I've daydreamed up some similar website concepts, but just haven't had the motivation to make it happen. There's already Goodreads.com, but I find it a little disorganized for my taste, and I've also had Shelfari.com suggested to me, but haven't checked it out yet.
The part that seems really important to me, which none of these sites seem to get, is browsing. It should be easy and convenient for a reader to burrow down into a specific genre or style of book, and start leafing through titles and short summaries. Instead, they give me ungainly lists based on broad distinctions, or user generated my favorite whatever lists, and I can't be bothered to sort through either.
Ultimately, the right sort of site will pop up, but I think it'll have to be the authors themselves who start it because they're the ones with something at stake. The ebook market is turning them all into entrepreneurs, and their business depends entirely on being able to find and connect with an audience. Once they realize that no one else will do it for them, and that nobody else has their well-being in mind, they'll find a way to band together and make it happen. I think.
I think it's always been a challenge deciding which books to purchase; everybody's taste differs, and what I love reading may not mesh with your own preferences. Even with print, your average bookstore stocks tens of thousands of titles with new ones coming in everyday, and the staff is at best familiar with a very small percentage of them. That's why the bulk of customers find a section that interests them and start looking at covers, reading backs and sampling pages. The purchase was always a leap of faith.
I think it's interesting that with digital stores, we're actually beginning to have a lot more information to base purchases on. Besides samples (which on Amazon are 15% of the book, I believe), you now also have access to user reviews in the same page, lists of other books bought by this book's customers, and links back to the author's other works. That's a pretty reasonable amount of info to work with, I think.
I still think there's a discoverability problem right now, especially for new and unknown writers like myself, but I expect that further marketplace innovations will eventually offer some remedy for that. For instance, Amazon's bookstore currently does a lot to reinforce the popularity of a work by making it more visible, but it doesn't have any mechanisms to promote new and undiscovered works. Something as simple as a Fresh Reading box, showcasing books that have very low downloads and few reviews, would help to start leveling out the field.
A lot of indies are offering POD versions right now, but when I took a look at the options, I was disappointed in both the quality of the printing and the price. The idea of offering my customers an overpriced, junky book didn't exactly get me excited. That said, I'm keeping an open mind right now. I've heard some great things about Lightning Source recently, and I intend to give them a closer look when I get a chance. All of my work is also released under a Creative Commons license, and you can feel absolutely free to print out copies if you desire.
Sorry, I know it's not quite the answer you were looking for, but my approach to the business is still evolving.
Hey, thanks for taking a look, either way. I hope you find it interesting enough to purchase, of course, but it's hard enough just getting folks to nibble at this stage. As for geographical restrictions, I don't believe there are any (at least, it seems like folks outside of the US have been able to purchase it), but if there are, you can find alternate methods for obtaining a copy at my blog.
Hmmmm... Slashdot appears to have eaten my original comment. I hope my comment was yummy and filling, Slashdot.
Anyway... I read the interview earlier today and it's a pretty good read, if a bit long at somewhere over 13,000 words. Konrath is preaching his usual gospel, but it was nice to get Eisler's perspectives on the publishing industry and its inner workings. He drops a few entertaining links as well; one chronicles his struggles with a French publisher who bought the rights to one of his books. They went to the hassle of translating the book, only to put a cover on it that depicted a chartreuse garage door with a security camera. I have no idea what sort of through process led to that decision, but I'd kind of like to know.
I'm actually pleased as punch to see Barry Eisler doing so well, and doubly pleased that he's shifting to self-publishing and being so vocal about it. I met him back in 2003 shortly after his first book, Rain Fall, came out. I was working at a bookstore a few miles from his house, and he'd drop through to sign copies and urge us to sell more. I got the impression he was just a genuinely nice guy, and he even humored me when I asked for advice in getting an agent.
That said, I'm more than a bit jealous, too. He released a short story on Kindle this year, and it's apparently on track to make $30,000, while I'm struggling to sell a dozen copies of my sci-fi novel a month. He's a really good guy, though, and I wish him the absolute best as he dives head first into the self-publishing world.
