₦airaland Forum

Yeah, ure right about adaptations.

However I think PJ did the best job possible! by cutting out stuff like the scouring of the shire and tom bombadil, by rearranging the events in TTT and ROTK so the spread of action was even, by giving more (and larger) roles to the women in the story, by including action payoffs to some of the anticlimatic scenes in the books- the man reinvented and revamped LOTR into a superior masterpiece!

I am one of those people who believes the LOTR movies are superior ro the books.

Maybe thats why many people prefer lotr to hp. In hp's case, many times the books are better. And in the case of goblet of fire, the movie is severely shortened. They are still nice though, I think, and definitely not 'for kids'

Hey sbucareer, I like your customized courier/fixed-width font posting approach. Makes sure that your posts always stand out! And insightful posts they are.

However, your last post has some misleading assertions: You said a big software company used cobol to write SAP and ABAP. That isn't entirely correct.

In fact, SAP is the name of the company, and they used their OWN language, a FOURTH-GEN language called ABAP, which is by the way a modern language that supports objects and advanced abstraction, to create the SAP R2 and R3 enterprse resource planning packages.

In fact, at first the SAP ERP packages were not written in ABAP. ABAP was initially intended as a data manipulation language to be used in conjunction with R2. Over time, however,


THE ENTIRE SYSTEM WAS REWRITTEN IN ABAP!!!! WHICH IS EXACTLY THE G&!%^"%"^"^^"^ POINT I HAVE BEEN MAKING SINCE MORNING!

TO REWRITE YOUR ANCIENT PROGRAMS IN NEW LANGUAGES IS NOT LAME OR IMPRACTICAL! SEE, SAP DID IT!!! JESUS CHRIST!

However NEITHER IS IT COMPULSORY! of course cobol code in existence will do just fine. If not, it wouldnt be in existence, ne? However as time and technology moves on, the code will need to be rewritten because that old code is not portable. Starting new projects in nonportable languages is asking for trouble. ABAP is obviously a portable language as it was originally designed to run on top of a hardware-independent platform ie SAP ERP.

Bros. Khamileon

If you want to argue that Harry potter is for kids, I will have you know that Tolkien eventually began the lord of the rings anthology as a story for his children.

Both stories have many seriously mature elements. Just read (or watch) HP and the Goblet of fire to understand this.

Both movies are aimed at a general audience, in my humble opinion.

Just because LOTR has more blood n' guts doesn't make it more 'mature'. HP has its own share of 'strong' content. Mature tales can feature young children as protagonists. And you will admit, the hobbits are very child-like!




iice, I feel u ooooo! I remember the first time I watched ROTK. I was ready to hate it for 2 reasons

1) The book ROTK was the dryest and worst of the 3
2) People were over-hyping the movie and repeatedly using it to play down the matrix revolutions which, while a rather bad movie, was nowhere near as crap as people made it out to be.

Despite this my jaw was open at the end. It was truly a masterpiece, and superior to the novel version by far. PJ is a true genius!

THANK GOD! (or monkey, )

HE SAID FORGET IT! Nferyn did u hear? he said forget it. So lets forget it and just live happily ever after! everyone link hands and dance around in a circle,


ring-a-ring-a roses, tra-la-la, there are bunnies in the fields and the sun is shining (bunny rules!)


lets all exist inpeace and harmony and leave all the monkeys for lioness to eat!

aaight. Thread closed, right?

meeen

thats bad o

it means the 'next gen' may end up being a colossal flop.

if ps2 sales are still so strong, the ps3 has a major opponent already.

I still put my money on wii. Its the only really interetsing new console. The other 2 are just a bundle of inflated tech specs and part 3, part 4, part 10 of the same games we've been playing since 1996 (10 years!)

Anyway ill prolly get a ps2 before then. I need to play god of war and res4 to see what the hype is all about.

I still write qbasic programs :-)

once I was stranded at Gateway hotel with no link, no software, no nothing and I had to quickly code up a replacement for a logon script gone bad for a conference that involved 50plus laptops and autoconfiguring wifi connections. All I had was qbasic! And it served me well, lololololol! the details will just be boring, though,

Nah, no hatred to people using fortran, cobol, etc.

