22nd March 2006, 6:46 PM
I agree. I never laid a hand on that thing, nor did I read any reviews on it. All this "hate" over it seems like petty bickering over something untested. I'm fairly certain none of the people whining about it had either the human biology or engineering training to actually conclude that it was a bad design. That said, it's irrelevent at this point.
And oh yes, as far as compressing the data goes, you have a good point.
But, on the topic of aspect resolutions, "having a choice" is fine, but you point out the main problem. If a lot of developers have to design their software to take advantage of every aspect ratio under the sun, they won't. We'll have games split between aspect resolutions, and that is already happening.
Standardization is a good thing ABF. While the aspect resolution for TVs is changing, it should be changing TO something that is an accepted standard everyone can agree on. However, that said, we are on our way to an accepted standard. I'm merely suggesting the golden rectangle as a nice solution that won't really need tweaking (it is aesthetically pleasing in shape and seems "complete"). Look at the keyboard. You don't see a billion different keyboard layouts. You see maybe a few variations on a nice standard. Now, I'd say it may be getting time to start designing a new standard layout, something more optimized to speed up key pressing perhaps, but I am not about to suggest 5 billion different layouts. The downside is that every single time someone buys a new keyboard or changes the company they work for, they need to be retrained to type quickly again and are unlikely to ever type as fast as they might if there was a single standard.
I'm sure in some niche situation a different aspect ratio might actually work better, but I really don't think the market should be flooded with so many options that it ends up hurting us. I really don't see how that would help anything.
And oh yes, as far as compressing the data goes, you have a good point.
But, on the topic of aspect resolutions, "having a choice" is fine, but you point out the main problem. If a lot of developers have to design their software to take advantage of every aspect ratio under the sun, they won't. We'll have games split between aspect resolutions, and that is already happening.
Standardization is a good thing ABF. While the aspect resolution for TVs is changing, it should be changing TO something that is an accepted standard everyone can agree on. However, that said, we are on our way to an accepted standard. I'm merely suggesting the golden rectangle as a nice solution that won't really need tweaking (it is aesthetically pleasing in shape and seems "complete"). Look at the keyboard. You don't see a billion different keyboard layouts. You see maybe a few variations on a nice standard. Now, I'd say it may be getting time to start designing a new standard layout, something more optimized to speed up key pressing perhaps, but I am not about to suggest 5 billion different layouts. The downside is that every single time someone buys a new keyboard or changes the company they work for, they need to be retrained to type quickly again and are unlikely to ever type as fast as they might if there was a single standard.
I'm sure in some niche situation a different aspect ratio might actually work better, but I really don't think the market should be flooded with so many options that it ends up hurting us. I really don't see how that would help anything.
"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." ~ Charles Babbage (1791-1871)