Unfortunately I think describing the situation as merely 'fidelity' is a bit misleading. There's other ep clones out there, but they're all lacking the set of animation routines the original had and so none of them really look like the original other than that they all have color-shifting polys zipping around. For an abstract art piece, this is rather important, hence the absurd effort spent on decompiling an 80s screensaver.
Here's another simpler implementation of an HTTP server in Linux x86 assembly from last year, coincidentally by the one who did the Seiken Densetsu 3/Secret of Mana 3 translation hack and the old Starscream 68k emulator:
You can build 'em out of essentially scrap parts fairly easily, actually. There's also dumps of the Melloton's sample reels floating around if you particularly want that sound rather than producing your own.
Peter Christopherson and Chris Carter of Throbbing Gristle made their own tape loop sampler out of car tape decks, some simple soldering and a keyboard controller in the late 70s. They could control the pitch, rewind, forward, etc. and otherwise trigger various tape loops which was the basis of the band's sound.
There's no reason to stop with tapes, though. MiniDisc is cheap, dead and has seamless shuffle (!!!) which means a whole stack of 'em could be chained to a mixer and played similarly. Still, you won't get the odd mechanical quirks and failings of using a cassette based system, especially if you start munging with manipulating playback speeds which may or may not be interesting to you.
They abuse seamless shuffle with an 88 track minidisc album that's designed to be played on random shuffle. It basically sounds like a Farmer's Manual album, but it's still wild.
Autechre was the first thing I thought about when I read your post :)
I was thinking more about hooking up a deck to an arduino and sending the "skip track" command at 20hz, or something like that. Record, chop, loop, and you're away.
'In 1993, Atsushi Ohori extended the Standard ML of New Jersey compiler at Kansai Laboratory of Oki Electric, and named the experimental prototype SML# of Kansai. [..] The name SML# of Kansai symbolizes the field selector #〈label〉, which was given a polymorphic type for the first time by this compiler.'
Actually, the PSX version of FFVII is /sampled and sequenced/ (like a surprising chunk of PSX music) from a Roland SC-88 MIDI module and part of the reason why a lot of video game music enthusiasts found the PC port of it interesting was because of the Yamaha XG support, an extension of General MIDI that was competing against Roland's GS extensions.
It had nothing to do with a 'lack of redbook', especially given the PC port shipped on disc and no one was releasing stuff on floppies anymore. It simply was common for Japanese computer games to support MIDI modules, even into the late 90s. They kept at it longer than Sierra!
This really has been my experience at several game studios, including the current one I am at. Often enough, the 'game designer' tends to be someone who exists mostly as a political organism in the company. Without fail, none of the designers I've worked with know much about the history of video games and will usually be rather dismissive about the subject.
The current game designer I'm with could not tell you anything regarding various character creation tools and strategies that have been used in various games (APB, City of Heroes, Skyrim, etc. being good relatively recent examples), yet his job is to spec out that very thing for one of our products. The result has not been very good, but this person outranks the rest of the team on these decisions.
Currently this guy is so bereft of anything to do design-wise, he's decided to read some books on Agile and has moved into pushing the artists and programmers around as if he's the project manager as well, which upper management collectively shrugged at and allowed. Management is where every 'designer' I've worked with has wound up and this guy will be no exception.
At the end of the day, I no longer have much faith in the average game studio because I know these people are out calling the shots on creative decisions. If you aren't a coder or an artist, for the love of fuck, please at least be a genuine gamer with a working understanding of game design history. There's been tens of thousands of video games produced now and some are very much worth remembering when considering a new design, both what to do and what to avoid. Your products will be better for it.
At the AAA game studios I have been an engineer at, the core/systems/lead designers have all been very familiar with game history, are avid gamers across genres, and always have, for any idea, examples of how that idea has been done in other games or that it has been promised in upcoming game X, etc.. The junior designers I've worked with have lacked that skill, which is probably why they are mostly just a cog in the content pipeline. Much as there's a difference between a real engineer who can build up systems and an enterprise UI programmer, there's a difference between content "designers" and systems designers.
Hands down, though, the best systems designers I've worked with have had programming backgrounds.
For some reason, testing graduates a lot of designers.
What I found in various game companies is that game designers usually graduate from other positions in the company and rarely hired as designers from the start.
> For some reason, testing graduates a lot of designers.
I have been wondering for a while how transparently bad game designers must be to produce well... a lot of what we see. This actually explains a lot.
Testers are not designers. :( Testers can be wonderful user advocates, if they make that effort, but... designers they are not. If anything, they're antithetical to design at their best.
Good testers are hard to find, and what's even harder to find are good testers who want to remain testers. The pay is terrible, the benefits are usually non-existent, and they're quite often placed socially at a lower level than the other game developers. Finding someone who is good at testing and doesn't want to be a programmer or a designer is nigh impossible in the games industry. Even if they don't want to be a designer/engineer, they want to advance their career which leaves them with the option of managing other testers, which as we all know, leaves no time to actually exercise their testing skills.