Not discouraging anyone. In fact, if you people actually read my posts rather than just jumping to conclusions you'll see the many arguments FOR legacy languages I give, and you wont be responding to my posts attempting to discredit me with points I have already raised!!!!!

So, for the 2,000th time I will repeat my position:

USING LEGACY LANGUAGES IS NOT BAD!!!!!!! IT IS THE NOTION THAT "REPLACING OLD NONPORTABLE SOFTWARE WRITTEN IN LEGACY LANGUAGES WITH MODERN LANGUAGES IS LAME AND IMPRACTICAL" THAT I DISAGREE WITH!

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh.  Listen for once.

whoooooa! the coelacanth! someone mentioned my favourite dinosaur :-) (or dinosaur fish, lololol)

I remember when, as a kid, I dreamed of seeing one. Just think, a real live dinosaur still alive today! I still hope to see one, although not as feverently as before, lololol!

And here someone is using the biggest proof OF evolution as an excuse to claim someone is shooting himself in the foot!

Nferyn, why do you continue to punish yourself and the rest of us? These guys DO NOT WANT TO THINK. And even if you convince them to think, they do not want to know the truth. They want to believe they are luminous angelic demigod sons of a diety that has built mansions of gold for them beyond the grave.

Give it a rest, dude!

@codec

check it out: (linked from your article)

http://www.gameai.com/blackandwhite.html

It is not a neural net, but not as simple as a decision tree either. It is a simplified neural net using symbolic rather than numeric data structures.

also, from

http://www.dansdata.com/blackwhite.htm

You Creature learns fighting skills, spells, how to impress Villagers in various ways, and, of course, where to poo, from you. You can stroke the Creature to tell him he's been good and beat him when he's been bad, and a conceptually simple neural net arrangement guides the animal's behaviour. You also get three Leashes - a neutral one that encourages learning, and two others that encourage compassion and aggression, respectively - which tell your creature to pay particular attention to what you're doing.

and then there's this

http://www.jadetower.org/muses/archives/000015.html

In fact, I've had my own experiences with the game that convinced me that my little ape had a temperament all of its own. Games like "Black & White" or "Creatures" have used neural network techniques to push the bounds of artificial intelligence. Indeed no one doubts the success neural networks have had in progressing the computer sciences.

So well, it seems like a lot of people think there are neural nets in there, ne? But maybe molyneux is just lying and throwing marketing hype around like Sony

@neoteny

I was going to just glance at your HUGE post (well done!) , assuming it was just copy-pasted, but Iread it and am glad I did, because it seems you made your arguments very clear- thus making it easier for me to get my points across! So thats what I'll do.

The mgs4 gun-in-mouth trailer is NOT a gamplay trailer. Before you roll your eyes in exasperation, allow me to explain! When you launch a game like Halo, or deus ex 2 on a PC, do you notice how the realtime cutscenes are so much faster than the game itself? Thats because a cutscene is a custcene, whether rendered realtime or not. You are comparing what amounts to a puppet show to a complete game! Definitely, the full game will be toned down considerably.

Also, we have not been shown any gameplay demos showing new or interesting gameplay. All we have seen is cutscenes- and cutscenes do not make a game. Finally, you give kojima too much credit. He scored major hits with MGS3 and the different versions of MGS1 (including twin snakes) but MGSA was rubbish to most people (we can blame the psp if we want) while Sons of liberty, despite positive reviews, scored 'most overrated game' awards by gamespot and Edge (and possibly everyone who had to suffer the games idiotic savepoint placement and snake-less gameplay. I want my snake!!!!!)




