Yeah, idk, this probably a very subjective sort of argument, but in games where I can just retry everything instantly i usually just bang my head against the wall until it breaks down so to speak. In something like Dark Souls which sets you back more, I'm more concerned about not fucking up and therefore more actively engaged. 

Also when I have to replay a level I usually notice things I haven't noticed before and stuff like that. I really like the feeling of familiarizing myself with a game world.

Maybe this is different for different people idk.

I feel the same. It's not just a case of being more engaged with the boss. I'm also more likely to think about what I could do to prepare better and engage with the rest of the game. If there were bonfires right next to the boss locations not only would people be more likely to rush straight back in, it'd also be more likely that people would be hammering on a boss, when they were only just able to scrape through to its bonfire and weren't really ready for it.

Find AB, the vector from A to B.
Find AC, the vector from A to C.
Take the dot product of AB and AC.
Divide that by the length of AC.

In the diagram on the right this would give a negative value.

I posted in the other 'futile' thread about this but didn't get any feedback.  I'm scratching my head a bit about what the point of writing an engine within an engine is?  If you plan to not make use of all the main features of an editor based engine like Unity then I gotta wonder why you would use Unity in the first place.  Surely this is a case of another engine being more suitable to the task at hand rather than writing your own engine within another engine?

Even if you're not using the editor, you get Unity's cross-platform, hardware accelerated rendering. Including via the browser plugin which many people already have installed (which also gives gamepad support and mouse capture).

You'd have to concatenate the returns from the recursive calls though, if you returned by value.

Yeah, returning like that by value is valid. Also, a local vector doesn't store its array's contents on the stack, so that's not a problem either.

However, the whole thing becomes quite a bit simpler and more efficient if you pass in the vector to fill as an argument by reference:

Code:

void Quad::get_children_recursive(glm::vec3 player_pos, std::vector<Quad*>& out_children)  {
    for(size_t i = 0; i < children.size(); i++)  {
        children[i].get_children_recursive(player_pos, out_children);
    }
    if (this->should_draw(player_pos))  {
        out_children.emplace_back(this);
    }
}

The call to it would become:

Code:

std::vector<Quad*> children;
root->get_children_recursive(player_pos, children);

Saturn would make more sense. Thursday is Jupiter's day.

The subtraction of 1 here?

Code:

for (int j = 0; j < childs_children.size() - 1; j++)  {

Looks like a fencepost error, but it's worse: the size() of a vector is unsigned so if it's 0 and you subtract 1 you don't get -1, you get the maximum value of a size_t.

It should produce a compile warning.

Wii was released a year after the 360.

PS2 was before GC and Xbox, but DC was the first of that generation.

Release timing matters, but there are a number of factors. Consumers need to be confident that the console will have games that will make it worth the price. If a console is first in its category to start gaining momentum, it has a big advantage, but a console doesn't start building momentum without first somehow gaining that confidence.

It's more likely the cable cartel would balk at the idea of people playing games rather than watching their content and ads on TV.

I don't think cable companies get to tell companies like Samsung and Sony how to compete with each other.

Moreover, it is highly unlikely that TV manufacturers would jump on an idea like this without an established user base for the Ouya and what it has to offer players.

I don't think that's the case. TVs already have various features included because they're supported by SoCs. Those chipsets inevitably move forward in power over time anyway, and if they can use that to get an extra feature (i.e. gaming, whether that's Android apps or cloud streamed), then that's a point which differentiates the TVs with it from those without. A TV manufacturer isn't thinking about install base for the console, they're thinking about the sales they make or lose vs their rival products because they have or don't have that feature.

And potentially a company which provided the store for such a feature would even be will to pay for that right.

If it happened, it might be yet another thing that made the current business model for AAA games even more unsure.

Did the MegaTen series adopt D&D style alignments from earlier games? The plot of Shin Megami Tensei was mostly about the silent player character making choices that influenced law, neutral or chaos alignment. This does seem like they were trying to include roleplaying mechanics influenced by tabletop systems.

