoever it was at Adobe that designed it must seriously hate their customers. I'm not an Inkscape user (I tried it out some time back and it just didn't click with me at all) but if you say that Inkscape's gradient interface is somehow worse than Illustrator's then I don't think I want to be an Inkscape user.
Sony's Blu-Ray licensing explicitly forbids hardware manufactuers from creating hybrid players. If they did it anyway, Sony would cancel their license and blacklist their players on all new BR discs.
Originally they didn't plan to strap it to the side of a whopping great rocket and shoot it into space, either. Originally they had planned to have a very large, reusable delta-winged aircraft which the shuttle would clip into (this is one of the reasons why it fits so cleanly onto a 747). The booster aircraft would take the shuttle up to a very high altitude, the shuttle would take off into orbit, and the booster would return back to the ground where it could be re-used.
They didn't build it, convinced it would cost too much to put the desired payloads into orbit. In retrospect they probably would have been better with the original idea. Certainly it would have been better then the horrible kludge they came up with.
There was also Pathfinder, which was used for ground tests, and Explorer, which is a museum replica.
This actually illustrates a side point. We're running out of actual, real shuttles. Enterprise doesn't really count as much since it was never intended to be launched. The sad fact is that the shuttle program is coming to the end of its lifespan. As things progress, we're not going to need the shuttles we have remaining. Atlantis will be cut up for parts to keep Endeavour and Discovery going, and then probably we'll end up cutting up Endeavour to keep Discovery in the air for those final few flights. Assuming, of course, that there isn't another catastrophic accident.
The sad thing about this is that it will mean there's a chance we won't have a real, complete shuttle that actually saw use in space to put into a museum. Regardless of the flaws in its design, the Shuttle is a symbolic piece of equipment. It seems like a huge shame that there's a chance that all we may end up with is the shell of Discovery or Endeavour, the remains of Atlantis and whichever of the other two active ones is used for parts, and the whatever they haven't torn off of Enterprise left to show our grandkids 50 years down the track. Discovery would be the ideal, as of the remaining shuttles it had most of the high profile missions, such as launching Hubble.
We may have replicas like Explorer for the museums, but a replica is simply not the same.
It's not just the saving in energy consumption, either. LED-based lightbulb alternatives generally have lifespans in the tens of thousands of hours, compared to around 1000 hours for a good quality incandescent bulb. Most of the LED bulbs that I've seen have around 50,000 to 60,000 hour lifespans, which if you do some quick maths will work out to around 6 years of constant use. They're a lot more expensive than a single incandescent bulb, but if you actually sit down and figure everything else, the equivalent number of standard incandescent bulbs will cost you more. That's not even touching on the significant power reduction, either.
"certainly no notable games have shipped on multiple DVD's (A few might have, but I'm a big spending gamer, and I've yet to see one)."
Two relevant console titles that come to mind for me are Xenosaga II and Star Ocean 3. Both ship on two DVDs. Both primarily used the in-game engine for cinematics, so you can't really level the FMV criticism at them. They're reasonably high-profile games, especially to a Japanese audience, and that's quite likely the core audience that Sony are aiming at when it comes to this higher capacity anyway.
I suspect though that the reason these games were split over two discs is because a lot of PS2s have terrible trouble with Dual Layer DVDs - I know Star Ocean 3 had issues here - so they've been split onto two DVD-5s for better compatibility.
You can't assume that doubling the texture's size will quadruple the space it takes, unless you're talking about raw bitmap data. If the original data was uncompressed, then the simple thing to do would be to compress it. If it was compressed, then increasing its resolution does not correspond to a constant increase in size - it depends on how much information is in the higher-resolution image compared to the lower-resolution one.
"Blue Dragon, while not having the star status of the former, still is going to be a huge release."
Blue Dragon is also being headed up by Hironobu Sakaguchi, also has a Nobuo Uematsu soundtrack, and it has character designs by the freakishly popular Akira Toriyama of Dragon Quest (and Dragonball) fame. Given that it's going to be released before Lost Odyssey (they're pushing for later this year), I'd say Blue Dragon is actually by far the higher-profile of the two. It's probably worth noting that the last time these three came together on a project (Uematsu was credited as being involved even though he didn't write the score) the result was Chrono Trigger, which is still one of the best-loved Japanese RPGs ever.
