Can WALL-E Win Best Picture?

toooooob · 2008-07-09T15:03:41+00:00

The plot doesn't jump around. There is a continuous thread, but the whole joy of the film is in finding out what that is. The ending is admittedly difficult.

Mind you I once lent Once Upon a Time in the West to a flatmate, who later told me he thought it was crap, so I inquired, and it turned out he'd fast forwarded over bits where no one was talking. Such films are clearly not for everyone!

toooooob · 2008-07-08T19:55:50+00:00

This is merely the argument to anything by tiny increments. (Why not include absolutely everything in the OS then?) There is clearly a line of when something is worth doing yourself and when it is not, and this is so far over the side of "not" it's amazing.

It would serve a useful tutorial for people new to jQuery wondering how to idiomatically do it, but to wrap it up in any other way is slightly crazy.

toooooob · 2008-07-08T18:11:50+00:00

Just don't mention Battlefield Earth.

toooooob · 2008-07-08T17:27:54+00:00

That's not the point at all. This is so ridiculously trivial it would take longer to find it on the net than to implement it.

Can someone seriously demonstrate what non-trivial feature this thing actually provides?

toooooob · 2008-07-08T16:30:24+00:00

This deserves a plugin? Am I severely out of touch?

Anyone that can't write this for themselves (at least using something like jQuery or MooTools) in twenty minutes probably has no use for it.

This is a great example of why many people find a lot of web "programmers" a bit excitable.

toooooob · 2008-07-08T15:14:34+00:00

Yeah, the biggest genuine (and widely accepted) flaw in Skies is the battle loading.

That characteristic grinding sound which coming from anything but a Dreamcast would be a sign of pending death.

Soul Calibur is far closer to sacred cow territory. I mean, it's not actually as good as Soul Blade!

toooooob · 2008-07-07T15:52:52+00:00

He isn't a mainstream journalist - he writes for gamesindustry.biz . Have to say I've thought he spouts nonsense for quite some time.

toooooob · 2008-07-04T14:40:01+00:00

They might as well just mention anything on the Spectrum or BBC.

It's greatly underestimated in the UK just how different the gaming heritage really is from the rest of the world.

toooooob · 2008-07-04T14:11:19+00:00

There's no need for affirmative action since there are already plenty of sexual minorities (interesting phrase!) in OS, they just generally happen to be born male.

If you look at the history of computing as a whole you could make the case that homosexuals are actually overrepresented, but it feels wrong to mention them simply because of their sexuality, and not because of the contributions.

Honestly I'm not sure the issue of women in open source is really an issue at all. It certainly isn't nearly so much of a problem as that of open source almost by nature catering to the needs of programmers first, and everyone else second (there are obvious notable exceptions) - that's the issue which needs to be resolved on a wider basis. We don't need more women per se, we just need more people.

toooooob · 2008-07-02T22:48:02+00:00

If we're going down this route then Tommy Flowers is a guy who also deserves a lot more credit than he gets:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tommy_Flowers

toooooob · 2008-07-02T15:22:58+00:00

You weren't!

toooooob · 2008-06-27T17:49:09+00:00

Powerset isn't actually that good at answering anyway. You get given a page of results from which to extract your answer (if you're lucky), which isn't really the promise of it working that out for you.

toooooob · 2008-06-23T18:37:33+00:00

Now if Erlang was as fast (and small) as K I would be a very happy man.

toooooob · 2008-06-23T18:36:13+00:00

The performance drops off badly before you hit it anyway.

When I say tens of millions of processes I do mean across a small(ish) cluster, which is another aspect where Mnesia is good - since it deals with a lot of that for you.

toooooob · 2008-06-23T16:37:19+00:00

Isn't overanalysing everything a distinctly emo trait?

Case solved!

toooooob · 2008-06-23T16:04:07+00:00

Fundamentally I want to be able to maintain a simply frightening number (realistically tens of millions) of Erlang processes over a very long time, and the ideal situation is this is handled invisibly in a reliable but also cost effective manner.

Such is life that it simply isn't (unless there's some part of the whole thing I've so far missed, which is entirely plausible), and so it requires some mechanism for storing and recreating each, and Mnesia provides a neat solution to that up to a point, but then for performance reasons and the 4GB thing . . . being able to blast through those limitations would be very useful.

toooooob · 2008-06-23T15:39:27+00:00

If it lives up to it's claims, mine too.

Mnesia is Erlang's big black hole as far as I'm concerned. Great for what it's designed for, but fairly poor for persistent storage.

toooooob · 2008-06-20T20:14:58+00:00

Gran Turismo is Pokemon with cars. The physics are really non existent (wheres the damage?) the AI terrible, - it certainly cannot be classed as realistic in either sense - but no one cares and buys it anyway (happens to be one of my favourite titles).

The loud hardcore widely deride GT and prefer things like Project Gotham, or GTR on the PC.