It seems most folks here are pretty disgusted at the idea of advertising in books, but how would you feel about direct corporate sponsorships conducted in a tasteful manner? Let's say your favorite sci-fi author's books were all released as Intel Presents or AMD Presents, similar to the old anthology shows from the '50s & '60s such as The Alcoa Hour, Kraft Television Theater, and the Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse; would that inspire the same level of disgust?
I'm very interested in finding a way to distribute fiction for free without DRM, thus maximizing the value to readers, while at the same time raising some profit for the writer. Advertising seems to be the optimal way to get it done. The other leading contender would be the Ransom Model, but that has some inherent weaknesses that are rather difficult to work around. If you have other ideas, I'm absolutely all ears.
Note to first-time viewers: the various characters in TOS (i.e., The Original Series) were conveniently color-coded for longevity: those wearing tight-fitting red outfits generally didn't make it out of any given episode alive.
You aren't missing out on a "whole lot": You end up being about 80 ADAM down per 3 little sisters, or 320 in the whole game. I'm sure there are 320 atom worth of useless upgrades you don't need to buy in return for some pretty cool bonuses.
This is true... and hell, having saved all the precious little things, I still had a surplus of a few hundred ADAM when the credits rolled. It's not like I was being unduly stingy, either; fights with Big Daddies usually lasted about 10 seconds, and the final boss went down like a chunky street-walker.
The penalty for saving the little sisters really is negligible, and as a bonus, I didn't have to murder a dozen screaming little girls. I consider that a pretty good deal, although I imagine everyone's mileage varies there.
And for the record, ambient occlusion is not what you want in a raytraced scene. Such occlusion is a form of illumination "cheating" that gives decent, but not spectacular results. There are far better shading models available for ray tracing.
AFAIK, ambient occlusion is often used in conjunction with raytracing. While raytracing can provide shadows for every given light-source in a scene, it generally fails at dealing with ambient light and its occlusion. There's certainly no good reason not to use these techniques together, and a bit of AO can do a lot to help define subtle surface details that standard traced shadows do not.
And to be perfectly honest, raytracing is just as much of a cheat as any of the other techniques mentioned in this whole thread. It's more physically realistic only in the most abstract sense, and doesn't provide any of the more interesting lighting effects currently being used in high-end rendering.
Regardless, raster rendering is good enough for Pixar, and for most purposes, it's certainly good enough for me.
From what I know (which isn't much) even high end shops like Pixar only recently started using ray tracing, before that it was all rasterization using procedural textures and fairly complicated lighting models.
From what I understand, Pixar's renderer (PhotoRealistic RenderMan) is still primarily a REYES renderer, but since Cars, has supported optional ray-tracing for certain effects such as reflections. This is an important point that I think a lot of folks don't understand or are overlooking... You can mix different rendering techniques. You can have a scan-line rasterizer as your primary rendering technique and also have raytraced shadows and reflections. It's an amazing world we live in, isn't it?
Mark my words. Duke Nukem Forever will ship within the next calendar year. Prey went from vaporware to shipping. People have recently seen and played Duke Nukem Forever. 3D Realms is actually going to ship it.
However, we can always mock the Phantom Console, which will never ship.
Sure, but you're ignoring a key factor in Prey's development that directly led to it being finished... It was developed by someone other than 3D Realms.
Actually, that would depend on what the Copyright laws were like at the time of the original publishing. If they used anything like our current term limits (author's life + 70 years), then it would still be under protection, seeing as how it's the literal word of God...
Unless Nietzsche was right, of course. If his pronouncement of God's death was correct and in a timely manner, then the Bible would've been in the public domain for 30-40 years at least.
Hmmm... I wonder what the Bible has to say about Copyright?
We regret to inform you that we already have ample copies of Shakespeare's works, as well as numerous duplication technologies which are significantly faster and less expensive than retaining your services. Further, our legal department informs us that duplication of more modern works which might be of more value to us in the market-place would in most cases violate Copyright law, regardless of the manner in which these duplicates were produced.
