Posts by Kosmo

Yeah well, I don't really think that Applets (Apple fanatics) go nuts over this, but it is actually pretty big thing, IBM PowerPCs were for a long time THE reason, why Apple was the speed king and I believe most of it is loyalty. But IBM has been sleeping with the console makers these days and I think maybe Apple would have liked a piece of that Cell Processor action, who knows.

Macs are quite close to PCs, they are just branded as Macintosh, for a while only thing different has been the processor and the mobo chipset, they use PCI-X and DDR memory, SATA HDDs many technologies used by PC manufacturers, but in the end they are computers, just like DELL or HP, they just made it sure that every piece of hardware works optimal with their OS.

But I think Macs continue to be a special breed of workstations because they are build as ones, just like consoles are good for gaming beucase they are build for it (except the space dildo PS3 ).

When I make 3d models from start to finish, concepts, modelling, tweaking, UW mapping, rigging, texturing and that is what I do today, soon you can add cooking normal maps and making shaders for the textures, making bones to react correctly to physics and whatnot.

I'm horrified by the things you and about half a million more effect junkies want me to add to my model, I remember quake 2 days when I basically did something that kinda looked like a dude with some sort of log that shoots rockets, and people were like "dude, that is the most awesome model ever!" and I was happy, and they were happy.

You spend 4 months on a map and you have a deadline of 6 months to do 5 maps with all the static meshes and textures, believe me, the 30 minutes of extra work can break you especially when you have quality to keep, the effect junkies demand movie quality graphics and usually so does your boss.

Now like I have been saying, there is nothing wrong with static detail textures, but what I am saying, they are not actually that great to begin with, first of all, they create extra work, second they really don't add that much compared to lighting, normal maps, HDRI, specular, bump and all kinds of road and whatnot maps, IF they be added I suggest that you look at the end of the project if you have time and need to use detail textures and then do them, not put them on a pile with things way more important than that, it doesn't save anything (not that it could destroy anything either).

If there are detail textres in a game, I don't mind, it's all good, but I did actually enjoy HL2 despite the "burry" textures and lack of detail textures and the addition of detail textures won't propably increase the enjoyment rate any further for me nor hundreds of other players. Now compared to the new HDRI thing they did, I might actually revisit some maps in HL2 if I'm really desperate of somekind of gaming experience and HL2 is the only game around.

To any of you who give a flying apple.

Apple is going to stop using IBM PowerPC chips in their products, well a computer doesn't work without CPU, and Apple is going to be using Inter chips for that purpose.

Few years back, Apple computers were the fastest consumer computers around, but about year or two back that changed and PowerPC based Apple computers are not the speed kings anymore, Intel and AMD have gone way beyond that, but this is only the CPU, Apple G5 is still extremely fast computer thanks to it's solid hardware and OS, could this mean that Macs drop in price? And maybe it is easier for developers to port games from Windows platform to Mac? Maybe Apple can take back that speed king crown.

Well, just like with that Adobe Macromedia thing, we just have to wait, but apple promised that first Intel based Mac will hit stores June 2006.

No amount of blurry or sharp textures are not going to create the illusion of a living world, I'm a book reader, the world with lively characters and good background story creates this illusion to me. Just like my undying love for Sam 'n Max: Hit the Road and Day of the Tentacle, those two games create their world with speaking presonalities and interesting storylines and do hell of a lot better job at creating a good gaming experience than any kind of detail texture you can add to a game, like I just said, detail texture adds zero game value.

And speaking of realism, do you know why they created shader based DYNAMIC effects and are moving away from texture based STATIC effects? Oh, geez, I just answered my own question.

Just like internet, static content = bad, dynamic user created content and communities = good.

Quote

Lot of work ? Those 2 setups in my example pics took me the whole 10 to 15 seconds to set up and about 8 mouseclicks. What did you say ?

Yes, you did that with maps and textures already there, but now apply your 10 to 15 seconds TO APPLY THE TEXTURE TO THE MAP and now do textures, models, gameplay etc. etc. by your self and add the stupid amount of additional detail textures on the top of the pile vs. engine supported lighting effects out of the box. Again, is this piece of detail texture so neccessary that developers should do the extra work for just to give some graphics oriented players the immersion they need just because they can't use their imagination?