Until testing is treated like a real career, with architect-style career growth options, it will continue this way. Instead, testers spend a lot of their time growing their connections, internally and externally to the studio, hoping that a junior level designer/engineer position will open up. Because there are so many testers, it's quite cutthroat, so spending time at work "showing off" or playing politics is almost a necessity here for career advancement.
QA is basically a lottery for designer jobs. You get a job doing QA (which is a terrible job) in the hopes that you will be one of the 0.1% who get chosen to become a designer. This makes no sense at all, but that is how it works.
Sousveillance[1] seems to really answer 'Who watches the watchmen?' with 'We all do'. Ultimately I think not only crime will go down, but also more egregious cases of corruption. This is more harmful to governments in the long run who like a rather tight control over information, as the internet constantly demonstrates. I'm slowly learning to be okay with this aspect of AR.
It's the /services/ that Glass secretly enable for its users that I find far more worrying than mere scrapbooking of your life. Just start thinking as sleazy as possible here, for a moment. If Glass can log conversations, it can also relay conversations to other parties to comment upon.
I just can't stop imagining things like MTurk-like services staffed with popped-collar sociopaths fresh off the set of Jersey Shore, all working with your transcripts to be your 'virtual wingman' as you work your 'game' on unsuspecting people. Ridiculous, but just sleazy enough I could see it.
I imagine if we all really just wanted to depress ourselves today, we could keep coming up with more and more ideas of how to exploit AR for social advantage/manipulation.
> Specifically, they could source a higher-res, higher frame rate, lighter, lower-latency OLED display
None of those are actually remotely as important as the fact you're still using your head as a dumb camera joystick, there's no ability to track eye movement and the mismatch between what you're seeing and your inner-ear pressure is going to make a number of people throw up.[1]
These are fundamental problems that have been a part of HMDs for the last twenty years of me playing with them and the Rift addresses absolutely none of them. The Rift itself is not significantly different than its HMD contemporaries, it's actually aiming for the low-end gamer market and so far seems to be mostly pushing 'What's old is new again' without having made significant progress along the way. The most interesting part of the Rift kit is the tracker, not the actual HMD itself.
[1]: In a study conducted by U.S. Army Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences in a report published May 1995 titled "Technical Report 1027 - Simulator Sickness in Virtual Environments", out of 742 pilot exposures from 11 military flight simulators, "approximately half of the pilots (334) reported post-effects of some kind: 250 (34%) reported that symptoms dissipated in less than 1 hour, 44 (6%) reported that symptoms lasted longer than 4 hours, and 28 (4%) reported that symptoms lasted longer than 6 hours. There were also 4 (1%) reported cases of spontaneously occurring flashbacks."
Read up on 'Simulation Sickness' for more details.
Eye tracking would be awesome but it's not required for good VR. I fail to see how "using your head as a dumb camera joystick" is a problem; that's the whole point of VR.
Motion sickness is a real problem for some people (but not all). With low latency and thoughtful game design I think it can be mitigated. The bigger problem is the social acceptability of blocking your entire field of vision for long periods of time. I won't pretend that VR doesn't have problems, but the payoff is large enough that the problems are worth tackling.
> I fail to see how "using your head as a dumb camera joystick" is a problem; that's the whole point of VR.
Perhaps you should try playing some VR games for a while. I clocked quite a few hours playing the old Virtuality SU2000 games like Dactyl Nightmare and I've idly kept up with HMDs. The chief problem is that without eye tracking, it's incredibly UNFUN to use your head for movements that your eyes could otherwise have done for you. Mind you when the HMDs were much heavier back then it sucked a lot more, but it's still pretty shitty not being able to glance aside. Nope, gotta move your entire head for absolutely everything related to what you're currently seeing, if you move your head for any reason you can't maintain focus on objects naturally, etc.
> Motion sickness is a real problem for some people (but not all).
Probably not something you should underestimate. See Nintendo's 3DS launch and about-face on their stance on pushing 3D once they found a small but significant percentage of their users could not actually see the 3D effect. This lead to policy that the 3D effect could not be used for anything related to actual gameplay mechanics, reducing it entirely to an optional gimmick.
Simulation sickness affects even more people than the 3D issue. It's a real problem if you want to go mainstream.
Just to clarify my position, I'm not against the Rift nor do I have anything against HMDs. I simply see the Rift as a step along the way to whatever device truly popularizes the tech. I don't think we're there yet.
it's incredibly UNFUN to use your head for movements that your eyes could otherwise have done for you.
That's only a problem if your FOV is too small. With a large enough FOV and a light display there's no reason why eye and head movements shouldn't work exactly as they do in real life. The Oculus Rift has twice the angular field of view of the SU2000 in both dimensions, for 4x the subtended angular area.
