Apr
16
Posted in Games, Technology
The technology that powers computers, such as PCs and consoles (they’re basically computers), has skyrocketed in power in the past few decades. We went from Pong to Crysis in just 35 years, while it took thousands of years of human ingenuity to get the ball rolling.
Just 35 years, from this:
To this:
I don’t know about you, but I think that’s incredible.
But that brings me onto the question - when will it end? All the game consoles released - ever - seem to have the sole goal of improving on graphics, with the exception of the Wii. The N64 existed to improve on the SNES’s graphics, which in turn existed to improve on the NES’s graphics. We’re constantly working towards one thing, though we maybe didn’t know it at first - realism. Some games are pretty close, like the aforementioned Crysis, but they are missing a few things - try pumping it out onto a 150″ screen, and it won’t look so awesome. Plus, the image is completely flat on the monitor or TV, which is not realistic.
Even games that are not meant to be realistic, like ones based on cartoons and anime, are trying to be realistic to the cartoon or anime show they’re based off. And cartoon-ish games that aren’t really based off anything cartoon-ish (like Zelda: The Wind Waker) are still trying to be realistic to the artist’s original ideas.
And it’s not just graphics realism we’re trying to achieve. The Wii, which I said before was not trying to achieve realism, actually is. The Wiimote is a controller designed to improve on realism - compare Virtua Tennis 3 to Wii Sports and tell me - which one is most like real tennis to play?
Obviously, the plateau we’re trying to reach is utter realism. It took us just 35 years to go from a dumbed-down, monochrome, blocky version of table tennis (or something) to a war simulator with near photo-realistic graphics, computer controlled enemies, and graphics rendering on-the-fly. Many of the boundaries have not just been crossed, but trampled - the leap from 2D to 3D, for example.
So all that’s left is holographic graphics (or pseudo-holographic, which has already been achieved - see here), realistic control methods and completely realistic graphics, and then we’ve reached the plateau. Considering what’s already been done, all that should take 15-20 years, at most, then another 5 for portable consoles to catch up. Once it’s indistinguishable from reality, what comes next? All similar games will look the same. Nobody will complain about games having blocky graphics, or praise games for near-photorealism.
Consoles and gaming PCs alike will come to a standstill.
Then, game makers will forget about graphics. They’ll forget about control methods. They’ll concentrate on what was most important all along - ideas and gameplay. That will mark the true beginning of the golden age of video games. Forget about the 16-bit battle between Sega and Nintendo, forget about Shigeru Miyamoto - the only way for a company to survive in this era will be to provide things that are more fun than anything before.
But what will happen, in a few hundred years, when all the ideas we humans can think of have been used? When all storylines are somehow similar to that ancient game released in the 2100s?
What do you think?
Read more...
Apr
8
Posted in Real World, Technology
In a surprising chapter of events (or not so surprising, given how perfectly working things tend to fall apart on me all the time), my main desktop’s hard drive crashed on 4/4/08. It was a three-year-old Western Digital 160 GB 8 MB cache IDE hard drive, originally purchased for well over $150. At the time of purchase, it was one of the best available. Of course, it’s obsolete by today’s technology standards, and pretty much one of the only bottlenecks of my otherwise fast system (which I’ll cover shortly). I just never got around to upgrading the drive to something faster or bigger. Too much data, too much software, too much random stuff to potentially lose. Yeah, I could’ve backed everything up on a few DVDs. I could’ve done a lot of things to ease the transition from IDE to SATA. But I don’t like change. And I definitely don’t like surprises.
Well, I came home late Friday night expecting to turn on my LCD monitor and see a flood of AIM windows all over my desktop, as common when I leave for a period of time equal to or greater than 2 hours. Instead, I was surprised to find that my desktop was shut down. Yes, the system was OFF. Now for me, that’s a kinda big deal. My uptime has been nearly six months without a single restart or shut down on this particular rig (only restarted once to apply driver updates/BIOS tweaks). I have surge protectors, backup generators, etc, which keep my system protected and running. And I don’t have any applications that auto-update-restart ala Windows Update. So…
A quick detail about the rig: it sports an Intel Pentium 4 561 3.60 GHz running at a whooping 4.65 GHz. It’s been overclocked at that speed for nearly two years non-stop, up 24/7/365. Once upon a time, when I created/owned a phase change setup utilizing R134a HVAC gas, I was capable of overclocking this beast of a CPU to 5.4 GHz STABLE (that’s right folks, Super-PI stable, not just POST). Anyways, my point is, this was a heck of a solid setup I had, and a fast one at that. Considering I haven’t upgraded to any of the Core Duo/Quad mumbo-jumbo yet, I’d say I did a damn good job of keeping up with technology without buying new crap every year. I just tack on a few more MHz and call it a day.
Back to my story. I turned on my system and, much to my dismay, I heard five loud “clunking” sounds coming from my hard drive, followed by pause, followed by another set of clunking sounds, etc. Great. Clunking sounds are the universal “you’re screwed” noise that hard drives make. All jokes aside, the clunking sound I am referring to is the sound of the platters/head hitting each other. Somehow my hard drive managed to commit-suicide, as there was definitely no physical shock to the system.
My options at this point are limited. The only way to salvage the data is to submit it to a 3rd-party hard drive recovery facility, where they charge up-the-a$$ (I’m talking thousands of USD) to retrieve maybe a single Word document. So, that’s not gonna happen. All my 10,000 important emails I had downloaded to Outlook? Gone. Contracts, proposals, hand-coded websites, and hundreds of other Word documents? Gone! Gigabytes upon gigabytes of downloaded music, movies, and games? GONE! I don’t really care for the latter, because to me, the emails and documents, not to mention the many, MANY work-in-progress website projects (which I spent hundreds of man hours on), was an extremely monumental loss.
So here I am now. I’ve learned my lesson. I bought two new 500 GB SATA II drives, which are currently running in RAID 0, but I plan to switch things up to RAID 1 when I get the chance to go into the BIOS and reformat my drives (accidentally set it up as RAID 0 since I was so frustrated). Data loss is terrible, and I hope this never happens to me again. I still have a lot to catch up on. But the blog will go on… I promise…
Image brought you in part by MS Paint. Special thanks to Western Digital for losing my copy PhotoShop CS2.
Oh, and a word of advice. Western Digital’s slogan is “PUT YOUR LIFE ON IT”. Please, don’t put your life on it. Aside from the terrible one-year warranty that came with my last drive, apparently the quality is CRAP. Never have I ever had a hard drive just die like that. Things just don’t go wrong with hard drives unless they’re built crappily in a third-world country like Malaysia. I’m definitely not putting my life on any hard drives anytime soon.
Read more...
