Slashdot Mirror

Because for somebody in IT to NOT know what Slashdot is, but know and use Reddit, suggests that they're twenty-something year olds fresh out of college with maybe a few years of experience under their belts.

Slashdot is relic of the dot com bust in 2001 and ranks #5,555 on Alexa. Reddit was founded in 2005 and ranks #9 on Alexa. Seems like Reddit is more popular than Slashdot these days.

The only reason I knew about Slashdot was that I worked at a video game company where many of testers read Blue's News, Slashdot and The New York Times.

5 years? It was 12 years ago when I dropped them. I couldn't stand their DirectX 8 regressions on Geforce2-4's (and not the crappy FX lineup suspiciously). And they NEVER fixed their palette slow bug or the text mode BSOD.

Can't really blame you on that, I've still got a Geforce 3 around here somewhere and really ATI could have had something against them for that period if they'd simply gotten their shit together with their drivers.

Funny though how all the negative nvidia comments are voted down though, almost like someone is really butthurt. Oh here's the thread on them wanting to have rigs and videocards shipped to them as well. Including the whining from the fanboys that it's all the customers fault. Including a snippet on it.

Blue's News back in the day. I haven't read it in years. Still around.

https://www.bluesnews.com/

And a lot of "your driver stopped responding so we turned it off, then back on again."

That's the infamous nvidia TDR problem, and has been plaguing their drivers and cards since the very early R.208.xx series drivers. Said TDR problem has been so bad that ~4 years ago they were paying to ship PC's to California for testing to determine the cause of it. It's been on-going since 2008 and they haven't fixed it, or have been working on 'trying to fix it' since then.

The last time nvidia fixed it in mid 2011, it was due to the cards throttling the core voltage down to control the amount of heat being generated. This caused problems in a lot of cards, especially cards which had flaky GPU's that didn't handle voltages well. Well it was fixed for all of about one driver release then it was right back to where it was again.

I used to be one/1 of the top /. submitters until it changed. I rarely submit to /. these days, but do on other web sites like Reddit, Blue's News, etc. :)

No I'm not misunderstanding. You're simply not paying attention to what's going on. There's a difference between an emulation layer, and native support. Currently we have multiple flavors of OS's with native support in either flavor, in a few years we're going to have a single flavor of OS support with an extreme drop off in support for x32. We're already seeing this in gaming with x32 binaries being thrown into the trashbin, and the entire codebase thrown and ditched. The most recent example in gaming of zero x32 support is Watch Dogs for the PC.

Your post seemed to imply that 32-bit apps would fail to run in Windows 9, which is simply not the case. Also, I fail to see the problem with the world moving to 64-bit native OSes with a 32-bit compatibility mode. And what do you mean "an extreme dropoff" of support? 32-bit applications run flawlessly under 64-bit Windows. It's not some soft of half-assed software emulation. 64-bit processors still support the original x86 instruction sets all the way back to the original 8086 and executes those natively. The emulation layer (Windows on Windows) is for the Windows API, not for the binary's instruction set, so it's fairly minimal in terms of overhead.

Also, you seem to be under the impression that you need to completely rewrite your game engine for 64-bits, which isn't true. My current game engine is both 64-bit and 32-bit compatible with zero differences in the codebase itself. Simply throw a switch in the configuration and it's done. There's some types of code you do have to actually port, such as inline assembly, which is not allowed in 64-bit, or any tricks using pointers that rely on a 32-bit size, but for most C/C++ code, there's no difference at all if written correctly. If a game company decides to abandon 32-bit platforms, it's because they've determined that the market can now move ahead with 64-bit platform. This allows them to push beyond the 2GB memory limit of 32-bit applications, which is becoming a serious bottleneck for modern PC games (we had to work pretty hard on my last commercial title to fit in this limit).

