I don't think that competence can be put down to simply having a degree. Quite a large number of the people who have made their mark on the profession are college dropouts. On the other hand quite a number of people with an academic qualification have contributed to the field as well.
People who are good at what they do tend to have a passion about being good at it. They do what it takes to be good. This might mean going to college or simply reading things up themselves. Whatever the means - the end is reached not because of the means but because of the motive. People who want to excel, and have the capability to do so will do what it takes to get there.
This seems more forward looking than currently practical. With intel talking about doing graphics completely on the CPU again, and Nvidia talking about more general purpose GPU's, the line between the two will be blurring quite a great deal.
Allowing the directx stack to take care of where the code is actually executed is a nice way of allowing developers to concentrate on the actual work, without worrying about which hardware they want it to run on in x years time.
I started coding on a Commodore 64. Getting basic sprites up and running on one of those required a lot of peekf's and pokef's in BASIC. It wasn't easy, but heck, I had so few games I was desperate to write my own.
Then one of my friends game me a bunch of old cassettes with games like "Paper Boy" and "The Last Ninja" on it, and for a while the need to program was satiated, but not for long. There was always something cool I could write when I got board with games.
My point is that most kids have the attention span of a goldfish, and tend to want to context switch what their doing all the time. For me it was games and coding. A good way to start a kid off on coding might be to show him something fun on a machine, and then get him curious about how to do it himself (and i'm not talking about pr0n). Provide enough alternatives and they'll live in your basement all their life;).
Agreed. I've been hearing a lot from Intel on RTRT lately and I think they are barking up the wrong kd-tree(ha ha). It's far more likely that people will start caring less and less about visual fidelity and more and more about the content and gaming experience. It's the same thing we saw with offline rendered movies a few years back. Visual quality increased steadily (Final Fantasy - Spirit Within?) and then dropped relatively with more emphasis on entertainment (most of the new animated movies).
On the other hand, why would a developer use a 8 core machine to do rendering on it when there's already a 48 core GPU that gives pretty decent results? Why not use those 8 cores on AI and physics?
"Also, I don't actually think we'll have a shift back to single-threaded apps"
Not completely true. We might still see single threaded at the conceptual level with languages supporting latent parallelism, even though the program flow is conceptually single threaded. Think parallel "for" loops and futures. The burden of actually distributing the parallel execution would be the language runtime's responsibility. This way you have code that acts and behaves like it is single threaded but actually scales on processors as more cores get added.
"You are a programmer, not a computer scientist. I'd hire you to write code based on a specification. I wouldn't hire you to design rendering algorithms."
I'm fairly certain John Carmack would be pissed about your attitude...:)
The problem is that the current generation of politicians have little or no idea about video games at all. Very few (if at all any) of them would have played when they were kids. It's the typical "Fear of the unknown" scenario. I think that this would end when the video game generation actually begins to take part in the system, which will eventually happen.
Germany didn't start WWI. It began as a war between Austria and Serbia.
Yeah:). Like America didn't start Iraq. It began with Saddam and those dang weapons of mass destruction.
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I don't think that competence can be put down to simply having a degree. Quite a large number of the people who have made their mark on the profession are college dropouts. On the other hand quite a number of people with an academic qualification have contributed to the field as well. People who are good at what they do tend to have a passion about being good at it. They do what it takes to be good. This might mean going to college or simply reading things up themselves. Whatever the means - the end is reached not because of the means but because of the motive. People who want to excel, and have the capability to do so will do what it takes to get there.
This seems more forward looking than currently practical. With intel talking about doing graphics completely on the CPU again, and Nvidia talking about more general purpose GPU's, the line between the two will be blurring quite a great deal. Allowing the directx stack to take care of where the code is actually executed is a nice way of allowing developers to concentrate on the actual work, without worrying about which hardware they want it to run on in x years time.
I started coding on a Commodore 64. Getting basic sprites up and running on one of those required a lot of peekf's and pokef's in BASIC. It wasn't easy, but heck, I had so few games I was desperate to write my own. Then one of my friends game me a bunch of old cassettes with games like "Paper Boy" and "The Last Ninja" on it, and for a while the need to program was satiated, but not for long. There was always something cool I could write when I got board with games. My point is that most kids have the attention span of a goldfish, and tend to want to context switch what their doing all the time. For me it was games and coding. A good way to start a kid off on coding might be to show him something fun on a machine, and then get him curious about how to do it himself (and i'm not talking about pr0n). Provide enough alternatives and they'll live in your basement all their life ;).
Hey Sexy RepRap... your foundry or mine?
Agreed. I've been hearing a lot from Intel on RTRT lately and I think they are barking up the wrong kd-tree(ha ha). It's far more likely that people will start caring less and less about visual fidelity and more and more about the content and gaming experience. It's the same thing we saw with offline rendered movies a few years back. Visual quality increased steadily (Final Fantasy - Spirit Within?) and then dropped relatively with more emphasis on entertainment (most of the new animated movies). On the other hand, why would a developer use a 8 core machine to do rendering on it when there's already a 48 core GPU that gives pretty decent results? Why not use those 8 cores on AI and physics?
"Also, I don't actually think we'll have a shift back to single-threaded apps"
Not completely true. We might still see single threaded at the conceptual level with languages supporting latent parallelism, even though the program flow is conceptually single threaded. Think parallel "for" loops and futures. The burden of actually distributing the parallel execution would be the language runtime's responsibility. This way you have code that acts and behaves like it is single threaded but actually scales on processors as more cores get added.
Poor Optimus Prime...
"You are a programmer, not a computer scientist. I'd hire you to write code based on a specification. I wouldn't hire you to design rendering algorithms." I'm fairly certain John Carmack would be pissed about your attitude... :)
The problem is that the current generation of politicians have little or no idea about video games at all. Very few (if at all any) of them would have played when they were kids. It's the typical "Fear of the unknown" scenario. I think that this would end when the video game generation actually begins to take part in the system, which will eventually happen.
Germany didn't start WWI. It began as a war between Austria and Serbia. Yeah :). Like America didn't start Iraq. It began with Saddam and those dang weapons of mass destruction.
Great... all they have to do now is mount it on one of them pork eating robots...
I don't think it's a coincidence that is appears near Area 51 either. It's bait, everyone knows what they do to aliens at Area 51...