Quote from Hourences

Unreal engine 3 and gears of wars in particullary support it heavily, theres a reason for thatAfaik it even uses normal mapped detail textures, so a second smaller scaled normal map just for detail texturing

Yeah but unless you haven't noticed, Unreal Engine 3 is the holy grail of shitload of extra work hours of nifty details 90% of the consumers are not ever going to see or give a flying fuck about, they even have two different shadow maps per light source and light detail textures, normal map this and normal map that.

Yeah I can see that there are uses for detail textures but it is not actually something that adds really anything to the game, no, nothing, it adds completely 0% of any kind of immersion or anything and besides the textures look even more unrealistic with detail textures.

The amount of work developers do already, and one would think that engines take off the workload but it's the opposite, and now you would like to add one more step between me and game. If they come up with a shader that does the same thing without adding any more work, then I'd agree the usability and would actually support it, but right now? Nah, fuck it.

Detail textures are the 180mph of sports cars. You can even have some old Lada go that fast but you can't drive that fast anywhere, so it's just added to grow your imaginary penis, just like detail texture, they are there but anything it adds is the size of your @-penis nothing more.

Salary might be around average but the differences are in the work they do.

Example, this list is from Firaxis employment page

Company Benefits

Fully-funded health plans

Contributions programs ($150 yearly to your favorite charities)

Birth and Adoption leave for mother, father, significant other

Generous vacation, holidays, personal days, and sick time

Release time for volunteering (3 hours per month)

Supportive, team-oriented work environment

Life insurance and Disability coverage

Family-friendly social gatherings

Competitive salaries

Spacious offices

Profit Sharing

Free lunch

401k

Pretty nice benefits don't you say? All that and add the salary = atleast I'm happy. Then that compared to the couple of million dollars made by only a handfull of movie stars/producers/writers/directors minus the benefits, and the case of "oh, you are sick, well that is so sad, pay for your own doctor bill" and "oh you are so sick you can't work? well maybe big name actor #2 will take your place" high salary means "bitch can pay everything him/herself".

Fine article, and I agree with few messages coming clearly through. I don't know how they did it but many game media outlets and even customers think that Nintendo died when they released GC they shunned them for not hopping on the internet bandwagon and their plethora of family oriented games, people actually think that Nintendo can't change this time around. The most bizarre thing in all this is that they had a child like belief to Microsoft that they could do better with next-gen Xbox, losing the hulk sized design of the machine and do something about the original controllers, and the insane price ratio.

Well, Microsoft pulled it off and everyone were reliefed, all this believe for MS and none for Nintendo? So how did Nintendo get this big corporation status that everyone hates from? Or better yet, how did Sony avoid it and how did MS get a new face? I'm really glad that Nintendo has those fan boys that cheer at the press release to show their dedication to the big-N, and that means they are here to stay and they have done something to earn that dedication and it won't fade away in the near future.

I'm just hoping that all this, is kept as a competition and not become an open war since I believe Microsoft would win that, they have the tools and know how to wage wars.

There is a pattern, in movie/game/music industry if your name is a selling point of on show for other reasons you are in 99% of the cases loaded as fuck.

The normal employee in these industries whose names are mentioned in somewhere where everyones names are mentioned like the end credits in movies are propably paid like everyone else.

And I might say "why should the average coder be paid more? or why should the average voice actor be paid more? if you get a 'superstar' name to do your game like John Carmack then he would get a big fat paycheck since his name is with out a doubt in the game box and every piece of adverticement" but I don't since I want to get paid well from what I love to do

Now Detail Textures are really nice.. for me to poop on.

Who the hell cares what textures look like when you are looking straight down crouching? And if you do, then I suggest that you start enjoying about that quietly in your own privacy, because it is like shit fetish, something we all know happens but we don't actually want to hear the details about.

Don't you think that Valve and dozens of other companies would have used them if they are gods gift to makind like you are implying?