Anyhow, I'm not quite sure of your overall point. Do you feel that MS should continue releasing 32-bit operating systems even though there are no 32-bit-only processors being manufactured for desktop or laptop computers, and haven't been for years?

No I'm not misunderstanding. You're simply not paying attention to what's going on. There's a difference between an emulation layer, and native support. Currently we have multiple flavors of OS's with native support in either flavor, in a few years we're going to have a single flavor of OS support with an extreme drop off in support for x32. We're already seeing this in gaming with x32 binaries being thrown into the trashbin, and the entire codebase thrown and ditched. The most recent example in gaming of zero x32 support is Watch Dogs for the PC.

Let me copy over most of my post(updated with more gameplay) from blues, and yeah if you don't know what bluesnews is, it's one of the first gaming review sites that existed. And we do have a stick up our asses over the quality and content of games.

So yeah guys, my first 3hrs of gameplay? Enjoying it quite a bit. It's more or less true to the game, and there's no shortage of lewts to grab but some of it's tricky. Only playing it on medium atm, do a true playthrough when I'm done the first run. Turning off contextual "help" and prompts makes it more challenging as well. Gameplay is fine, you don't have to use the new focus system if you don't want to. You can make the game even more challenging if you want.

To anyone who doesn't like the game? That's okay, I'm enjoying it. I'll get my $34 out of it without a doubt.

Oh and if you're looking for a x/10 rating? 3hrs in, I'd give it a solid 7.8-8.3/10 give or take. I don't mind the voice acting at all, and find the interaction so far decent.

First major map, the one that people were posting images about earlier? Not really holding true. I've so far found 4 alternate paths compared to the one taken in the video.

Oh and "non-exclusive fullscreen" listed as "exclusive fullscreen" works beautifully in win8.1x64 for alt-tabbing with zero issues, lag, slowdown/crashes or other issues. I'd be interested to hear if the same holds true in win7.

And if anyone wants to see the main map area in chapter 1 here it is.
http://imgur.com/1oN7zx5

And from NKD

I've been playing it a bit tonight and your experience mirrors my own. I just don't see what all the bitching was about. I truly don't. These horrible glaring flaws people talked about in the reviews are orders of magnitude less dire than they led us to believe. They are barely worthy of mention. Maybe if I put more hours in I'll understand, but so far so good. It doesn't even really feel like a franchise reboot, IMHO. It's just another Thief game. You'd have to set it on easiest difficulty and run around being a psycho to not get the Thief experience, and that'd be your own fault.

Looking at some of the reviews again, I feel like most of the reviewers didn't understand the point of a Thief game and they were expecting something more flashy like a Deus Ex.

On the other end of the spectrum you have the die-hard Thief "fans" who have been swearing up and down that the game was going to suck for YEARS. These guys are so invested in their own opinion that they are psychologically incapable of enjoying the game.

If I put a few more hours into the game and everything goes to hell, I'll have to change my view on the game, but like I said, so far so good.

Odd. /. at a url to bluesnews. Let's try that again.

Well at least Blizzard admits they fucked up D3 with the Auction House:
http://www.bluesnews.com/s/140325/jay-wilson-auctions-houses-really-hurt-diablo-iii

After a month when you're bored of D3 I recommend you check out (free!) Path of Exile. It is the true spiritual successor to Diablo 2. Also, if you haven't played Torchlight 2 give that one a go too.

At least that way you can decide which one is right for you because you'll have first hand experience. Would love to hear your feedback on why you prefer one over the other!

--
Only cowards use censorship.

Last night at around 5am EST, I was finally able to log in. Which is okay, because I wasn't doing anything anyway. I tried about 5mins ago and was able to log in without a problem. You'd think they'd have figured out what to do with all their practice with WoW/expansions and SC2. But maybe they just didn't expect it.

It's possible, then again they are offering a replacement copy to anyone who bought from GAME Australia who has a copy of their original receipt. I'd link to the source, but I hate kotaku, and like Stephen much better, and he could use the ad traffic.