In short, your services will no longer be required. You may collect your payment for this incomplete work week before being escorted from the premises, and the corporation will further provide you with three months worth of severance bananas, as per the stipulations of your original employment agreement.
Thank you very much for your tireless efforts (as illegible as the fruits of those efforts may have been), and we sincerely wish you well in all your further endeavors.
If you had 32 guys running around shooting rocket launchers at each other that would pretty much dessimate any real-life structure in a matter of minutes. Some things just need limits in a gaming environment. Flying crates and debris is fun, but who wants to play in wasteland of scrapped geometry?
You're right. Playing in a wasteland of scrapped geometry doesn't sound like much fun. OTOH, turning a perfectly good level into a wasteland of scrapped geometry... now we're talkin'.
They only thing I would add to your definition is that it is something that someone intentionally made. Not bad. I like to define art as anything you've done more than once. It casts a pretty wide net... In fact, it makes essentially everyone an artist at something, and I think that's why I like it.
Every single one of us has at least a little kung-fu.
If memory serves, the WASD+mouselook interface was really pioneered by SkyNET, a Bethesda Terminator game that came out a short while before Quake. It's the first game that used mouselook as the default AFAIR -- the original Quake still required the player to enable mouselook manually, I believe (+mouselook).
My stereo's on a wooden stand, but I keep a flask of Dewar's and a tank of nitrous nearby. I bet my stereo sounds better... subjectively, of course. Waaaaaaaay better.
I'm going to add to that list. Most of these are in Edit mode.
X, Y and Z constrain to their respective axes (X=Red, Y=Green, Z=Blue)
Shift+ X, Y or Z essentially mean Not That Axis (i.e. Shift+X constrains to Y/Z plane, etc.)
Ctrl+Tab to switch selection mode (Vertices, Edges or Faces).
W brings up the Specials menu, which is sort of a grab-all toolkit.
CTRL+R to add Edge Loop, and Ctrl+E for Edge Loop Specials. Both useful when working with edge loops, which you should learn to use with great haste.
Click and drag down the top bar for options. A lot of useful stuff is hidden up there.
Looking for a seemingly obvious and super useful function, but can't find it? Try the Python scripts. There are many useful tools there that will make your life a lot easier.
If I had mod points at the moment, you'd be getting some.
To reiterate what this fine gentleman just said, PRMan -- Photorealistic Renderman, Pixar's in-house renderer which was originally developed back when they were part of Lucasfilm -- supports ray-tracing as an option, but primarily uses a REYES algorithm, which I believe is a highly optimized raster renderer. More information is available here.
Aside from that...
I find it interesting that no one's talking about where raster renderers are going. Everyone knows that we'll see CPUs with obscene numbers of cores in the next decade, that's a given. Real-time ray tracing will no doubt become a possibility then. However, GPUs will be advancing that entire time as well, and I'm not willing to count them out of the fight just yet. This is especially with regards to the growth of pixel and vertex shader processing, which are making it easier to fake effects that would've required ray tracing before, but at a fraction of the computational overhead.
When real-time ray tracing finally rolls around in the next 3-5 years, it will be struggling to produce a 1024x768 image at a reasonable frame rate, all the while sucking up all of your lovely cores essentially for rendering alone. In that same time frame, I don't think it's unreasonable to expect GPU technology to have progressed largely as it already has been... I can imagine multi-core GPU silicon with vast arrays of pixel and vertex shader units, multiple gigabytes (gibabytes, damn you SI) of RAM on card, outputting beautifully rendered, cinematically photorealistic graphics to our new 3840x2400 widescreen monitors. All the while, all of this will be driven by an 8-16 core CPU, which will be used to simulate new worlds full of procedurally generated props and intricate AI actors, governed by reasonably realistic physical simulations.
I'm not saying that real time ray-tracing won't be a reality, or that it won't be any good when it is. However, I don't think it's going to happen soon, and I'm pretty sure it'll be fighting an uphill battle the whole way. No one's resting on their laurels right now, and I can certainly imagine much better uses for that multi-core beast processor of the future than rendering the damn scene.
In the case of the GIMP, I'm pretty sure it's actually less popular than it is commonly used.