There are literally hundreds of technologies that would have been cool but are not used just because they found out a better way to do it, for instance, I think detail maps are not used since they are not shader based like many effects these days, and we are moving towards shader based effects for a good reason, they are supported by the graphics cards. Hell I would like that texels would be used in games but they are not becuase it is the worst thing invented since 80s.

are you implying that the shadow looks like Schutzstaffel logo?

If you do, you must have alot of free time on your hands looking for nazi connections in sci-fi game screens :roll:

That dumb fuck who wrote the blog article was talking like Reality Engine was the ONLY engine in the world besides UE3, Source and Doom3 (why don't they give doom3 engine a name).

Go here and take a pick, there are all kinds of engines and actually if based on open source engine, great engine development that uses shaders and wha not is actually pretty cheap http://www.devmaster.net/engines/

And the funny part was that Reality Engine wasn't actually even that high tech so developers are better off without it.

press ESC to skip the cinematics

This is pretty awesome stuff, and I have yet to wrap my head around it, but the possibilities for both companies are really opening up, and just like Tim Sweeney said the reality engine developer can make some nifty upgrades to UE3.

Many don't realize but 6-years experience (I assume this is commercial experience and not 6-years of garage hacking) is actually pretty much, and with that kind of knowledge you can really do amazing stuff. Especially ince the last 6-years have been pretty magical in the field of real-time graphics.

I don't see anything hostile, and I don't actually see Reality Engine as a competition in any way, small companies that couldn't afford big names like D3, Source, UE bought Reality Engine, so they were in two completely different categories, and this buy doesn't take UE3 any closer to the cheap engines so how this is buying competition? If Epic bought id or Valve THEN it would have been buying out competition.

And usually in hostile takeovers they just buy the stock majority of a company, freeze it's licences, fire it's employees and cease the company just to a brand (example Sierra), come on people, I tought that you have seen EA do this enough of times that you'd recognise a hostile takeover.

press IDDQD and then IDKFA and doublebarreledshotgun the guys ass

And one of the biggest problems creating realistic sci-fi setting is that, if we are speaking logically, all unreal games don't look anything like a sci-fi, more like cyberpunk (a sci-fi fantasy) future will propably look more like in Star Trek with spiffy interiors, no pipes and steam I'm afraid.

Problem being that the map maker should be an arcitecht AND have very solid knowledge of current technology and history to use as a point to compare the future styles of interior/exterior decoration, that is why they like to create fantasy settings and not hyper realistic sci-fi settings.

But this would be something you all already know, I just said it out loud *blush*

But I like to play with idea that was Source outdated when HL2 came out or was it our hardware that was actually outdated when it came out? There were some pretty advanced stuff, but everything was scaled down in the hopes that pople wouldn't complain that it doesn't run well on any machine. Something that they learned from Doom3 perhaps? I mean, does it run well even current machines? The latest test at Tom's HArdware show something like 60 fps in Doom3.

Epic makes solid technology with minimal risk, the decision to hop in the physics card bandwagon shows mentality like that, they don't want to sacrifise their precious physics so they have support for them IF they ever become popular, and the fact that it is the most licenced engine makes it all that much easier to do so, they don't have to be afraid of thta flopping because of minimal support.

This is very wise when compared to the competition, HL2 was an instant success even before it was released, it has thousands of fan sites and registered fans in them.

Doom3, well people were looking forward to it becuase of the "cutting edge" technology, and it was a blockbuster. Epic has their core players and not that much competition actually, the gamytype they have is actually unique, their only competition at the same genre was quake 3, I'm not counting HL2 and it's mods since they are more towards the realistical shooters than UT and it's arcade style gameplay.

Yes, again a new article from David Strom EIC of Tom's Hardware, this time he says that the days of CPU are over

Well, are they? Judge yourself, but the read is interesting.

http://www.tomshardware.com/column/20050511/index.html

Haha, Conneticut Light and Power sucks

Hope that he misses :roll:

change log PSP firmware 1.5

• Support for German, Spanish, French, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese and Russian languages

• Support to retain screen mode settings (For video stored on Memory Stick)

• Support to allow resume play after recovery from sleep mode (For video stored on Memory Stick)

• Support to allow resume play of audio tracks after recovery from sleep mode.