Yeah, I bet you miss those LAN parties (I know I do)...

I do and I don't. I still get to one or two major ones every year, mostly because I still compete in SC and SC2 league games. Bluesnews lists some of them, and there's other lists around too. I'm just too lazy to tack on the ones I know in Canada and specifically Ontario.

http://www.bluesnews.com/

Well to be fair the PLATO system didn't modify their logo, they just added a "heart" to the top of the screen. Google actually makes custom logos.
A better example of prior art would be Blue's News
http://www.bluesnews.com/cgi-bin/logos.pl
As you we can see the first christmas logo was for 2000, a few months before google submitted their application.

That inconsistency is part of the trouble with the awesome bar. I don't go to Accuweather too often, but I've been there in the last couple of weeks. If I type in 'ac' or 'www.ac', my options are, in order:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=662909&page=2
http://www.bluesnews.com/cgi-bin/board.pl?action=userinfo&user=
http://www.neatorama.com/2010/10/07/new-software-adjusts-actors-body-shapes-automatically/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Neatorama+(Neatorama)
https://chaseonline.chase.com/MyAccounts.aspx
http://www.accuweather.com/
http://www.lenovo.com/us/en/#ss

I find this asinine, but some people like it. That's fine. Give me the option to have something sane and consistent. As someone else mentioned elsewhere, if they would just put the items with exact matches at the beginning of the domain first on the list (or give the option for it), it would help a lot. Then they'd just have to work on how slow it is.

You may be interested in this news. Tribes Universe is in development now. Hope it compares, the original was a blast. http://www.bluesnews.com/s/115380/tribes-acquired-tribes-universe-announced

I'm pretty certain I got your point, actually. :) It's just that games don't need photo realism, so why use a very very math intensive method to render something perfectly when you can use a method that's just very math intensive to render something not perfectly but acceptable to the eyes of a game player nonetheless?

It'll always be that way: the time needed to ray trace a certain scene will always be more than what's needed to render the same scene using umpteen triangles, the textures of which can be enhanced by techniques like bump mapping and what-have-you. The amount of details in a ray traced scene would always be less than the amount of details in a scene that's rendered using 'tricks', because of performance trade-offs.

Yes, current games do stuff that's very math intensive. They might also have multiple methods for rendering the same thing: one for when it's up close and needs to be displayed very detailed, and several more optimized ones for other scenarios. John Carmacks career is pretty much built upon finding clever optimizations like that, enabling Id Software to come up with novel rendering engines (Mike Abrash talks about this in his articles 'Ramblings in Realtime', which make for a pretty interesting read, if you're somewhat into games programming). For ray tracing you'd still have to trace all rays, it's kind of hard to optimize that.

Plus, hardware would only be developed for something that has the potential of becoming widely adopted. The advent of semi-3D games like Wolfenstein, Doom and Duke Nukem 3D made a switch to real 3D very likely, so the gamble of developing 3D rendering hardware proved to be a very profitable one, and nowadays a PC without such hardware is virtually unthinkable. I don't see that happening with ray tracing. I mean, ray tracing a not-so-detailed scene requires a cloud of computers, while for rendering a highly detailed scene in Crysis nothing more than a good gaming PC is required.

Also, security people for Air Force: http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/63783 from http://www.bluesnews.com/s/112262/safety-dance ...

Considering they're trying to region divide the game, and since I live in North America I won't be able to play with my friends in S.Korea and Japan. But rather I'd need a second copy of SC2 to play, and vice-versa. Seriously Blizz, fuck you and your "idea" that tries to make this good. You can read about it here: http://www.bluesnews.com/s/110669/starcraft-ii-regions-divided

Them saying that community/latency/etc are the reasons. Seriously the last time I played a game of SC against my korean buddies, I had a ping of 180ms. Makes me want to beat my head against the wall, but it's pushing a pile of us not to buy the game as it is. There are trans-pacific communities already, GG blizz, just kill them.