Euphoria: read between the lines. Euphoria falls under what I described as 'cosmetic physics'. The article clearly states that euphoria is NOT ai, but is rather a system to allow a ragdoll-type to interact properly with objects in its environment- for increased VISUAL appeal. Nothing to do with gameplay. Paralellizable YES, but does not improve gameplay. For the physics to improve gameplay, like in HL2, you need to integrate within the main thread. But codec has made some good arguments against that, I'll need to read a bit more before reinforcing that position. Nontheless Euphoria is NOT an example of this type of phys/AI- it is purely cosmetic.

i copied and pasted this because of your rant about how crap AI is and watnot. well heres a sample of nextgen AI. you are bein unnecessarily overcritical(one might even say cynical) about what u have neither seen nor experienced. you base your arguments and "research" on the works of critics of the ps3 while i try to approach this from a common sense perspective with as little industry jargon as i can.

Dude! cool down! please don't write off my research as 'research' in quotes! It hurts my feelings!

I posted a link to the microsoft article because you said MS accepts the cell is faster. I do not recall basing any other research on ps3 critics. And as for industry jargon, dude, you just copy-pasted a perfect example of marketing glockenspiel into your very post! Hey chill, they are just games, and sony fanboys are probably going to buy the ps3 in droves anyway, even if it turns out that sony built it from pigeon droppings! Lets cool down and have fun analyzing this cool technology, and seeing past sony's marketing hype.

Also, bros, did you REALLY read the ibm tech specs? You did read that the spe's are vector processors? And you DID read about their method of operation? You *DID* read about the method used to share memory and the recommendations on how they are meant to be used? Well, if you did, and you still maintain your position, I'll just keep quiet because anything I say will make me sound like an arrogant prick/pretentious bastard. I'll just say this: I guess its a matter of point-of-view. At the end of the day, the only thing we will have will be benchmarks, and you can be SURE they will all be fixed! so lets just forget about it, ok?

I'll just drop a clue: the keyword is 'predictability'. Perhaps that will help, ??


And finally, there's the major point: affordability!

It seems ps3 will be expensive, but what if sony is LYING? what if ps3 is actually going to be the same price as xbox360 and they just said this to mislead nintendo? U know nintendo was going to anounce the wii price at e3, but they didnt once they heard the ps3 price, and later came up with $250. What if they were planning to announce 199.99 or 239.99 and they decided to bump it up because of the high ps3 price?

I admit, its just wild speculation. But if this is what sony is really doing i will give them hand o!

who said ibb is an islamic zealot?

Havent u seen the way his wife dresses?

he worships only one god and that is KUDIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII! (moolah)

I see 'am not alone in the nat portman fan-worship club. She is the BEST!

Watch Closer, seun. Regret it, you shall not. Pity u couldnt see it on the big screen, though. I absolutely *loved* that movie! And to think I was dragged to the theatre by a girl, who thought it would be your average girly-movie. Hah! Halfway thru she was hating it, and I was glued to the screen!

I liked v4v so much I saw it 4 times on the big screen and will be getting the origio-dvd once it comes out in 2-disc form. Unbelievable!

Possibly you multithreaded your tabletennis demo, BUT,

you have to justify it! would a single threaded approach not be faster?

the domain of solutions only includes those where for a given problem, the multithreaded solution is faster than the singlethreaded solution. If we want we can multithread hello world! But we are only concerned with situations where performance is actually enhanced. Many times multithreading causes horrible performance hits.

I imagine you are locking and semaphoring and mutexing like ker-razy to maintain sync in your program. Hope u know all these are proc cycles down the garbage chute! Cool tech demo but in practice, is it workable?

the rule-based thingy isnt what black and white uses. It specifically went out of its way to implement a learning neural network- at least thats what all their pr blahblahblah said. Of course I havent seen the code!

ANyway so you get what b&w is all about, its a god-game like populous except that it has a virtual pet thrown in. like all godgames, you indirectly rule your people, rather than giving direct orders like in civ or AoE, you impress them with miracles, help them with their harvest, and create disciples to create specialization and make your people more independent. The more people that blieve in you, the more prayer power you generate to workl nmore miracles and convert more villages to your cause.

