AwesomeOcelot

I reinstalled Universe Sandbox to get the cards, it's still a buggy piece of crap, before the program just crashed a lot, now it gave me a BSOD.

It's still a 100BASE-T wired network, right? I doubt your internet is faster than that. If it was faster than 100Mbit, theoretically 802.11n 2.4Ghz has more bandwidth, but it rarely is, but dual band 5Ghz or 802.11ac would be.

What Fargo and Schafer said about publishers was true. Publishers make stupid demands, especially since they have no experience creating games or even playing them. Good developers don't see royalties and they don't own the IP they create, the relationship has changed to heavily weighted towards the publisher. Publishers only care about franchises, install base, and large sales. It's a situation that's unfair to independent developers, and isn't interested in making good games. If "AAA" gets applied to the Civilization series, then what does "AAA" even mean? It's not a big budget game. It's also a well established franchise with 4 sequels and countless expansions, it's exactly the type of thing Fargo said publishers were asking for. Plus isn't it made by a publisher owned developer?

I've played both, I really liked World of Goo but didn't like Little Inferno, a lot of what makes World of Goo great is there (music, humour, "atmosphere", art style) but the key component of gameplay is just not, it just doesn't work.

They stated that every time a badge is crafted, a number of booster packs drop, randomly distributed around the other players eligible for a booster pack drop. I'd really like to know how they calculate how many.

I'm treating it as a game, it's been quite fun so far, I'm not that interested in level or completionism, that's really expensive. It's a new spin on card trading games, as the cards are introduced into the market for "free" (for owners of certain games), I have about 350 games on Steam so I have many of them. Steam make a percentage of transactions in the market, but not for trades. I think it's a brilliant move by Valve, it's going to encourage people buy games and use Steam, and they're probably making a lot of money for hardly any effort through the market fee, and those funds can only be used with Steam. I'm up $6 thanks to drops from games and 1 booster pack. I got over 100 cards to drop, plus buying 30 to get level 20 for +40% chance for booster (random 3 cards from a game) to drop once a week (so far so good), they can be worth $0.4 to $5. Only 1 foil so far (which is under 25% of happening with so many drops), I'm hoping to sell for $4 but Steam's servers are struggling now so half the items I put on the market don't show up and it keeps throwing up errors. Steam stopped dropping cards for over a day and a half and prices doubled and tripled. Most of the time cards have been steadily going down in price through competition, the economy is finding equalibrium according to how much XP a card gets you in the case of normals, but foils don't work the same way and they tend to go for around 6 times their corresponding normal. Booster packs are tied to badge creation, but they haven't said how, at least not in the FAQ. Valve were giving useless coupons away at the beginning, then mystery cards, I wish I had gotten them instead because I sold them at the top, bought them at the bottom, and when they were revealed they were worth 150%. It's put me in the mindset that Valve could screw me over at any time and assets are bad.

I don't know what people were expecting, that they were going to buy machinary and self publish? That's not the broken part of the publishing arrangement, as far as I know publishers do a good job at distrubition and manufacture, it's the IP ownership and funding part that needs to change.

The limits are in the specifications and the drivers are limited to the specifications, the screens, cables, ports, and controllers are made to the specifications. There's better cables, ways to increase the signal quality, but I doubt the Seiki screen timings or PCB are capable of 4k at 60hz.

HDMI 1.4b adds support for 1080p at 120hz or 3D 1080p at 60hz per eye, 4k is limited to 30hz with HDMI 1.4b that the Seiki SE50UY04 uses. It's going from 2m pixels to 8m pixels, so 120 / 4 = 30. 4K video content at 60fps is a long way off, so if you just want a HDTV for 4k video content then it's good value. If you want a 4K desktop you'd just get multiple monitors. If you want to game in 4K you're going to have to wait for HDMI 2.0 because getting at least 60 frames per second is way more important than going from 1080p to 2160p. I think if the Seiki screen supported 4k at 60hz they'd have used displayport, since they didn't I think it's almost certain that screen isn't capable of it, even if it had an interface that supported it.