Anyway, I think we can all agree that if Photoshop and the GIMP went to the same high school, Photoshop would be crowned prom queen, while the GIMP would have a bucket of pig's blood poured on it.
Slashdot Mirror
I've daydreamed up some similar website concepts, but just haven't had the motivation to make it happen. There's already Goodreads.com, but I find it a little disorganized for my taste, and I've also had Shelfari.com suggested to me, but haven't checked it out yet.
The part that seems really important to me, which none of these sites seem to get, is browsing. It should be easy and convenient for a reader to burrow down into a specific genre or style of book, and start leafing through titles and short summaries. Instead, they give me ungainly lists based on broad distinctions, or user generated my favorite whatever lists, and I can't be bothered to sort through either.
Ultimately, the right sort of site will pop up, but I think it'll have to be the authors themselves who start it because they're the ones with something at stake. The ebook market is turning them all into entrepreneurs, and their business depends entirely on being able to find and connect with an audience. Once they realize that no one else will do it for them, and that nobody else has their well-being in mind, they'll find a way to band together and make it happen. I think.
Well... I can dream, right?
I think it's always been a challenge deciding which books to purchase; everybody's taste differs, and what I love reading may not mesh with your own preferences. Even with print, your average bookstore stocks tens of thousands of titles with new ones coming in everyday, and the staff is at best familiar with a very small percentage of them. That's why the bulk of customers find a section that interests them and start looking at covers, reading backs and sampling pages. The purchase was always a leap of faith.
I think it's interesting that with digital stores, we're actually beginning to have a lot more information to base purchases on. Besides samples (which on Amazon are 15% of the book, I believe), you now also have access to user reviews in the same page, lists of other books bought by this book's customers, and links back to the author's other works. That's a pretty reasonable amount of info to work with, I think.
I still think there's a discoverability problem right now, especially for new and unknown writers like myself, but I expect that further marketplace innovations will eventually offer some remedy for that. For instance, Amazon's bookstore currently does a lot to reinforce the popularity of a work by making it more visible, but it doesn't have any mechanisms to promote new and undiscovered works. Something as simple as a Fresh Reading box, showcasing books that have very low downloads and few reviews, would help to start leveling out the field.
A lot of indies are offering POD versions right now, but when I took a look at the options, I was disappointed in both the quality of the printing and the price. The idea of offering my customers an overpriced, junky book didn't exactly get me excited. That said, I'm keeping an open mind right now. I've heard some great things about Lightning Source recently, and I intend to give them a closer look when I get a chance. All of my work is also released under a Creative Commons license, and you can feel absolutely free to print out copies if you desire.
Sorry, I know it's not quite the answer you were looking for, but my approach to the business is still evolving.
Hey, thanks for taking a look, either way. I hope you find it interesting enough to purchase, of course, but it's hard enough just getting folks to nibble at this stage. As for geographical restrictions, I don't believe there are any (at least, it seems like folks outside of the US have been able to purchase it), but if there are, you can find alternate methods for obtaining a copy at my blog.
Hmmmm... Slashdot appears to have eaten my original comment. I hope my comment was yummy and filling, Slashdot.
Anyway... I read the interview earlier today and it's a pretty good read, if a bit long at somewhere over 13,000 words. Konrath is preaching his usual gospel, but it was nice to get Eisler's perspectives on the publishing industry and its inner workings. He drops a few entertaining links as well; one chronicles his struggles with a French publisher who bought the rights to one of his books. They went to the hassle of translating the book, only to put a cover on it that depicted a chartreuse garage door with a security camera. I have no idea what sort of through process led to that decision, but I'd kind of like to know.
I'm actually pleased as punch to see Barry Eisler doing so well, and doubly pleased that he's shifting to self-publishing and being so vocal about it. I met him back in 2003 shortly after his first book, Rain Fall, came out. I was working at a bookstore a few miles from his house, and he'd drop through to sign copies and urge us to sell more. I got the impression he was just a genuinely nice guy, and he even humored me when I asked for advice in getting an agent.