Where the AI comes in is the creature. You have an animal that wanders around the countryside interacting with your people. It develops and grows by learning from its experiences. You can interact with it, rewarding it for certain actions and punishing it for others. You can also use a 'leash of learning' which forces it to watch you and learn from your behaviour. Based on your behaviour, the creature eventually develops a personality of its own, and will act independently of you. Do your job right and it becomes a powerful ally, because it has unlimited miracle power and any villagers it copnverts will belong to you. Do your job wrongly and it may even develop a personality that contradicts your own, sabotaging your efforts, or it may become lazy, stupid or otherwise useless.

Its an intersting concept! Be sure to check it out. And no, its not a smoke-and-mirrors thing like Fable's good vs evil noinsense which was just a lot of branching possibilities.

I'm going to be a bit of a pretentious dickhead here, so I apologize in advance!

I didnt say 'autonomous agent'. I said 'autonomous *client* agent'!

What I mean is a system that is seperate from the core game logic, sending commands exactly as a human player would.

For example, imagine if when coding your football game, you code it as a 2-player game with no 1-player functions, then code a seperate system which will PLAY THE GAME exactly as a human would, ie with 8 directions and a set of fire buttons. This system will need real intelligence, because it will be unable to cheat, and it will have to analyse the data sent to it via the screen or whatever channel you use and base its strategies on that.

As you know, the way you are going to write it is that the game engine itself will 'pretend' to play by moving the players around in a completely different way than the human. Its like in the simple 'chaser' game that everyone uses to learn game programming. The code for the human is something like

(routine a)
if input(up) {decrement(y)};
if input(down) {increment(y)};

etc


but for the computer it is

(routine b)
if (cpu_x < x ) {decrement(x)};
if (cpu_x > x) {increment(x)};

when it SHOULD be

(routine(c))
if (superduperAIroutine_says_go_left) {sendinput(left)};
if (superduperAIroutine_says_go_right) {sendinput(right)};

which would send messages to routine (a) above. This is what makes it a client AI. It is not part and parcel of the game logic as in routine b. But as you can see, superduperAIroutine would be a bitch to code. How does it know where the human is? It would need to take a dump of screen memory, analyze it and figure it out. Why bother when you can just reach into the variables themselves and compare, then directly change the position of the agents involved? ah but then, you are merely masquerading as a player. And THIS is how games are made today.

In streetfighter Guile has to pretend to charge his flashkicks. Imagine how hard it is for the prorammers o ensure that sopmehow, guile has been in a position where down is held for 1 second before executing the flashkicks! End result: a lot of instant flashkicks. cheating, shebi? call it a limitation of the AI

anyway the final point is that routine (a) and routine (c) can exist on seperate cores, but not routine (a)_ and routine (b) because routine b is part of the thread that includes responding to human input. For us to remove AI from the main thread we should remove it from core game logic.

Unless of course, the code we use for AI is so complex, we can afford to use the 'tic' method of calculation, and merely poll the AI thread from time to time for results that ill be used to decide what to do. If the results are not available in a particular tic, we do some generic action, otherwise we do what the AI says. This I believe will not be feasible until the AI routines become SO complex that treating them in this way will actually be a performance gain.




black and white supposedly uses a neural net to evolve the creature's behaviour over time, based on its experiences in the game world and its interactions with you. The results are supposedly unpredictable, also. I'm currently playing the game (the original) and really enjoying it!

nice to see someone corroborating my post!

i forgot about isildur, duh, I need to be hammered on the head.

@codec:

Your projects are not crap. Just remember me when the millions come rolling in! ;-)#

The explosions interfering with the gameplay is what I was talking about when i spoke aboput obscuring of vision, and then went on to blablabla about the difference between incidental effects on gameplay and design features, but it seems you werent listening to me at all! pls re-read my post, I'm anticipating what your reaction will be.

AI: i dont know what ut does but its definitely a lot more complex than quake. however it will still be implemented as a direct function of core game logic, no question. A fully autonomous client AI (as seen in chess programs) is NOT something that realtime gaming can expect to see anytime soon. Nonetheless stuff like fuzzy logic, genetic algorithms, neural networks and so on can still be applied in this context! witness black and white. However ont mention spore yet, it hasnt come out and games like this tend to be exaggerated.