Spielberg has been involved in the creative side of game development before. Back in the 90's he wrote the original story for Lucasarts' The Dig. It was a personal favourite of mine, though it didn't meet with quite the level of success it really deserved.
I'm surprised no one's mentioned this. No 'historical computer' collection is complete without an original Macintosh. The amount of things that we take for granted in modern computers (especially in terms of interface) which were introduced to the general market with the Macintosh is astounding. It may not have been the first to do a lot of those things, but it was the first to really bring them to light. Additionally you're far more likely to be able to find an old Mac for cheap than an old Lisa or similar.
I think people are missing the point here a bit. The significance of Evangelion goes a long way beyond it being a reasonably good anime series. If that was all that it had going for it, then it wouldn't have been as popular for as long as it has been.
The fact is that Evangelion changed the whole market. It proved that you could be successful by focusing on characters, and more importantly dealing with mature, adult situations. This is not to say that there weren't a number of serious anime series that predated it - Gundam comes to mind as an example - but Evangelion truly was a revolution in terms of style in the medium. Add to that the fact that it was pretty much the first thing to make a killing by merchandising the characters, rather than having a huge amount of robots to build model kits from (the Bandai approach) and you realise that, while it may not be that good, it was one of the most significant milestones in the development of just about every aspect of modern anime, both the good and the bad. It may be a bit of a right-place-at-the-right-time thing - if Evangelion hadn't been there, something else certainly would have come along.
Unfortunately both ADV Films and Gainax have flogged the series mercilessly. It was the first production by Gainax to have actually made a profit, and I think at this point re-releasing it in box sets over and over is about all that is keeping ADV afloat after their drunken license-everything-we-can anime binge a few years back and the general failure of their Anime network.
I wouldn't have classed Bioware's games as sandbox. Certainly they offer a decent amount of freedom in that there is a lot of side material that you can do, but all their games have been very much story-focused. Probably the weakest link was Baldur's Gate, but its sequel is often held up as being a poster-boy for quality game plots.
Whether or not the actual system is good or not is not what is being debated. Changing its name doesn't change the system itself. I don't need to be a 5-star chef to be able to tell when the steak isn't cooked. What is being debated is the choice of the name itself. The name changes our preception of the system, and more importantly, it will make it less attractive to the Joe Sixpacks of the world that Nintendo say they were intending to pitch the system at.
X-Wing already was brought back as X-Wing Alliance, and while it wasn't a bad game by any means, for some reason no one seemed to really notice it.
What would be far more interesting to me would be another TIE Fighter. Though knowing Lucasarts, what we'd actually get if they did another space combat game would involve flying clone trooper ships and jedi starfighters.
The test you speak of is a basic english competency test, ie they want you to be able to speak rudimentary english in order to become a citizen of Australia. There's nothing wrong with that in my opinion - you should be able to communicate in the national language if you want to be part of the country. If not, just get permanent residency or something.
I may not be the typical gamer, but as far as PAL releases go, I've probably purchased as many games between January and March as I did all last year. Shadow of the Colossus, ICO re-release, We Love Katamari, Atelier Iris, Dragon Quest VIII... and we're supposed to be getting Guitar Hero some time soon. Plus there's even more in the pipeline. And that's just on the PS2.
I suspect that while things might be declining in the US, they may not be in other territories. Then again, maybe no one's buying games but me. That might explain why Shadow of the Colossus and We Love Katamari have constantly been in the top-ten PS2 sellers in Australia since they released in Feb.
What interests me is if there is a limit to this sort of technology. How many electrodes can they stick in there before they reach a saturation point at which they can no longer add any more? I'd expect that the limit would be something astronomical compared to 16 of them, but as the number increases their size would have to decrease proportionately, which would likely mean that the probability of successful 'installation' would be inversely proportional to the potential quality of vision. Also, to take the concept to its logical extreme, is it possible we could deliver a signal that is of higher resolution than the natural human eye?
And of course if you take this tech to it's Sci-Fi extremes... if we can deliver an image into the optic nerve, does that mean we could do some sort of hybrid thing for people with working eyes where information could be mixed in?
