from the she-should-be-getting-older-too dept.
A gamer and a graphic artist at the costumers site HalloweenCostumes.com teamed up to create a mashup of the animated character Lara Croft through nineteen years of the Tomb Raider video game series; they realized it also illustrated the unfolding of Moore's Law on console and PC video hardware more convincingly than the usual logarithmic-scale bar and line charts.
When the series started in the mid-90s, the small number of polygons and simple shading models used to render the character were painfully obvious. Contrast that with the nearly lifelike renderings of Lara from the 2013 and 2014 editions, which take advantage of orders of magnitude more capable hardware to employ sophisticated modeling and rendering techniques, not to mention gameplay.
More verbose histories of Tomb Raider can be found here (2008), here (2011) and here (2013).
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 22 2015, @03:46AM
What's with the affiliate tag in the main link? I thought we were better than that other place.
Come on, editors.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 22 2015, @03:54AM
What does the tag do?
(Score: 5, Touché) by martyb on Sunday February 22 2015, @12:42PM
The submitted story originally contained this link:
The submission was edited and saved into the story queue at 1909 UTC for release at 0327 UTC.
When I got home from work after a long slow drive in a snow storm, I noticed there were several stories in the story queue lacking signoff. (That means one editor had reviewed and updated the story and put it in the story queue for release, but no other editor had had a chance to review it. It is our goal to have such a review and signoff performed before the story goes live.) So, anyway, I started doing signoffs on the stories in the queue. I noticed the above link and changed it to be:
That change was saved at 0403 UTC. Thus, there was a period of just over a half hour where some people saw the story with the affiliated link in it. As I understand it, there can be a delay of a few minutes between the time changes are saved to the DB and the time the story is re-read into the main page's story cache, so there may have been a few more minutes of the original link being visible. I apologize that we failed to notice and update it before the story went live.
Looking at the stories posted so far this month, 260 have been posted to the main page, the vast majority edited by one of four of our editors (aka authors) [soylentnews.org] (janrinok, LaminatorX, n1, and myself) and also reviewed by one of the same. This is a volunteer position, so submissions and reviews often happen very early or late in our days. We do have an editor-in-training and are hoping that it will help distribute the load.
So, thanks for keeping us on our toes! Even more importantly, thanks to all of you who have sent in stories! Please keep them coming! [soylentnews.org]
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 22 2015, @04:28PM
Thank you for the update. But what does the tag DO? Is it someone trying to monetize submitting stories?
(Score: 3, Informative) by n1 on Sunday February 22 2015, @10:38PM
Monetizing the submission would be the assumption I would make on this, especially coming from an AC. I like to think we're usually very good at spotting press releases or clickbait with no substance type submissions.
We also try to sanitize the links that are included in some of the submissions, sometimes they have affiliate and other tags for the same purpose, tracking our viewing and sharing habits. These tags are usually from the sites themselves, creating unique ID's on the page generation to better 'understand' (or market to) their audience.
Hope that added some clarity on our process and the situation with this specific story.
(Score: 1) by martyb on Monday February 23 2015, @01:59PM
Couldn't have put it better. Though I do not know for certain what is happening in this particular case, my viewpoint is that *any* tracking is a pox on the internet. I see no benefit to our community from including them in our stories. Hence, I endeavor to remove all such tracking items from links I see in submitted stories. This one slipped through the cracks at first, but from the response, it appears I am not the only one here who objects to them.
Hope that helps!
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 22 2015, @04:18AM
Hey two people at h***w**nc***umes.*** took a couple of hours to put this together. It's not staggeringly informative but I didn't feel cheated out of my time.
We live in a brave new world where BuzzFeed is considered a news organization.
(Score: 2) by mth on Sunday February 22 2015, @04:30AM
I don't see any affiliate tag. Where did you find it?
(Score: 4, Informative) by janrinok on Sunday February 22 2015, @08:46AM
The story was partly produced by staff of HalloweenCostumes.com - and we try to attribute work wherever possible. We have not suggested that you support them in any way nor have we made any comment on the quality or otherwise of their commercial business. This is not a plug for them any more than a link to El Reg, CNN or Ars Technica would be considered a plug to their sites.
The link to imbd,com is to illustrate who or what Lara Croft, in this context, is - we don't all spend our days gaming and there are many who have never even heard of the character. Not all geeks and nerds spend their spare time pretending to be some fictional character. slaughtering other soldiers, or striving to defeat demons and dragons. I have no problem with those that do, but it is not all or even the majority by any stretch of the imagination.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 22 2015, @10:43AM
Now the link is all gone? I had to google it to find the mentioned page at all.