Actually, the PC version sold very well. See http://www.bluesnews.com/cgi-bin/board.pl?action=viewthread&threadid=104549

Lots of people are clueless, yes

Actually, the PC version sold very well. See http://www.bluesnews.com/cgi-bin/board.pl?action=viewthread&threadid=104549

On the other hand, while it started out controversial, DLC in general is very accepted these days, and it seems arbitrary to react differently to it simply because it's released on launch day. Should they have simply let the DLC lie on a HDD somewhere for a few weeks?

It may be accepted by some, but PC gamers, especially those that have been around long enough to have played Bioware's earlier RPGs, are definitely not accustomed to paying extra for small bits of content like this. Recall the scrap over the Oblivion DLC a while back. I can only hope that the DLC we get from Bioware is far better than what Bethesda tried to foist on gamers.

I always thought Id's games were perfect examples of engine showcases. I remember being very fascinated with Quake; read all about it, BSP modeling etc. (I even tried to create my own 3d-engine, which failed miserable, by the way).

Anyone else remember Ramblings in Real-time by Mike Abrash? Worth a read if you're interested in the mechanics of the Quake 3D-engine.

But Quake still wasn't very much more than showcasing... Id often seemed to rely on parties such as Raven Software for convincing storylines, exciting level designs, etc. I'd like to see them produce a game like Oblivion... A cutting edge 3d engine to power a convincing RPG world, what more would you want!

"Cameron himself believes 3D viewing 'is so close to a real experience that it actually triggers memory creation in a way that 2D viewing doesn't' and that stereoscopic (3D) viewing uses more neurons, which would further heighten its impact"

Anyone who has regularly played the current crop of First Person Shooter games experience the cinema as a bit of a lot down. It's not the act of viewing in 3D but interacting with the characters and moving about the landscape, so we are already familiar with the Cameron effect. Now if only they could get the AIs to behave as if they had some real intelligence. It does also get a bit boring blowing away aliens in the underground tunnels of the Black Mesa Research Facility.

And it's not just GPUs. Back in Quake 1 and 2, they maintained a surface cache where they mixed the base texture with a lightmap (in software). Keeping the texture resolution as low as possible meant less space in the surface cache and less time mixing textures. You can read a bit about that here.

I hope that's all clear.

What on earth are you talking about? 3DFx died because it was horribly mismanaged and ran out of money. There were lawsuits, but 3dfx sued NV first in 1998 and then in 2000 NV counter-sued (source). True NV's countersuit was right before 3dfx died, but a simple lawsuit that's gone nowhere in the courts yet doesn't cause a company to go bankrupt overnight.

Personally I'll believe one of my (ex-3dfx Austin) friend's explanation for their downfall: the fully stocked Tequila bar that was free to all employees. Or there's a whole list of problems leading to their decline on wikipedia.

"EVE Online Scandal [February 07, 2007, 3:04 pm ET]
This EVE Online Forum Thread, currently at 621 posts and rising, details a brewing brouhaha in CCP's outer-space MMORPG that centers around alleged improprieties by CCP staff. The original post by EVE Online community manager kieron mentions that the identities of CCP employees participating in the game have become public, and that the compromised accounts have been deleted, and goes on to refer to the possibility that information about a coming story arc had been leaked by employee/players. They describe a tightening of the audit measures whereby accounts of employees are monitored for malfeasance to protect against employee misconduct. The fuel for the thread's rapid growth are allegations that the scandal runs deeper than what is being addressed, and that employees of CCP have been able to steer valuable in-game items to the groups in which they participate, with many expressing the opinion that allowing employees to play the game represents a conflict of interest. Here's a bit from the originating post:

        Last summer, CCP implemented stricter monitoring procedures and audits on all CCP employeesâ(TM) EVE accounts. We are confident that our rigid procedures and protocol will prevent any misconduct or, at least, allow us to quickly discover it, should such an unfortunate scenario arise.