@spikyn

the spec debate is basically just an attempt to clear the air on some of the smoke and mirrors that sony has been spraying into the air. Thank God they were caught scamming everyone with killzone or else we for never hear di end of di thing.

I personally have been excited about the wii-remote since it was announced (outside e3) last year. And its great to see that the public shares my enthusiasm! PLUS the wii is cheap enough for me to actuially buy! PLUS the games are on dvd so the alaba boys may be able to crack em this time, meaning i can actually play games on it! and finally, it plays gamecube games, so I can finally play all those great cube games i always wanted to play but couldnt justify the unreasonable expense! (for a console that has no pirated games. this is Naija, afterall. original games are too expensive because we dont have localised releases)

exactly.

particle systems.

and what are particle systems? cosmetic physics, just as i said earlier. They have no impact on the gameplay, except maybe obscuring the vision of players during combat (which is really cool, as seen in FEAR), but if the game is being played seriously, I asure you its one of the first things players will turn off, as it adds wildcards into the game that mean sometimes you may die due to no fault of yours. realistic maybe, but not GAME. its like players turning off the lightmap lighting in competitive quake3- it looks cool but gets you killed! Plus quake3 is a better game without the wildcard of lighting- its not splinter cell which is esigned around lighting and cover. In a combat oriented game like q3, such lighting causes problems. JKinda like the terrain in tekken4 which u will notice has been ripped from tekken5. cool, but intrudes on the gameplay. (unlike VF where the games strategy is built around terrain management)

The Kameo thing, I believe, was a sound thing (like i mentioned earlier). Hardly an amazing feat.

I'm not saying people wont do it. I'm just saying it will take a looooong looooong time, or probably new types of game.



Finally the code i went thru is not the q3 source that was recently released (I'm not worthy), it was the arena source code that was released donkey years ago for the purpose of Mod-building. It had stuff like bot AI, weapon damage calculations, etc etc and was really well documenmted (in terms of naming of headers, functions etc) so it was really easy to navigate and very good fun, too! it was also humiliating to see how simple the routines that powered the most deadly bots were. I also got to see that the mode where I thought the bots had a damage advantage, HARDCORE mode, was actyually the mode where they dealt damage equal to that of the player! So I realised I had to step up my game, instead of claiming the bots were cheating, lololol!

something really cool I learned from the code was how recognizable complex behaviours were just the result of tweaking some parameters on a very simple AI routine!

For example in Quake 3 although the bots are not as smart as the ones in unreal when it comes to team tactics, they have distinct personalities. (unlike UT where its obvious the bots are all just the same guy with different likes/dislikes/tendencies/skill levels) You know that Doom will do his best to get a railgun, even sacrificing his life in the process- you know that sorlag will always use ranged attacks when he can, will try to knock opponents off course in mid air for crater kills, will move towards bounce pads whenever he can. You know biker will avoid direct confrontations and will instead choose to sneakily interfere with fights that are almost over, killing the weaker player. I read the code, hoping to find the source of all this but instead saw that there were just a few generic routines with some parameters here and there 'weighing' random number generators, and each bot was just a set of parameters fed into the same set of routines! Incredible!

The guy who wrote that code is jean paul van waveren and I think he is too much! however the gaming community has turned up theior noses at him, cos the q3 bots are so crap at team tactics. But how was id to know that team games would take over the gamespace after q3, eh?

Yep, like the physex and the new physics extensions that the gpu makers are going to add to their cards.

EDGE did an article on them early in the year, actually thats where I got most of my grammar about parallelism in game programming from. John Carmack made a speech at quakecon 2005 (I wish i could still find the link, but if u look around for 'quakecon video nsv' you may get it- its a nullsoft video.)

His biggest concern was on this physics issue and i practically repeated his words verbatim. If you paralellise it,. you are choosing to remove it from core game logic, and you make the game completely unpredictable and nearly impossible to playtest to robustness.