I recall seeing something like this late last year, but it was slightly different. In principle the same thing - electrodes connected into the optic nerve - but in this case it was a set of 16 electrodes in a 4x4 array. Essentially they had the guy equipped with the tech put a pair of glasses on that had a camera in the center. Each frame was broken down into the aforementioned 4x4 grid, and then delivered directly into the optic nerve. 4x4 is not exactly high resolution though, so the guy was only really able to distinguish light areas from dark.
There was further research planned though. The next goal was to create a 64-electrode version (8x8), which should give the ability to distinguish large features in the image being viewed, such as being able to distinguish the approximate figure of someone standing just infront of you. Their eventual goal was to be able to also build essentially glass eyes which would have a camera mounted within and would remove the need to pass the electrodes through the skull and out underneath the skin to the area of the temple where the signal from the camera was delivered.
Anyway, I'm not sure if this is more results from the same research, or another group working along similar lines. I unfortunately don't have a link to the older material and TFA is a bit sparse on details.
I'm increasingly feeling like Australia is caught in a rapid downward spiral. Every week it seems like they've chipped away another little bit of our privacy and liberty. To call the country a ship without a rudder is an understatement - the rudder came off years ago, we're now taking on water, the captain's roaring drunk and half the crew have lost their minds.
The standard of living in Australia is generally pretty high for now, but I just can't see it continuing. The problem is, where else is there to go?
Are sales in general down, or just sales of the cookie-cutter crap that the big studios have been pushing out? In Australia, February was a great month for games - Ico finally got a re-release, along with We Love Katamari and Shadow of the Colossus. Shadow was the most-sold game on the platform in the week it released, and Shadow and Katamari are sitting at #3 and #4 on the charts this week too. I know that Australian sales are a drop in the ocean overall, but this trend seems to be going on throughout the PAL territory.
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Sony's Blu-Ray licensing explicitly forbids hardware manufactuers from creating hybrid players. If they did it anyway, Sony would cancel their license and blacklist their players on all new BR discs.
Originally they didn't plan to strap it to the side of a whopping great rocket and shoot it into space, either. Originally they had planned to have a very large, reusable delta-winged aircraft which the shuttle would clip into (this is one of the reasons why it fits so cleanly onto a 747). The booster aircraft would take the shuttle up to a very high altitude, the shuttle would take off into orbit, and the booster would return back to the ground where it could be re-used. They didn't build it, convinced it would cost too much to put the desired payloads into orbit. In retrospect they probably would have been better with the original idea. Certainly it would have been better then the horrible kludge they came up with.
There was also Pathfinder, which was used for ground tests, and Explorer, which is a museum replica.
This actually illustrates a side point. We're running out of actual, real shuttles. Enterprise doesn't really count as much since it was never intended to be launched. The sad fact is that the shuttle program is coming to the end of its lifespan. As things progress, we're not going to need the shuttles we have remaining. Atlantis will be cut up for parts to keep Endeavour and Discovery going, and then probably we'll end up cutting up Endeavour to keep Discovery in the air for those final few flights. Assuming, of course, that there isn't another catastrophic accident.
The sad thing about this is that it will mean there's a chance we won't have a real, complete shuttle that actually saw use in space to put into a museum. Regardless of the flaws in its design, the Shuttle is a symbolic piece of equipment. It seems like a huge shame that there's a chance that all we may end up with is the shell of Discovery or Endeavour, the remains of Atlantis and whichever of the other two active ones is used for parts, and the whatever they haven't torn off of Enterprise left to show our grandkids 50 years down the track. Discovery would be the ideal, as of the remaining shuttles it had most of the high profile missions, such as launching Hubble.
We may have replicas like Explorer for the museums, but a replica is simply not the same.
It's not just the saving in energy consumption, either. LED-based lightbulb alternatives generally have lifespans in the tens of thousands of hours, compared to around 1000 hours for a good quality incandescent bulb. Most of the LED bulbs that I've seen have around 50,000 to 60,000 hour lifespans, which if you do some quick maths will work out to around 6 years of constant use. They're a lot more expensive than a single incandescent bulb, but if you actually sit down and figure everything else, the equivalent number of standard incandescent bulbs will cost you more. That's not even touching on the significant power reduction, either.