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Sunday February 22 2015, @12:29PM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 22 2015, @08:17PM
Maybe the AC is referring to the fact that it's a Wikipedia not IMDB link. Not that it makes much difference.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 22 2015, @03:55AM
Lara Croft: Tomb Raider [imdb.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 22 2015, @03:59AM
Don't mention gameplay. Just don't. We all know every elite gamer is a graphics bigot.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 22 2015, @04:34AM
All power to them. More money thrown at NVIDIA and AMD GPUs has resulted in beefier GPUs making their way into supercomputers (along with Intel Xeon Phi) and promoting more parallel computing. Now NVIDIA is looking to put GPUs into self-driving cars [theregister.co.uk]. The "elite gamer" buys the expensive 4K screen one year, that screen is $600 the next, soon to be $200. Your phone will have the power of a Titan eventually.
As for gameplay, there are plenty of games with both great visuals and gameplay, plenty of pixel art titles to choose from if you're into that, and plenty of Kickstarter-funded Indie titles challenging the dominance of EA/Activision/whatever.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 22 2015, @04:05AM
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Transistor_Count_and_Moore%27s_Law_-_2011.svg [wikipedia.org]
http://www.wired.com/2014/06/supercomputer_race/ [wired.com]
http://www.anandtech.com/show/7764/the-nvidia-geforce-gtx-750-ti-and-gtx-750-review-maxwell [anandtech.com]
and moore:
http://www.zurich.ibm.com/news/10/moore.html [ibm.com]
http://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/devices/the-status-of-moores-law-its-complicated [ieee.org]
http://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/devices/introducing-the-vacuum-transistor-a-device-made-of-nothing/ [ieee.org]
http://www.kurzweilai.net/ibm-invests-3-billion-to-extend-moores-law-with-post-silicon-era-chips-and-new-architectures [kurzweilai.net]
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1323507 [eetimes.com]
http://www.hpcwire.com/off-the-wire/tgac-and-optalysys-collaborate-to-reduce-hpc-energy-consumption/ [hpcwire.com]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Tick-Tock [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylake_(microarchitecture) [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 22 2015, @04:08AM
Gaymers can't read, you literate clod!
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 22 2015, @04:06AM
It's not lifelike enough until you can fuck it.
I'll be in the holosuite.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Kell on Sunday February 22 2015, @05:54AM
"Sufficiently advanced graphics is indistinguishable from porn. Graphics distinguishable from porn is insufficiently advanced."
Scientists ask questions. Engineers solve problems.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 22 2015, @06:12AM
I can smell Laura's musky scent through her daisy dukes.
(Score: -1, Troll) by warcques on Sunday February 22 2015, @06:36AM
Wait, wait... moor's law is the one about, like, Shit Happens 'n' shit right? Wahy does that have to do with.. wait who care ?
(Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Sunday February 22 2015, @12:59PM
Moore's Law Illustrated Through 19 Years of Lara Croft
All this does is demonstrate that computer graphics get qualitatively better as technology progresses over time. Moore's law is a quantitative thing and only tangentially related.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 3, Insightful) by VLM on Sunday February 22 2015, @01:22PM
I never looked at her face before I saw the linked story. Interesting. Nice looking face, now that I've finally looked at it.
The sidebar of the story has an ad thats more on topic for what about 95% of the male audience was already thinking about when they read the headline, "Popular - DIY 3 breasted woman halloween costume". I'd rather see a study of the evolution of what we were actually looking at. Not just the appearance but a finite element analysis of vibrational modes of the structure, etc.
not to mention gameplay.
Isn't that the stereotype of FPS that nothing has changed in gameplay since Quake in the 90s or if you stick to 2.5D then not much has changed since the original wolf3d? Has anything changed in the gameplay other than trivial map and puzzle changes?
(Score: 2) by ticho on Sunday February 22 2015, @01:28PM
Well, there's the auto-regenerating player health, to make it even easier for anyone and their dog to "achieve" something in the game. :)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 23 2015, @01:21AM
Isn't that the stereotype of FPS that nothing has changed in gameplay since Quake in the 90s or if you stick to 2.5D then not much has changed since the original wolf3d?
Not really. The bland modern shooter tropes such as slow movement, two weapon limit, health regen, chest-high walls, vehicle sections and quick time events owe more to the XBOX and the ascendancy of HALO/COD. These developments sure are stale, but they are a long way from the 90's PC shooter. The gameplay of the Id/3DRealms period apparently being a lost art.