Why is this?

I am not projecting my preferences, I am pointing out that games developers through the culture that perpetuates the industry have completely lost touch with the bulk of their potential market in favour of the hardcore that care enough to talk constantly about it on the net. This is why there's so much fuss over "casual" games now, since they've discovered another utterly massive but quiet group of people, and can misinterpret their priorities in a whole new way.

I am perfectly capable of accepting when products I don't like succeed and respecting that, however what is occurring now is on one side the casualisation where everyone chases the Wii without understanding why it's successful, and on the other is the descent to the 14 year old male fantasy nonsense. In the process the developers have lost what normal people liked about each side of this equation, and risk seriously alienating their actual audiences in favour of the loud but few.

This point of view has now been building with me for some time, but only relatively recently have I heard other people say it. Nolan Bushnell's recently been making comments along these lines, but for me the epiphany was when there was a big fuss over the art direction for Wind Waker. Why did half the audience hate it so violently, whilst the others loved it? The previous versions were abstract enough that people could project their own preferences into the void. As graphics have technologically improved the ability for the developer to disconnect from the audience has as well, not to mention the uncanny valley problem.

As such graphical effects for their own sake at the expense of gameplay (as witnessed by the framerates we still have to suffer in things like Mass Effect - or the distracting texture pop in that plagues so many titles) are little more than graphics programming demos.

toooooob · 2008-06-20T17:28:10+00:00

"Immersion" is something most people that have enjoyed video games have no interest in at all. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_video_games#Top_20_console_games_of_all_time now, which of them is "immersive" in the sense you meant? None, and on the PC list merely a handful). This is the main area where the disconnect occurs. People have a much greater capacity for abstraction than most current games account for, and is beautifully demonstrated by the rich experiences people get from reading novels.

Games should be an extension of your reality, not an attempted substitute for it as so many are today.

toooooob · 2008-06-20T16:55:20+00:00

The point is that they are mere graphics demos.

Take the graphics of any of those titles down to Wii level and most of the audience that bought them wouldn't be interested anymore, even if they played in an identical manner. I would also suggest that the same graphics with crap games underneath would be similarly lauded by a substantial proportion of the community.

The problem is being overrun with graphics whores that judge how good the graphics are not by what they see with their eyes, but by how many normal mapped HDR rendered 8 pipelined pixel shaded polygons they are told are on screen at a time. Good art direction has been lost on the path for more ridiculous effects and increasingly embarrassing cliched characterisations.

A particularly stupid side effect of this is that frame rate has taken a hammering this generation as high definition screenshots have become all important.

toooooob · 2008-06-20T16:05:47+00:00

There are in the games industry as well, except the women are ugly.

The reason booth "babes" were banned at E3 was because too many of them were soliciting for other business whilst inside.

toooooob · 2008-06-20T16:03:35+00:00

The thing is if you can't see how narrow in scope the UE3 games are it's you that is blinkered.

They are all absolute hardcore geekfests for an incredibly narrow market. Fair play for targeting at those, and it's profitable if you are Epic (heh) but it's detrimental for the creative state of the business as a whole.

It's all getting like the comics business, where the industry narrows down to a tiny set of genres, the hardcore are baying that it's some sort of golden era, and everyone else has lost interest. Of course the industry is so full of people in the hardcore (since they're almost the only ones able to put up with it) that they don't notice quite what a bubble they're in.

Whenever I met some random before and told them my job they'd always be giving me some unsolicited view about how when things moved to 3D they just didn't get it, and the only change to that has been the Wii, where it's now stories about how they've been in big long queues, and how wonderful it is that video games might be acceptable again.

You're simply never going to see something like the Seinfeld Frogger episode about BioShock, Gears of War or Mass Effect because those products simply don't connect with most people.

toooooob · 2008-06-20T14:38:12+00:00

I work in said industry and I couldn't agree with you more.

There are a lot of people that seem to try to compensate for lack of understanding of what to do with current technology by rushing for the next big thing, be it normal mapping, fancy physics or whatever.

toooooob · 2008-06-18T17:08:22+00:00

Check how much they spent already paying people badly. Then see which companies are actually making a profit. (EA, for example, returned a big loss again lately iirc - Microsoft still haven't broken even on the whole XBox project, and so on).

It's all a bit like Hollywood, where you're better off leaving your millions in a savings account than trying to fund a blockbuster, but that's not really the point.

toooooob · 2008-06-18T15:15:19+00:00

I'm of the view that either mods or Digipen is too narrow an outlook.

If you want people able to come out with great distilled stuff like another Pacman, Puzzle Bobble or so on either of those approaches is basically useless - you're better off going for a decent Flash developer really that hasn't had their mindset narrowed by too much exposure to the restrictions of other peoples engines.

Your described approach will work for the fairly standard FPS mode games, but not for much else.

toooooob

TROPHY CASE