"certainly no notable games have shipped on multiple DVD's (A few might have, but I'm a big spending gamer, and I've yet to see one)."
Two relevant console titles that come to mind for me are Xenosaga II and Star Ocean 3. Both ship on two DVDs. Both primarily used the in-game engine for cinematics, so you can't really level the FMV criticism at them. They're reasonably high-profile games, especially to a Japanese audience, and that's quite likely the core audience that Sony are aiming at when it comes to this higher capacity anyway.
I suspect though that the reason these games were split over two discs is because a lot of PS2s have terrible trouble with Dual Layer DVDs - I know Star Ocean 3 had issues here - so they've been split onto two DVD-5s for better compatibility.
You can't assume that doubling the texture's size will quadruple the space it takes, unless you're talking about raw bitmap data. If the original data was uncompressed, then the simple thing to do would be to compress it. If it was compressed, then increasing its resolution does not correspond to a constant increase in size - it depends on how much information is in the higher-resolution image compared to the lower-resolution one.
They're available now in Australia too.
Of course, that's because today is our release date. I'm absolutely mystified as to why we're getting them over a week early.
"Blue Dragon, while not having the star status of the former, still is going to be a huge release."
Blue Dragon is also being headed up by Hironobu Sakaguchi, also has a Nobuo Uematsu soundtrack, and it has character designs by the freakishly popular Akira Toriyama of Dragon Quest (and Dragonball) fame. Given that it's going to be released before Lost Odyssey (they're pushing for later this year), I'd say Blue Dragon is actually by far the higher-profile of the two. It's probably worth noting that the last time these three came together on a project (Uematsu was credited as being involved even though he didn't write the score) the result was Chrono Trigger, which is still one of the best-loved Japanese RPGs ever.
Apparently the Australian date for the DS Lite is June 1st, which is very odd as that's before the US release.
Spielberg has been involved in the creative side of game development before. Back in the 90's he wrote the original story for Lucasarts' The Dig. It was a personal favourite of mine, though it didn't meet with quite the level of success it really deserved.
I'm surprised no one's mentioned this. No 'historical computer' collection is complete without an original Macintosh. The amount of things that we take for granted in modern computers (especially in terms of interface) which were introduced to the general market with the Macintosh is astounding. It may not have been the first to do a lot of those things, but it was the first to really bring them to light. Additionally you're far more likely to be able to find an old Mac for cheap than an old Lisa or similar.
I think people are missing the point here a bit. The significance of Evangelion goes a long way beyond it being a reasonably good anime series. If that was all that it had going for it, then it wouldn't have been as popular for as long as it has been.
The fact is that Evangelion changed the whole market. It proved that you could be successful by focusing on characters, and more importantly dealing with mature, adult situations. This is not to say that there weren't a number of serious anime series that predated it - Gundam comes to mind as an example - but Evangelion truly was a revolution in terms of style in the medium. Add to that the fact that it was pretty much the first thing to make a killing by merchandising the characters, rather than having a huge amount of robots to build model kits from (the Bandai approach) and you realise that, while it may not be that good, it was one of the most significant milestones in the development of just about every aspect of modern anime, both the good and the bad. It may be a bit of a right-place-at-the-right-time thing - if Evangelion hadn't been there, something else certainly would have come along.
Unfortunately both ADV Films and Gainax have flogged the series mercilessly. It was the first production by Gainax to have actually made a profit, and I think at this point re-releasing it in box sets over and over is about all that is keeping ADV afloat after their drunken license-everything-we-can anime binge a few years back and the general failure of their Anime network.
8-9? By the time I was three years old I must have watched Star Wars 50 times. Granted I usually skipped to the Battle of Yavin and just watched that.
I wouldn't have classed Bioware's games as sandbox. Certainly they offer a decent amount of freedom in that there is a lot of side material that you can do, but all their games have been very much story-focused. Probably the weakest link was Baldur's Gate, but its sequel is often held up as being a poster-boy for quality game plots.