That said, I'm more than a bit jealous, too. He released a short story on Kindle this year, and it's apparently on track to make $30,000, while I'm struggling to sell a dozen copies of my sci-fi novel a month. He's a really good guy, though, and I wish him the absolute best as he dives head first into the self-publishing world.
Sir, I am shocked and dismayed at your baldfaced self-promotion. Have you no shame, sir? Have you no tact? Is nothing in this world too sacred, too hallowed to be plastered with your wanton advertising? May the Lord have mercy upon your black, greed infested soul.
It seems most folks here are pretty disgusted at the idea of advertising in books, but how would you feel about direct corporate sponsorships conducted in a tasteful manner? Let's say your favorite sci-fi author's books were all released as Intel Presents or AMD Presents, similar to the old anthology shows from the '50s & '60s such as The Alcoa Hour, Kraft Television Theater, and the Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse; would that inspire the same level of disgust?
I'm very interested in finding a way to distribute fiction for free without DRM, thus maximizing the value to readers, while at the same time raising some profit for the writer. Advertising seems to be the optimal way to get it done. The other leading contender would be the Ransom Model, but that has some inherent weaknesses that are rather difficult to work around. If you have other ideas, I'm absolutely all ears.
Shit, thanks for the advice. I'm sure that'll totally change my life.
Nah, I think I'll wave my rights there. I frequently have a good belly laugh about my comically under-sized wang; why shouldn't everyone else?
Note to first-time viewers: the various characters in TOS (i.e., The Original Series) were conveniently color-coded for longevity: those wearing tight-fitting red outfits generally didn't make it out of any given episode alive.
Oh my god! They killed Scotty?! YOU BASTARDS!
You aren't missing out on a "whole lot": You end up being about 80 ADAM down per 3 little sisters, or 320 in the whole game. I'm sure there are 320 atom worth of useless upgrades you don't need to buy in return for some pretty cool bonuses.
This is true... and hell, having saved all the precious little things, I still had a surplus of a few hundred ADAM when the credits rolled. It's not like I was being unduly stingy, either; fights with Big Daddies usually lasted about 10 seconds, and the final boss went down like a chunky street-walker.
The penalty for saving the little sisters really is negligible, and as a bonus, I didn't have to murder a dozen screaming little girls. I consider that a pretty good deal, although I imagine everyone's mileage varies there.
And for the record, ambient occlusion is not what you want in a raytraced scene. Such occlusion is a form of illumination "cheating" that gives decent, but not spectacular results. There are far better shading models available for ray tracing.
AFAIK, ambient occlusion is often used in conjunction with raytracing. While raytracing can provide shadows for every given light-source in a scene, it generally fails at dealing with ambient light and its occlusion. There's certainly no good reason not to use these techniques together, and a bit of AO can do a lot to help define subtle surface details that standard traced shadows do not.
And to be perfectly honest, raytracing is just as much of a cheat as any of the other techniques mentioned in this whole thread. It's more physically realistic only in the most abstract sense, and doesn't provide any of the more interesting lighting effects currently being used in high-end rendering.
Regardless, raster rendering is good enough for Pixar, and for most purposes, it's certainly good enough for me.
From what I know (which isn't much) even high end shops like Pixar only recently started using ray tracing, before that it was all rasterization using procedural textures and fairly complicated lighting models.
From what I understand, Pixar's renderer (PhotoRealistic RenderMan) is still primarily a REYES renderer, but since Cars, has supported optional ray-tracing for certain effects such as reflections. This is an important point that I think a lot of folks don't understand or are overlooking... You can mix different rendering techniques. You can have a scan-line rasterizer as your primary rendering technique and also have raytraced shadows and reflections. It's an amazing world we live in, isn't it?
Where are my mod points when I need 'em? You, sir, deserve another +1 Informative.
Mark my words. Duke Nukem Forever will ship within the next calendar year. Prey went from vaporware to shipping. People have recently seen and played Duke Nukem Forever. 3D Realms is actually going to ship it. However, we can always mock the Phantom Console, which will never ship.