If you choose to integrate it into the game logic, then by the nature of game programming it becomes nearly impossible to parallelize. I can get a concept of this because of my experience with quake 3 source code. I was trying to figure out how the bots in quake 3 reason (the game was beginning to get too hard) so i was reading thru the source code and I realised that the 'AI' in games is not ai in the traditional sense, but rather cleverly directed gam,e logic. you *can't* remove this from the core game logic.

Thats why we can't have 'client bots' that are pure clients, communicating with the game engine in the same way that humans do, because the intelligence required is out of this world. Bots of nowadays, in all games including fighting and stragegy games, are nothing more than the core game engine pretending to play against you, thats why they seem to cheat sometimes- they are going out of their way to pretend to play fair.

When the day comes where a fully autonomous bot seperate from core game logic exists, AI will be parallelizable. When a form of AI that can perform stresstesting on a physics-enabled playspace accounting for all possible error consitions exists, physics will be parallelizable. when setting semaphores andf passing messages between processors becomes faster than simply raising exceptions for collision events, collision detection will become parallelizable.

All these require the input of some seriously creative genius folk. exactly the kind of people that will NOT be working on ps3 and xbox (due to the ridiculous cost). So in my opinion it will be a long, long time before we see multiprocessor cpu's enhancing games in any way.

On the PC i have the idea that game makers will be happy not to use more than 1 core at a time, because that will allow them to escape from the 'close all other programs' wahala that most games usually require. They'll just code the games so the game chops one core and lets all other tasks share the next core. Imagine tanning halflife 2 and burning a CD in the background!

Yeah,you're right about concurrent processing tech being needed to make use of the spe's. The point i was trying to make is that ON TOP of this, the spe's are then again limited in what they can achieve, while the 360's 2 extra cores are full power pc units equal to the cell ppe.

But the real point is that game programming is inherently serial. It is not so simple as putting AI on one chip, collision detection on another, blah blah. Those are NOT parellelizable tasks. The tasks that are easily parallelisable are either mundane (sound, disk IO) or ALREADY parallelized (all forms of graphics). Remember- cpu's are not used for graphics in this modern age- the gfx are farmed out to parallel GPUs, in ps3s case this is rsx, in 360s case it is the ati card.

One thing that seems promising is physics. Physics CAN be parallelized! Unfortunately, this requires a decoupling from the game logic. The testing required to ensure that such a use of physics remains within a game's problem domain is insane and ultimately unrewarding, so in the end the designers either:

1) reduce it to cosmetic effects only (eg max payne 2,fear, almost every other havok-based game out there)

2) build it into the game logic, making it non-parallelizable (eg half-life 2)

I hope some genius figures out how to use parallel programming in games. Maybe it will mean a new type of game? That will really rock! 'cos todays games certainly do not benefit from multithreading.

As you say,

same rubbish, different day.

www.ngemu.com

all the ps1 emulators you need.

unlike ps2 emulation, ps1 emulation is mature, very fast and very playable!

@neoteny, you are absolutely right.

power does not mean victory.

*the psp is more powerful than the ds, but Ds wins.

*almost every gameboy-killer was more powerful than the gameboy,  gameboy killed em all until GBA

*Gamecube and xbox were more powerful than Ps2, even dreamcast games looked better due to hardware AA even though ps2 specs were (allegedly) higher,  yet ps2 won the day.

*the megadrive was more powerful than the NES,  yet it couldnt break its hold on the market.


However I disagree with you and c0dec (hows it going man! long time!) on the tech details of the ps3:

c0dec: I have a link for you- I have a technical study of the cell. Not a game magazine yanning nonsense, I mean a proper design document from ibm.com-

[url]http://www-306.ibm.com/chips/techlib/techlib.nsf/techdocs/D9439D04EA9B080B87256FC00075CC2D/$file/MPR-Cell-details-article-021405.pdf[/url]

to be clear:

The SPEs are NOT independent processors! the cell is NOT a multicore processor in the fashion of the xbox 360 processor!