        As the community knows well, we at CCP enjoy not only playing EVE Online, but improving EVE and interacting with our playerbase. We feel EVE benefits from the developers playing EVE as any other members of the community do, and to impose artificial limitations -- such as no access to Tranquility or special flagging on a developerâ(TM)s player character -- would greatly hinder the development of EVE.

        CCP is very passionate about EVE Online and is committed to its continued growth. We hope that this statement will put this issue behind us once and for all and allow us to continue moving forward with the support of our community.

This reply from a user (Borgholio) sums up some of the outcry that follows:

        The concern being talked about by the vast majority of players is not the identity of certain Dev or GM players, nor is it an in-game event that occured many months ago. The concern is that Band of Brothers (and possibly other large alliances) have received ill-gotten assistance from the Developers or GMs in the form of blueprints, ships, etc. That was the biggest concern, and you made absolutely no mention of it at all. Nobody really cares about the identity of CCP players in player alliances. Nobody really cares about an event that took place months ago. People care about rampant cheating by those whose job it is to STOP cheating. By conveniently ignoring this issue, you are only reinforcing the belief that CCP has something to hide.

        Were you to come out and say "Yes, some of our Devs and GMs were cheating. We cannot release their names for privacy reasons, but we can tell you that they've been fired, and all ill-gotten assets have been removed from the game.", then the community would be happy. It would suck that CCP employees have (yet again) been caught cheating, but at least we would know that you're doing something about it. Or you could have said "In regards to the cheating issue, we can't find any evidence of this whatsoever.". That wouldn't make people as happy, but at least you would acknowledge it. Instead, you whitewash it. You really screwed up, CCP. We want clear, straightforward answers, and we want them now...."

http://www.bluesnews.com/cgi-bin/board.pl?action=viewthread&threadid=75215

Steven from bluesnews been to a demo, this is his recap: http://bluesnews.com/cgi-bin/board.pl?action=viewthread&threadid=90547

Previous to microsoft acquiring Bungie.

http://www.bluesnews.com/cgi-bin/board.pl?action=postmessage&boardid=1&id=0&threadid=3840

Halo Announced [July 21, 1999, 10:59 am ET] - Viewing Comments
loonyboi just called in from MacWorld (where he's "on assignment"), with word that Bungie has finally announced their super-secret upcoming project, Halo at Steve Jobs' keynote address. The official Halo website has the first tidbits on the game, which is being developed for simultaneous release for both Windows and the Mac. loony got to see Halo earlier this year, and has been bursting at the seems to talk about it since then (but was under threat of death), because the demonstration (on a Mac) blew him away. The Press Release describes the game in detail, and I'll clip a piece below, as well as snagging the screenshot from the site, because it indeed, looks that cool. Here goes:

With no levels or breaks in gameplay, Halo gives players complete freedom of movement over open terrain. Vast outdoor vistas, complete with flora, fauna, weather and celestial events, are complemented with indoor environments of comparable detail and complexity. A universal physics model and persistent objects make events in this world utterly convincing. In this open environment, gameplay is not linear but unfolds in response to the player's actions.

After

http://www.bluesnews.com/cgi-bin/articles.pl?show=39

Previous to microsoft acquiring Bungie.

http://www.bluesnews.com/cgi-bin/board.pl?action=postmessage&boardid=1&id=0&threadid=3840

Halo Announced [July 21, 1999, 10:59 am ET] - Viewing Comments
loonyboi just called in from MacWorld (where he's "on assignment"), with word that Bungie has finally announced their super-secret upcoming project, Halo at Steve Jobs' keynote address. The official Halo website has the first tidbits on the game, which is being developed for simultaneous release for both Windows and the Mac. loony got to see Halo earlier this year, and has been bursting at the seems to talk about it since then (but was under threat of death), because the demonstration (on a Mac) blew him away. The Press Release describes the game in detail, and I'll clip a piece below, as well as snagging the screenshot from the site, because it indeed, looks that cool. Here goes:

With no levels or breaks in gameplay, Halo gives players complete freedom of movement over open terrain. Vast outdoor vistas, complete with flora, fauna, weather and celestial events, are complemented with indoor environments of comparable detail and complexity. A universal physics model and persistent objects make events in this world utterly convincing. In this open environment, gameplay is not linear but unfolds in response to the player's actions.