Sure, but you're ignoring a key factor in Prey's development that directly led to it being finished... It was developed by someone other than 3D Realms.
Actually, that would depend on what the Copyright laws were like at the time of the original publishing. If they used anything like our current term limits (author's life + 70 years), then it would still be under protection, seeing as how it's the literal word of God...
Unless Nietzsche was right, of course. If his pronouncement of God's death was correct and in a timely manner, then the Bible would've been in the public domain for 30-40 years at least.
Hmmm... I wonder what the Bible has to say about Copyright?
Dear Infinite Monkeys,
We regret to inform you that we already have ample copies of Shakespeare's works, as well as numerous duplication technologies which are significantly faster and less expensive than retaining your services. Further, our legal department informs us that duplication of more modern works which might be of more value to us in the market-place would in most cases violate Copyright law, regardless of the manner in which these duplicates were produced.
In short, your services will no longer be required. You may collect your payment for this incomplete work week before being escorted from the premises, and the corporation will further provide you with three months worth of severance bananas, as per the stipulations of your original employment agreement.
Thank you very much for your tireless efforts (as illegible as the fruits of those efforts may have been), and we sincerely wish you well in all your further endeavors.
Sincerely,
The Management
You're right. Playing in a wasteland of scrapped geometry doesn't sound like much fun. OTOH, turning a perfectly good level into a wasteland of scrapped geometry... now we're talkin'.
Every single one of us has at least a little kung-fu.
Damn, you stole my post!
If memory serves, the WASD+mouselook interface was really pioneered by SkyNET, a Bethesda Terminator game that came out a short while before Quake. It's the first game that used mouselook as the default AFAIR -- the original Quake still required the player to enable mouselook manually, I believe (+mouselook).
Some info at der Wiki.My stereo's on a wooden stand, but I keep a flask of Dewar's and a tank of nitrous nearby. I bet my stereo sounds better... subjectively, of course. Waaaaaaaay better.
I'm going to add to that list. Most of these are in Edit mode.
If I had mod points at the moment, you'd be getting some.
To reiterate what this fine gentleman just said, PRMan -- Photorealistic Renderman, Pixar's in-house renderer which was originally developed back when they were part of Lucasfilm -- supports ray-tracing as an option, but primarily uses a REYES algorithm, which I believe is a highly optimized raster renderer. More information is available here.
Aside from that...
I find it interesting that no one's talking about where raster renderers are going. Everyone knows that we'll see CPUs with obscene numbers of cores in the next decade, that's a given. Real-time ray tracing will no doubt become a possibility then. However, GPUs will be advancing that entire time as well, and I'm not willing to count them out of the fight just yet. This is especially with regards to the growth of pixel and vertex shader processing, which are making it easier to fake effects that would've required ray tracing before, but at a fraction of the computational overhead.
When real-time ray tracing finally rolls around in the next 3-5 years, it will be struggling to produce a 1024x768 image at a reasonable frame rate, all the while sucking up all of your lovely cores essentially for rendering alone. In that same time frame, I don't think it's unreasonable to expect GPU technology to have progressed largely as it already has been... I can imagine multi-core GPU silicon with vast arrays of pixel and vertex shader units, multiple gigabytes (gibabytes, damn you SI) of RAM on card, outputting beautifully rendered, cinematically photorealistic graphics to our new 3840x2400 widescreen monitors. All the while, all of this will be driven by an 8-16 core CPU, which will be used to simulate new worlds full of procedurally generated props and intricate AI actors, governed by reasonably realistic physical simulations.
I'm not saying that real time ray-tracing won't be a reality, or that it won't be any good when it is. However, I don't think it's going to happen soon, and I'm pretty sure it'll be fighting an uphill battle the whole way. No one's resting on their laurels right now, and I can certainly imagine much better uses for that multi-core beast processor of the future than rendering the damn scene.
In the case of the GIMP, I'm pretty sure it's actually less popular than it is commonly used.
Anyway, I think we can all agree that if Photoshop and the GIMP went to the same high school, Photoshop would be crowned prom queen, while the GIMP would have a bucket of pig's blood poured on it.