Neoteny, Vector units are NOT referring to geometry, etc. A vector unit in microprocessor design is quite different. There are certain instructions known as SIMD instructions, (single instruction multiple data) like the altivec on powerpc, or SSE and MMX on intel processors. A VECTOR UNIT is a co-processor designed to optimize these *specific* instructions. It has very limited general purpose capability. Therefore yuou can't put AI on one processor, collision detection on another, etc like you said earlier. Rather, what you do is you MULTIPLEX a vector operation and farm  out to your SPEs. this is how SONY got their huge teraflop scores! And as i mentioned earlier, simd is quite useless for games, so those teraflops are USELESS unless some genius can figure out a new form of game programming that uses them. Not likely.

Also, neoteny, microsoft does NOT concede that the ps3 is more powerful. They actually claim the 360 is more powerful (this is debatable, as regards relevance to games. The 2 extra cores of the xbox are just as useless as the spe's for reasons i will outline below,  but the real thing is that rsx is higher specced than the ati chip in x360). I have a link:

http://xbox360.ign.com/articles/617/617951p1.html

They reveal a lot of sony's misyans about ps3, but they talk some rubbish too, saying crap about how shared graphics memory gives them a big advantage over sony,  anyway time will tell.

finally, neoteny, the local memory of each spe IS a limitation, unless you are not doing video streaming or encoding. These are applications where you have a large, predictable, singledimensional datastream, and you can rely on your MMU to keep the stream pumping. If you attempt to read directly from main memory or read an spe's local memory, you get a huge clock penalty. This is the designer's way of saying, don't do it. As such, the cell is custom built for amazing performance in thoe areas, but not gaming.

dude! dont fall for sony hype! Cell is NOT A NINE CORE PROCESSOR! it is a single power PC with seven (not eight) vector units! the spe's are SIMD processors, hardly a full microprocessor unit. The cell's amazing SIMD power will only help it with vector-heavy processing, which means video encoding, decoding and streaming.

NOT physics, ai and 3d! so the cell's teraflop capability is useless for games! Oh my God!

RSX is more powerful than the ATI processor in the 360, that is true. BUT not by the margin sony will have you believe! PLUS the games may actually end up looking better on xbox because:

1) xbox doesnt have the wahala of seperating video and cpu memory. They are shared! so no need to use a local bus, and the xbox has the advantage of using superast video ram for its own cpu purposes! how cool is that!

2) Cell with its 7 spe's, local memory per unit (access to main memory from an spe is slow as a dead turtle) and crap devkits will be difficult to use compared to xbox and XNA, which is already in use and is really easy for developers. In the long term, the ps3 games will look better because the rsx is plain more powerful but in the meantime programmers will suffer. Just look at the games they showed at e3 2006- either they were videos, or looked terrible. The exception was Heavenly sword from ninja theory, which, i must admit, looked like it will be ONE HELL OF A SERIOUSLY AWESOME GAME,



next point:

mgs4 trailer- video. dont believe the hype, that is NOT ingame GFX. yes I am talking about the e3 trailer where snake shoots himself. remember the killzone trailer? at least they aren't trying to lie with this one.

final fantasy 13- video.Yes, the one with the chick slaughtering crowds witha gunblade. But then ff games are filled with video anyway,

Heeeeey ma guy! ATI has been whipping nvidia's arse for ages now! and they use RADEON now, not rage!Nvidia just struck back with the 7800 series, every gen before then has seen ATI the winner. However I wont debate that the RSX is more powerful than the xbox360 graphics chip. remember the shared memory issue, sha.


bottomline: dont be blinded by the hype. the cell is a 3+ghz powerpc with seven vector units. The xbox cpu is a triple core 3+ghz powerpc. For serial nonfloating point operations, they should have equal performance. For parallel nonfloating point operations, the xbox should be 2-3 times faster, for floating point vector operations, the cell should TOTALLY KILL the xbox 360 processor.

unfortunately games are not a floating point vector based application. They are also not easily parallelized. so neither cpu has a clear advantage!

Yes ooo those were the days!

Zelda on snes turned me into a hopeless addict. I would come home from school and play till i was chased away from the sitting room, not eating , going to the toilet or pausing to rest. Getting the level 3 master sword was a dreamlike experience, at the tail end of a weekend marathon with almost no break inbetween play sessions. Ah the vigour of youth!

