Angus Thinks…

Gameplay code will get slower and harder to write on the next generation of consoles.

This rather alarmist statement came out of a panel discussion at the Game Developers Conference. One of the panelists, Chris Hecker, suggested that the next generation consoles such as the XBox 360 and the Sony Playstation 3 may be better at doing pretty graphics than current hardware but be worse at gameplay and AI code.

Why? The reasoning is that the graphics code is predictable, straight line code and the processors on the new systems are good at in order code execution. The AI code on the other hand is quite random which doesn’t suit the new processors at all. Currently out-of-order execution is used to speed things up, but the new chips have less capability in this area, so performance on this type of code is worse. This problem was, to some extent, predictable but it seems that the level of performance is much lower than expected with the development kits.

My guess is that the Sony hardware may prove worse at this than the Microsoft hardware, simply because Microsoft is running something closer to a standard PC on the XBox added to the fact that the PowerPC chip range has been fairly solid in terms of performance so far. The Sony cell processors are completely new, so this remains something of an unknown quantity.

Since the hardware hasn’t been released yet, this might be less of a problem than is anticipated, but given that this new information comes from people with direct experience of the hardware it seems unlikly to be wrong.

However I’m no expert in this area so I think it’s going to have to be a case of wait and see.

[Via Alice at Wonderland: Burn the house down (Link)] via [A Gamer’s Manifesto]

I was reading a review on Amazon.com for a book (more on Amazon failings in some later post), when I came across two lines that perfectly describe a large number of the second rate novels being published:

“Recent Plot Chunk of On-Going Fantasy Story #62” and “Loud Explosion Clumsy Info Dump Space Adventure #23”

The unfortunate thing really is how many books that I’ve read seem to fall into one of these two categories. Yet more are sitting on the shelves, virtual or otherwise, awaiting the unwary reader.

The modern publishing industry, at least in the SF category, seems to delight in offering enormously length series of books, often without any end in sight. The Wheel of Time series seems to offer up an extremely large and very heavy new volume each each year. Which may be great if the series is worthwhile, but is it? I don’t know. I’ve decided not to consider reading it until the last book is published in case the author gets hit by a car or decides to stop writing it (as has happened to one series that I really liked).

I have no idea whether the wheel of Time series is good or bad, I suspect that it probably better than average, because people continue to buy the books. But perhaps the publishing industry should move towards new ideas instead of ever lengthening series?

However despite that, there are several excellent series on my bookshelf that I would be very pleased to see more of, so perhaps it depends on the readers.

The trailer for Howl’s Moving Castle has appeared on the Apple trailers site. It looks, as ever for Studio Ghibli, most remarkable.

I just read that New Worlds bookstore in London is closing. This is really sad news because I often visited it when I lived in Cambridge. It had a quite amazing collection of Science Fiction and Fantasy novels, especially US titles. But apparently the building is being demolished and the new premises aren’t large enough to take both it and the more profitable Murder One crime store as well.
Originally Murder One was on the ground floor and New Worlds was in the basement, now only Murder One will survive. It seems unfortunately appropriate that a Crime book store would survive.

I should really be working, not blogging today. (Since today is Monday).

Retrofone is a fairly new company that sells older model mobile phones. It seems that this may be where some of the those traded in phones are actually going. The company has a whole range of old models for sale on their website. They have all of the old favourites including the Nokia 7110 and 6210. The 6210 being interesting because I still use a 6210 as my main mobile phone (it doesn’t even have a color screen). The prices seem reasonable and the service looks adaquate with a 30 day guarantee on purchases.

The site also offers some really old units including analogue units. I suppose these are useful today only as historical oddities, or possibly for use on some ancient network in a remote part of the world. Although is there anywhere that doesn’t have a GSM network these days?

[From The Guardian]

Robert X Cringely offered up a new view on where Google is going.

His view seems to be that Google will eventually be in control of much of the internet experience though their new google cache, Yahoo will probably win the online music price war, Napster will die and Apple will offer a new mac mini based movie experience using a wireless unit that plugs into the TV and decodes H.264 in hardware.

It sounds exciting, if slightly unexpected. I still don’t believe that people want subscription music. At least with iTunes, I know that I own the music that I buy. With subscription services I don’t own the music and I have to keep paying to listen whether I listen or not.

This is one of the reasons I cancelled my subscription to Screenselect. It’s a great service and works well, except that I just didn’t seem to watch the dvds. If I own something I can listen or watch it in the future. If I subscribe I have to watch it immediately. I think that represents a large barrier and I think eventually outright purchase will probably win. This is especially likely if content prices decline and producers realize that more money can be made by outright sale. The DVD market has been moving towards encouraging outright sale for some time. Warner Bros being the first major studio to deliberately reduce DVD prices to squeeze the rental market and encourage purchase of retail DVDs.

Who knows how it will turn out, but at the end of the day I want to own stuff, not rent it.

[link]

If you’re in the UK, then today is Election Day.

Please vote if you haven’t already made a postal vote.

The inquirer has a preview of a new computer power supply that is rated at 850W with a peak of 950W. This is almost a whole kilowatt!

Who needs heating? Just install a few computers and you can have all of the heat you need and play Half life 2 (or probably 3 by that point) instead.

Technically the issue is the power draw from the graphics cards. This seems to be pushing upwards of 200W per card for high end products; and if you have more than one card in the machine the totals will be higher.

The key issue of course is whether such a monster PSU can be cooled efficiently and quietly enough for the consumer market. You would probably need quite a large fan to cool a 1kw PSU adaquately and that isn’t likely to be quiet.

I just managed to fix a really weird bug in SQLEditor. The problem was that when ever you drew a connector between two fields all of the lines would get drawn slightly thicker. This gave a really odd visual effect.

It turns out that the connector lines were using a slightly thicker line style and that the thinner default line style wasn’t being reset correctly when drawing function completed. This then meant that all future lines were drawn in a thicker line style.