I just buy more games, take more chances, I don't think deep sales negatively effect anything, it certainly increases revenue, that has to be good for developers. I don't buy games day one, never have, I preordered Bioshock: Infinite because it came with The Darkness 2 and X-COM: Enemy Unknown, that was a pretty good deal on GMG, and I have used KickStarter but that's to support independent development and developers I like. Microsoft were not planning anything that looked remotely like PC. They were going to have daily check-in DRM, region locking, and a digital distribution monopoly that wasn't going to have the same sales and pricing as PC.

It would take under 10 days going at the rate they said they were going in the article (8 billion guesses a second) with one GPU to search the 8 sign password's space. I don't think the nested md5 hash would do anything, and the salt isn't to prevent brute forcing.

I don't think the PS3 had the best hardware, it certainly made the most dubious claims about its harware, but then Sony have a history of this. The original Xbox was clearly more powerful than the Gamecube, Microsoft threw money at it to get its foot in the door. You're right about the developers so far, but I'm hoping we haven't seen all that's coming, the launch line up is always underwhelming. We are getting to a point where publishers aren't willing to fund the teams to create better and better assets. Unless people start developing procedurally created assets that look great then the higher the fidelity the more work for the artists, animators, and sound engineers. Compared to PC there isn't going to be a step up, as there wasn't last generation. The leap from sometimes 720p (sometimes 720x480) to 1080p is a big step. From having 256MB or less for textures to up to 2-3GB is going to be huge, as texture art can make the biggest difference in terms of how good a game looks, and previous generations of consoles had way too little (Sony almost made the same mistake again). The PS4 has got a GPU that's equivalent to a $250 PC GPU released last year, that's a lot more power than the 8 year old GPU in the Xbox360.

Found a quote from Tim Schafer's AMA on Reddit:

I see few are reading the articles I quote. It won't be simple simultaneous read/write. It says the GPU will also be used as a resource for compute calculations, including ray tracing for audio, texture decompression, physics and particle simulation, collision detection, AI, and world simulation. Dismissing GDDR5 as EOL already is just silly. The GPU isn't that great, unless they've hidden an extra one in there running physics, collision detection, particle simulation, and AI isn't going to be that impressive. The only reason they've got this capability is because the CPU is not up to much.

Sharing RAM between GPU and CPU probably won't make much difference, and GDDR5 won't make a difference to general computing. The PC with GDDR5 for GPU and DDR3 for CPU is the best price per performance setup, there's already cards with 3 and 4GB of GDDR5, more than will probably be available to developers for PS4 anyway. PC is also moving to DDR4 and GDDR6 in 2014, so PC will soon move on to bigger and better. If the HDD is upgradable in the PS4 I don't see why they wouldn't make it compatible with SSD but I doubt they'll ever ship with them. I know nothing about game software development, but I suspect they don't aim for the lowest minimum requirement across multiple platforms. Surely there must be a customization process. Skyrim was unplayable on PS3 for many, yet most Xbox 360 owners encountered a much smaller litany of quest-breaking bugs, corrupted/missing saves, etc. Depends what you're talking about. Assets, e.g. texture quality has been aimed at the lowest, and with the Xbox1-80 being 5GB of available for game RAM and lower bandwidth compared to PS4 let alone PC, you will probably see games aimed at that with the potential for some games to release "ultra" textures for PC (although that hasn't been often). Tweaking the graphics with extra particle effects and shaders, and even background models has gone on and probably will go on. Also with the next gen using the same architecture as PC, with CPU and GPU from the same family as PC hardware, less work will go into differentiating the ports because less will have to specifically target and be written for each platform.

Yes, I was, and they did use brute forcing and dictionary attacks first. They were using hybrid attacks but that still involves brute-forcing, just of a smaller space, they're still doing lots of guesses so memory-hard and work-factor still comes into play. With hybrid attacks the time can be shorter depending on the entropy of the password or whether the password uses a ruleset the cracker is using.

