The start of the devolution of the internet.
I'm not sure if I blogged about this before but I'll just blog away. We have ATT DSL connection at our house and there's been some news about ATT capping the bandwidth at 20GB to 150GB (for us, I'm sure 20GB is our cap since we have the lowest speed). I've been doing the math so here's my work: 20GB is ~20,971,520KB -> ~167,772,160 kilobits. My internet connection is 384kbits/sec so -> 167,772,160/384 -> 436,906 seconds of constant internet usage. Divide that by 360 to get 121.35 hours and divide that by 24 to get 5.056 days of constant internet usage.
Now imagine my hard drive gets corrupted. My steam folder is about ~35GB. It'll take me at least 2 months to get my steam games back without going over the limit. Not to mention holding off on the explosive weekend deals that steam has every week.
Here's a list of stores/things that will be affected by the bandwidth cap in no specific order.
1. iTunes HD movies will be rented/purchased less.
2. Netflix streaming will be used less.
3. Downloading games from Steam, Xbox 360 store, Playstation network store, and other online game distribution titles will be severely affected.
4. OnLive's upcoming technology that can "stream" games at extremely high quality to your screen without the need of any major hardware (imagine playing crysis on your netbook at full quality) might not even launch.
5. Youtube HD, uploading home movies will be reduced
6. Streaming tv shows from nbc.com, abc.com, hulu.com, or other major stream sites will never evolve to an HD standard and will receive lower viewer count.
I don't know how the future looks for the internet, but perhaps Google can save all of us by starting their own ISP with unlimited bandwidth usage.
Updates.
The game project is going well. Definately behind schedule but hopefully we can at least begin working on the game engine very soon. Michael (group member) wrote a Vector 3D class which is a start but then again, still definately behind schedule. I've been assigned to work on the soundtrack for the game, and as well as programming the audio in so that the music can stream during the game. I have about 3 tracks already in progress. Also, texturing is another thing I'm handling. I've picked up this software called "MaPZone" which is a "procedural texturing" software. Procedural texturing is simply having the computer draw up textures rather than having texture artists draw the textures manually. With this, you can have infinite resolution with the textures at about a fraction of the file size (about 3kb regardless of resolution). Google "96kb game" for a good example of the use of procedural textures.
Infusion – All Night Sun Light
Checking their myspace page, they seemed to have uploaded new tracks off their new upcoming album.Hovering the mouse over the cover art pops up "Infusion - All Night Sun Light". Could it be their new album? XD
Intense!
I'm currently taking CS499 which is intro to game development. I'm with a group of 3 others to come up with a game in 10 weeks (now 9). We currently plan to make a shoot 'em up type of game since that seems to be the most plausible type of game we can make given the time constraints. We do have the general story down and the general gameplay. Our big goal is to innovate this type of genre so that our project stands out from the rest of the millions of shoot 'em ups out there. Exciting!