Edit: Oh I see, your complaint is about using the head tracking to control a game, e.g. by pointing a gun. Yes, I think that's a bad idea. Head tracking should only control the camera. All game interaction should happen through a controller. A motion controller like the Razer Hydra would probably work well for this.
if you move your head for any reason you can't maintain focus on objects
Again, only true for crappy hardware. With a good enough display, 120 FPS, and low latency, there's no reason why tracking moving objects shouldn't work just fine.
I think a lot of people got disillusioned with VR because there's a lot of crappy hardware out there. Even the expensive stuff is crap. I tried Canon's augmented reality system at SIGGRAPH last year and the latency and FOV were awful, despite the $120,000 cost. But it doesn't have to be that way, and the Oculus Rift is the proof.
We seem to be so close to agreement here that I'll just have to vote you up and take you at your word regarding the Rift. It's entirely possible my experiences have all been unfortunate ones. I've not tried the Rift yet, though by all means I will. :)
Well, my word about the Oculus Rift is secondhand, since I haven't received mine yet. And I haven't tried the Sensics device you mentioned below; that hardware looks quite nice, so it would be quite disappointing if that level of device still wasn't good enough for a great VR experience. My opinion may change after using the Rift for a while, but given what people are saying about it I'm still optimistic :)
Modeless, can you please answer this "trick" question?
If a flat piece of cardboard that is 10 inches wide occupies 10 degrees of my horizontal FOV, how many degrees of my horizontal FOV will 20 inches wide flat piece of cardboard occupy? Both cardboards are positioned at the same distance from my eyes, of course.
> The chief problem is that without eye tracking, it's incredibly UNFUN to use your head for movements that your eyes could otherwise have done for you. Mind you when the HMDs were much heavier back then it sucked a lot more, but it's still pretty shitty not being able to glance aside.
Isn't that more of a problem of field of view? With a wide enough field of view, you could just look at whatever you wanted to. Basically make it like real life, where what you look at is the combination of where your head is pointed, which the computer needs to use to update the screen, and where your eye is looking, which the computer doesn't need to care about. Or are you thinking of using eye tracking to something else, like determining what you're pointing at like a mouse? Yet another option you have in VR is what you're targeting, like how Dactyl Nightmare uses the gun you're holding to map directly into the virtual world's gun. Using the head position to AIM rather than just LOOK seems like a bad way of doing things.
Yes, you're absolutely right that a lot of what I'm complaining about would be solved with sufficient FOV and things certainly have improved since the SU2000 system in that regard. But we're not at 'sufficient' at the moment, at least in my experience based upon trying more recent examples, like an obscenely expensive Sensics kit. It's possible that it will be sufficient long before eye-tracking winds up in consumer HMDs.
But yes, the other part of my previous remark regarding 'dumb joystick' was more directly related to using the head for aiming/pointer duties, which also unfortunately has cropped up before and I quickly conflated the two issues together.
>This lead to policy that the 3D effect could not be used for anything related to actual gameplay mechanics, reducing it entirely to an optional gimmick.
Because the working theory on what causes simulator sickness is related to the inner-ear detecting motion. If your eyes are detecting motion, but it does not line up with what your inner-ear pressure is telling your body, the end result is the body emptying its contents under the theory that it's been poisoned. Simply improving the quality of the picture isn't going to solve that.
It seems to me the oculus rift can accrately account for all head motion when you are standing still. There is no need for eye-tracking: All the rift has to do is detect all head bobbing & rotation, and update the view acocrdingly. Your eyes can still look around on the lcd screen.
What the rift _can't_ do is account for long term linear acceleration (eg in a car or walking around), it's true. If you had a large empty room to walk around in with the rift on, even this could be accounted for, however.
It's already braindead easy to put Linux on the ARM Samsung Chromebook. One of the first things I did was to assemble my own personal Linux distro and besides having to copy some blob files out of the original ChromeOS image, it's all very straight-forward stuff and I pulled up about a hundred packages I wanted including an X.org stack without fuss. The compile speeds are adequate if you aren't cross-compiling, I've certainly put up with worse.
I personally have little interest in the Pixel based on the specs. I think X86 is excessively 'big iron' now for a majority of needs and I find the lack of USB3 is mystifying. The screen looks interesting, but it's nothing I actually /need/ and certainly not worth another thousand bucks. I've personally taken to just using X86 for storage/cross-compile servers for the rest of my cheap ARM/MIPS/etc. crap and I've made it a point to stop buying expensive hardware. What $250 buys you now is actually pretty ridiculously awesome.
* Drop Crouton[2] onto Chromebook to get a full dev stack and unfortunate Ubuntu/XFCE environment.
* Set up chroot and start building other people's crap.
* Write to SD Card/internal storage and reboot.
Which step here is hard? Tedious to roll your own I'd give you, but you don't even need to as there's stuff like ArchLinuxARM[3] which skips the middle two steps.
Not gonna lie, I just spent several minutes trying to figure out what context sensitive notifications for Android had to do with hacking the chromebook.