If the numbers are right, and they could only manage 8 billion guesses a second with MD5, one 9 character password would take years to crack if it had symbols, lowercase, uppercase, and numbers. Even if they used a 8 GPU homebrew cracking box, that's stills months to crack one password. If they're using best practices with a properly hashed and salted password e.g. SHA512crypt, with a mucher higher work-factor making for 2000 guess per second on one GPU (according to the Ars article) only the short passwords (less than 6 characters), passwords in a dictionary, lowercase passwords, and the ones that substitute letters with numbers or symbols e.g. "p4$$word" would take weeks or less, the rest would take months each. Memory-hard functions in hashing are designed to make cracking impractical by making the cracker use larger amounts of memory, so they're forced to use the memory I/O, limiting parallel computation. So using a 8 GPU setup or cloud cracking array wouldn't be as much benefit and designing a cracking box would be more expensive as I think now crackers (and bitcoin miners) go for the most compute per $, generally means multiple low-mid graphics cards. With memory-hard functions it creates a bottleneck for that kind of setup.

To be fair to Double Fine they were talking about going over budget every episode since January, just not "we can't afford 75% of the content I've designed but I'm not going to cut it" and "looks like the game will be completed in 2015".

Documentary + Amazon credit processor (5%) + KickStarter (5%) = over 1/3 of the $3.34m

Writing and art led design is clearly not the way to make games. Gameplay and tech led design is the way to go. Half the problem is that the art assets take too long, that was decided early on and they knew then it would balloon the budget. Grim Fandango, Psychnonauts, and Brutal Legend have their problems but even though they were low fidelity the art and style were better than most games, they at least looked cool and were praised for it. Psychonauts didn't have a particularly strong main narrative, a lot of it was self-contained modules, they could have cut characters and minds out quite easily, it was writing that fits how gameplay and the tech used works, the story was told through that and cutscenes. The KickStarter raised $3.3m but the funds for the game were more like $2.1m, I would have been happy if they'd have stuck with a small scope game they were planning for $400K, with the extra money going on porting and adding team members. Tim Schafer apparantly has decided to design a $6-8m game.

I feel like this is the way to make buggy unpolished games with feature cuts and mechanics that don't work well. On the other hand if people backed because of Tim Schafer and his games: Grim Fandango, Psychonauts, and Brutal Legend, then that's not a surprise. I'm glad DoubleFine have funding for 4 other projects, because I don't have much confidence in Steam Early Access raising funds. I don't think you can accidentally design a game 4 times larger than your budget would allow, they didn't just find out it'd take until 2015, and they haven't continued for this long without a plan for additional funding. Also the KickStarter wasn't "half fund a Double Fine Adventure for 2015" if my memory serves me. It does answer why they barely show the game in the documentary series, I think I've seen twice as much of Project Eternity.

Hasn't everyone switched to Libre Office?

Oh **** you Ubisoft. I have a sufficiently long password, if Ubisoft properly salted and hashed the passwords then I shouldn't need to change it.

Because writing drivers and operating systems for the myriad of PC configuration just so your game could have a better access to hardware is realistic. It's not like they would have to write them from scratch, and key manufacturers would be supplying drivers if direct access was such a big deal. You're arguing against yourself, it's not realistic because direct access to hardware is not important.

Console developers also use drivers and API? There are benefits to using drivers, Nvidia or AMD know their hardware. DirectX was used on Xbox and 360, and an OpenGL based API was used on PS3. It really depends what the developer is doing, if it's something not supported in the API then not having direct access could be expensive. Developers on PC could have written their own drivers and gotten direct access to hardware, or made their own OS and gotten direct access, if it was a big deal they would have. I think the differences in graphics between console and similarly spec'd PCs is more down to which was the target platform, having narrower FOV, massive gun models (if FPS), sitting further away.