After

http://www.bluesnews.com/cgi-bin/articles.pl?show=39

As for the subscribed content, I've heard in several interviews that the differences between the subscribed and non-paying clients would be fairly small at launch but would increase over time. This eases players into the concept and will probably gain more interest over time. It was stated that they are not introducing a game breaking tier system where players can become vastly superior because they have subscribed for content. This is humored in the featured Penny Arcade comic http://www.hellgateguru.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/05/20070511.jpg

Some of the early content afforded for subscribing initially is more stash space (similar to D2 stash system).You are afforded 12 character slots for online play where the basic accounts have only three, allowing for two variants of each class if you wished. Game modes and other non-gear related features such as classic "hard-core" mode have been cited as well.
In the future there would be four month cycles of large content releases similar to current Blizzard World of Warcraft models but also smaller monthly content updates. Adding new areas, special group content, as well as new item content/improvements.

An interesting choice available for a short time is the lifetime subscription being made available http://www.bluesnews.com/cgi-bin/board.pl?action=viewthread&threadid=80910. For $150 USD you can sign up for a subscription plan that lasts the duration of the service. This amounts to nearly 16 months if you were to play monthly so if you had the game for at least a year and a bit it would become worth the initial purchase. If the lifetime of the game holds up to Diablo 2 this could be a very good deal.

Ah, interesting.. An article on Blues News refers to this interview over at Joystiq where this is stated :

Given the internets and what they are -- with their tubes and all -- I want to sort of talk about the concerns people have. We take the concerns people have very seriously. There's been some concern like, "What happens if it's three years from now, or ten years from now, when I want to play this game. And, you know, Irrational Games has been hit by a meteor?" We will unset the online activation at some point in the future -- we're not talking about when. If people have concern about that they shouldn't be worried about that. This activation is for the early period of the game when it's really hot and there are people really trying to find ways to play the game without buying it. Of course, there are a lot of people who are legitimately trying to play it. We're not trying to be Draconian, we're trying to find a balance.

Well, perhaps I will buy the game.. After I see this activation thing being disabled...

The winelibs are licensed under the LGPL. Anyone who's got a copy of Parallels is free to distribute the winelibs.

I am positive that you are required to give the source to anyone that asks for
it that got a binary from someone else.[emph mine]

Can someone explain what the actual scandal was?

Jesus H. Christ with a crutch in a sidecar on a pogo stick. The very first hit on a google search for "eve online scandal" (no quotes) tells you all about it.

Can you please explain why you're here? This is news for nerds, and a nerd would know how to use google.

Try this.

Those were the days - further I can recall back to is the Voodoo 2, anyone have any further fond memories of the mid 1990s GPU situation?

Oh yes indeedy. I had a Packard Hell Pentium 100MHz and after discovering QuakeWorld, bugged my mom ruthlessly to get me a Canopus Pure3D video accelerator. That card was the only thing I got for Christmas that year. (This is all going from memory, so nobody shoot me if I've gotten some facts wrong. Better yet, just correct me.)

Not long after Quake was released, id (or some trusted source close to the employees at id) produced a variant called GLQuake that utilized OpenGL acceleration on hardware that supported it. I do believe at that time such video hardware ran upwards of $2000 and was accompanied only by high end SGI workstations and the like. But Quake still looked damn cool on them things.