Alladin- too easy! finished it first day (like everyone else) but beautiful graphics!

DKC- the game that had me arguing with playstation freaks for a whole year! lol!

Cool spot- meeen I played that game, it was so hard, I gave up. Recently I got the megadrive version to play on my phone- still too hard. *sigh

Prince of persia- the game that proved to me computers were the PLACE to play games. I loved it, but finished it really quickly (cos I had spent ages slogging thru pop2 earlier which is SERIOUSLY DIFFICULT!) and have recently played and finished sands of time (best thirdperson game ive completed so far- no I have not played god of war or res 4) and am currently playing warrior within, which has gotten a bit boring


Hey, I never said you were a noob! Obviously from ure pedigree u are surely an alpha tanner! However as skilled as you are, if u think fps are repetitive u are obviously not a jedi yet! the truth lies in human competition! And if you go online on any fps, you are sure to be called a noob there! and after being whipped 10-0 a few times (as my humble self can attest to, having been forced to endure the same humiliation) you WILL SUDDENLY BECOME HOST to the spirit of the mad fps-tanner, and THE SCALES SHALL FALL FROM THY EYES (haaaaallelujah) and you will immediately become one of us, proud halo fanboys! You shall see that to finish all the fps in the world, nay, to PLOD THROUGH all the fps in the world is not enough, for man shall not live on end credits alone, but shall be saved by the eternal glory of the 180 mouse-twitch and the circle strafe. Can somebody shout hallellujah?!!!



Em, Bros. U cant have played starcraft ghost. The game has been cancelled and will never come out. small small, eh? ;-)

No, they are not.

You are thinking of the F programming language, which has been stripped of practically everything that makes fortran fortran.

However, remember I did NOT say that fortran is obsolete. Not by a long shot. Only that it isn't very portable. It wasn't designed to be.

fortran 2003 was designed to address many issues that you can see here:
http://www.kcl.ac.uk/kis/support/cit/fortran/f2003_new_features.html

portability is not one of them. fortran 2003 is an amazing modern language designed for use with scientific and mathematical programming due to its extensive and rich maths libraries- but it has a narrow problem domain and does NOT solve the problem of nonportable legacy code holding back progress in other areas.

I'll be getting a Wii.

Why? Its the only reasonably priced console. At less than 250 dollars, it is an absolute steal! PLUS: I get to play gamecube games such as gekito ninja taisen, and the wii controller is the only thing besides "xbox live anywhere" that was impressive at E3 2006.

And "live anywhere" is useless in Nigeria. Hence, wii!

Ps3? this is going to be Sony's big failure. the PAL version of the console will sell for 700 pounds!!!! that's over 180,000 naira! JESUS CHRIST!!! the NTSC version will be 700 dollars, which is just over a hundred grand! for a games console! And when the Alaba boys are done with it, how much will it cost?!!

By the way, the Alaba boys won't be able to (trivially) pirate blurays, but they will be able to pirate 360 dvds and wii dvds! this should make ps3 the big loser in naija, just like the gamecube of the current generation.

Sony has gotten greedy, like Nintendo of 1996. It is time for their downfall!

PS: since I am a confessed halo LovePeddler, I may be tempted to go for a 360 if halo3 is any good. The price has to come down first, sha.

Could u kindly excerpt the section on portability for the benefit of readers of this thread? Thanks!


An example of a project that suffers due to fortran's lack of portability is the Cambridge Crystallography Subroutine Library- there are other examples, too. The problems are mainly due to the fact that fortran comes from a time when portability was not a priority.

http://www.ill.fr/dif/ccsl/mk4man/c2node1.html

A quote:

Portability
There will always be problems trying to make the FORTRAN portable.

The areas which are particularly troublesome in portable programs are:

1)
input/output
2)
use of graphical output
3)
what the consequences of an error are

but there are other areas, which tend only to become apparent when the system is actually implemented on a particular machine.

We are aware of the problems of portability, but nevertheless we insist that CCSL must be portable. Some of the FORTRAN used may seem pedestrian as a result.