Whether or not the actual system is good or not is not what is being debated. Changing its name doesn't change the system itself. I don't need to be a 5-star chef to be able to tell when the steak isn't cooked. What is being debated is the choice of the name itself. The name changes our preception of the system, and more importantly, it will make it less attractive to the Joe Sixpacks of the world that Nintendo say they were intending to pitch the system at.
Japanese animated movies based of games are generally a whole different kettle of fish to the average Hollywood drivel. Another example which comes to mind is Air (http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/encyclopedia/anim e.php?id=4093)
To be fair though, they churn out a lot of crap as well.
X-Wing already was brought back as X-Wing Alliance, and while it wasn't a bad game by any means, for some reason no one seemed to really notice it.
What would be far more interesting to me would be another TIE Fighter. Though knowing Lucasarts, what we'd actually get if they did another space combat game would involve flying clone trooper ships and jedi starfighters.
The test you speak of is a basic english competency test, ie they want you to be able to speak rudimentary english in order to become a citizen of Australia. There's nothing wrong with that in my opinion - you should be able to communicate in the national language if you want to be part of the country. If not, just get permanent residency or something.
I may not be the typical gamer, but as far as PAL releases go, I've probably purchased as many games between January and March as I did all last year. Shadow of the Colossus, ICO re-release, We Love Katamari, Atelier Iris, Dragon Quest VIII... and we're supposed to be getting Guitar Hero some time soon. Plus there's even more in the pipeline. And that's just on the PS2. I suspect that while things might be declining in the US, they may not be in other territories. Then again, maybe no one's buying games but me. That might explain why Shadow of the Colossus and We Love Katamari have constantly been in the top-ten PS2 sellers in Australia since they released in Feb.
Actually, I'm pretty sure I didn't see it on PBS as I live in Australia and we don't get access to PBS, however this does look familiar.
What interests me is if there is a limit to this sort of technology. How many electrodes can they stick in there before they reach a saturation point at which they can no longer add any more? I'd expect that the limit would be something astronomical compared to 16 of them, but as the number increases their size would have to decrease proportionately, which would likely mean that the probability of successful 'installation' would be inversely proportional to the potential quality of vision. Also, to take the concept to its logical extreme, is it possible we could deliver a signal that is of higher resolution than the natural human eye? And of course if you take this tech to it's Sci-Fi extremes... if we can deliver an image into the optic nerve, does that mean we could do some sort of hybrid thing for people with working eyes where information could be mixed in?
I recall seeing something like this late last year, but it was slightly different. In principle the same thing - electrodes connected into the optic nerve - but in this case it was a set of 16 electrodes in a 4x4 array. Essentially they had the guy equipped with the tech put a pair of glasses on that had a camera in the center. Each frame was broken down into the aforementioned 4x4 grid, and then delivered directly into the optic nerve. 4x4 is not exactly high resolution though, so the guy was only really able to distinguish light areas from dark.
There was further research planned though. The next goal was to create a 64-electrode version (8x8), which should give the ability to distinguish large features in the image being viewed, such as being able to distinguish the approximate figure of someone standing just infront of you. Their eventual goal was to be able to also build essentially glass eyes which would have a camera mounted within and would remove the need to pass the electrodes through the skull and out underneath the skin to the area of the temple where the signal from the camera was delivered.
Anyway, I'm not sure if this is more results from the same research, or another group working along similar lines. I unfortunately don't have a link to the older material and TFA is a bit sparse on details.
I'm increasingly feeling like Australia is caught in a rapid downward spiral. Every week it seems like they've chipped away another little bit of our privacy and liberty. To call the country a ship without a rudder is an understatement - the rudder came off years ago, we're now taking on water, the captain's roaring drunk and half the crew have lost their minds. The standard of living in Australia is generally pretty high for now, but I just can't see it continuing. The problem is, where else is there to go?
Are sales in general down, or just sales of the cookie-cutter crap that the big studios have been pushing out? In Australia, February was a great month for games - Ico finally got a re-release, along with We Love Katamari and Shadow of the Colossus. Shadow was the most-sold game on the platform in the week it released, and Shadow and Katamari are sitting at #3 and #4 on the charts this week too. I know that Australian sales are a drop in the ocean overall, but this trend seems to be going on throughout the PAL territory.