Then the 3Dfx Voodoo chip came out and all hell broke loose. Suddenly, extremely powerful and affordable 3D acceleration was available to the unwashed masses. The Voodoo chip and GLQuake single-handedly started the 3D-accelerated FPS revolution. The interesting thing about the Voodoo chip is that it did not do any 2D graphics modes. For those who weren't around 3D gaming at this point or may have forgotten, there was actually a pass-through cable that connected between your old 2D VGA output and into the accelerator card. When not playing a 3D game, the card simply piped the 2D graphics through the accelerator, bypassing the Voodoo chip. When you launched Quake or any other 3D game, the Voodoo chip cut off the 2D signal to send its own to the monitor. Crazy, but it worked and it's probably one of the main reasons that the cards were so cheap. Oh, and the Voodoo had exactly one output resolution and color depth: 640x480x16k.

Now back to the Canopus Pure3D. The Pure3D, in its day, was the cadillac of Voodoo cards. If I recall, every single Voodoo card on the market had 2MB of framebuffer and 2MB of texture memory. The Pure3D had 4MB of texture memory, but the only game that could take advantage of it was Quake. (Every other game developer hard-coded their games to use only 2MB of texture memory due to the sheer volume of 2MB Voodoo cards on the market. id has always let you tweak everything.) The Pure3D also had a video-out jack, something unheard of on such a cheap card. But obviously it only worked in "3D mode," so it wasn't really all that useful. Few people would buy a 3D card capable of displaying high-resolution graphics only to display them on a crappy low-resolution TV.

Ah, the wonderful days of yore where I'd spend entire weekends playing QuakeWorld with the Team Fortress mod over 33.6 dialup. When I wasn't gaming, I was browsing Blue's News or Planet Quake. The Pentium 100 and Pure3D combo couldn't quite handle Quake II all that well, but I was still quite happy enough with good old Quake for at least a couple years.

This is too much fun:

From a discussion of free Shadowbane on BluesNews:

Some dude: "My question still stands, have you guys eradicated the sb.exe crash bug?"
Wolfpack community manager: "No, we have not... [but] we have drastically reduced the number of client crashes. I play Shadowbane nightly and haven't had one for well over a week."

A whole week? AMAZING! Imagining their code... I giggle.

I like the comment that was made on Blue's News about the Vista line when the story first broke.

Vista DOS
Vista WFW
Vista 95
Vista 98
Vista ME
Vista XP
Vista la Vista

ScuttleMonkey messed up my submission! I submitted as:

This three page ABC News story asks millions of people worldwide spend enormous amounts of time online, but are they addicted? Video games and the Internet have been subject to suspicion since the computer became a household fixture. One complaint: People get sucked into spending enormous amounts of time on the computer, to the detriment of other parts of their life.

But are they addicted? The answer depends on what you mean by "addicted." Most experts say computers are not addictive in the same sense that drugs are, but they could be on the same level as gambling...

Seen on Blue's News.

I played and posted my two cents on Blue's News on 12/14/2005:

"I played it last night for an hour. It looks pretty especially the indoor places, but for some reason the engine wasn't smooth like WoW. I thought it was lags, but it was still not smooth even at 6 AM PST. Taverns (those are cool -- better than WoW's inns) are so laggy for me. Solo instances(?) are smoother, but not that smooth. Outdoor areas lag too for me. The game was choppy for me with everything ON and without antialias on my XFX NVIDIA GeForce 6800 (128 MB), Athlon 64 3200+, and 1.5 GB of RAM. I had turn things down like use billinear, distance view lowered, etc.

I did not like its GUI. I think it was just too big especially when my maximum screen resolution is 1152x864. I prefer WoW's.

I loved the character setup. I made a hot chick with red long hair [grin]. Its setup reminds me of City of Heroes and City of Villain's. I also like the video clips (I wonder how much disk space these took up) showing each player class. I played as a barbarian since I like meelee fightings. I only got off the second boat after training. I will play more later hopefully. A lot of commands are similiar if you know WoW like: /laugh, /dance, /p for party talk, etc.