I think the Japanese games that had those kinds of elements are a bit more obscure though, than those which used the genre as a way of telling an adventure story about a group of characters. (especially in the West, because of lack of localisations) Genres tend to develop and diverge from their roots according to what is seen to work in practice in terms of popularity.

For another perspective, 5 act structure:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dramatic_structure

The difference from kishoutenketsu is the falling action part between the climax and denouement.

Good blog post arguing against using a 3 act structure when writing, from a screenwriter's pov:

http://filmcrithulk.wordpress.com/2011/07/07/hulk-presents-the-myth-of-3-act-structure/

I think the concept of kishoutenketsu, a 4 part structure, is actually more common in Japanese thinking about narrative:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kish%C5%8Dtenketsu

(the examples in that Wiki article are pretty bad though and don't really explain it...)

Does cert actually improve users perception of quality though?  I don't see people generally preferring XBLA versions over Steam/PSN/etc versions as 'less buggy'.

In practice, it just doesn't seem like much of a factor at all, except for the occasional story about how an XBLA version won't get updates/free-stuff because of the fee.  In theory, cert could be making XBLA games seem more buggy: Bugs that do make it through cert will be on XBLA for 2+ months, while bugs on Steam games can be patched in a day -- so way fewer users will see the bugs on the Steam game.

What cert tests for is not just bugs, but things like consistent implementation of platform features and avoiding things that are known to annoy users. In respect to user perception of quality, MS does seem to have been the most successful with their policies in this generation. Xbox Live gained a good reputation as a "next gen" service pretty early on.

If the cost of updates is an incentive to make fewer updates, you can get sense for what difference that kind of policy might make in looking at the perception that the PS3 and PSP suffer from annoyingly frequent firmware updates.

It's probably priced at the point where they think that large publishers would choose to do more thorough testing rather than taking a risk that they'll need to issue another patch.

The platform certification testing is not a substitute for the QA the developer and publisher ought to do. The platform holder does want to avoid a perception from users of a lack of quality on their platform, but they're not trying to enforce a perfect record. If a particular game has serious bugs, so long as it doesn't seem to the norm for the platform, it will be the developer's reputation that takes the hit.

Why is there such a strong homoerotic vibe coming from that image?? 

It's both a reason for and a result of the important female audience for mecha anime.

That MulV() effectively treats the vector as a quaternion (with 0 for its real/scalar part) and does quaternion multiplication.

The result of doing that is not the vector rotated by the quaternion.

It's another quaternion. If that quaternion is multiplied with the inverse of the rotation quaternion, the vector part of the resulting quaternion should be the desired rotated vector.

Which is why the fix is right.

That is what the equation here means:



rotated vector = rotation quaternion * vector * conjugate of rotation quaternion

The two multiplications are quaternion multiplications. The conjugate and inverse of a rotation quaternion are the same (the imaginary/vector part is negated).

3.0, bitches!

That's not Gainax. Anno started a new studio, Khara, to do the animation production.

Currently Gainax is doing the Medaka Box anime. It's not very good.

i'm curious about this 'valve handbook' or whatever -- and about how much power valve devs have relative to other devs. but i can't imagine valve devs have all that much more power over the design of their game than EA devs? maybe a little bit more, but i'd find it hard to imagine a first-year valve employee can go up to gabe and say 'this game sucks, let's do it my way' and have gabe give him the time of day

I think the point would be that if you thought the game sucked, you wouldn't go to Gabe. You could start for yourself doing the work your own way and try to convince other people to help you. Whether they listen or not is then up to them.

At EA you wouldn't be allowed to do it because the managers would say you're not doing the work you're scheduled to do. At Valve, the other devs would judge your opinions and the result of your work.

It is just that the exponents can cut one or two bits and give it to the mantissa. They just go needlessly low and high for games.

I think you're probably confused about what you'd actually gain in practice by having an extra bit or two for the mantissa and are underestimating how important small numbers are and the consequences of making everything under 1 be subnormal.