To compare, I still like WoW more so far."

I wonder how much has changed since then.

I totally agree. Slashdot seems to have degraded in quality substantially since I started reading it. How about we all recommend our other favourite websites so as to atleast offer something new on here!..

The above poster recommend Digg ?? got a link ?

I find that any story of interest appears on BluesNews.com way earlier than slashdot these days even though it is primarily aimed at games and gaming!

I remember back in the early days of Planet Quake, when Bastard (Basty) was running the site. This was of course before Gamespy transformed from being a little ping tool, into a giant marketing juggernaught. Quake lovers like myself would collect in #planetquake and chat about the latest mod, hang out on servers and submit news to contribute to the (then) growing online Quake community.

I did a lot of mods myself. Some I would have liked to have finished, but the ones I did finish all collect dust now. (and some of them collected dust THEN)

At the same time Bluesnews was also a great place to find out awesome insights to the whole Quake scene.

Look at these two sites now, and all you can see is marketing.

They both, arguably, sold out. I don't know why... maybe they like affording new computers from Alienware, or maybe they just like the concept of selling their souls. Another person who sold out bigtime was Dakota, the CTF guy that some of you might remember as the founder of Captured.com (which is now closed). He joined Gamespy and is running a large part of that company now. He used to post amazing CTF news, mods, tourney info and stuff.

Vid journalists all get bought up by the industry.

But the games changed, too. It used to be a lot of fun to play Quake or Thunderwalker on servers, but then other games came along and stole the show, thus putting an end to the tight-knit community. Each new game fractured the core community until, for quite a while, there was no cohesion.

All good things come to an end, and I think that is how we really know they were good.

Yes and no. The trick is that no, retailers don't make money on the games themselves. They make money selling the SPACE on the shelves. No money, no space. It's part of how Doom made it big - rather than buy space at stores like Best Buy, they bought space on the counter at Circle K, 7-11, etc. This is, btw, how grocery stores make their money.

Anyhow... of the 50$ of the game, the store usually gets 10. The Developer gets 5. Who gets the rest? Congrats, you get a biscuit. Yup, it's the publisher/distributor. Yes, they assume risk on a game. However, the publisher tends to be a LOT better off, on the whole. Sure, Eidos is having problems, but EA certainly isn't. And considering how often a game company releases a game then is closed (okay, I gave up hunting down links - you get the idea), I feel little sympathy.

I played it last night for an hour. It looks pretty especially the indoor places, but for some reason the engine wasn't smooth like WoW. I thought it was lags, but it was still not smooth even at 6 AM PST. Taverns (those are cool -- better than WoW's inns) are so laggy for me. Solo instances(?) are smoother, but not that smooth. Outdoor areas lag too for me. I had turn things down like use billinear, distance view lowered, etc.

I did not like its GUI. I think it was just too big especially when my maximum screen resolution is 1152x864. I prefer WoW's.

I loved the character setup. I made a hot chick with red long hair [grin]. Its setup reminds me of City of Heroes and City of Villain's. I also like the video clips (I wonder how much disk space these took up) showing each player class. I played as a barbarian since I like meelee fightings. I only got off the second boat after training. I will play more later hopefully. A lot of commands are similiar if you know WoW like: /laugh, /dance, /p for party talk, etc.

Note that it it is only until THIS Saturday! Yep, it's a short test! Then, it's over. Downloading takes a while (1.6 GB for the standard client). You can apply for an account before installing. Note you need to be subscriber on those download sites to get the high quality package. The game was choppy for me with everything ON and without antialias on my XFX NVIDIA GeForce 6800 (128 MB), Athlon 64 3200+, and 1.5 GB of RAM.

Other notes/FYI:

FYI from FAQ:
# Monday at 9:00am PST registration servers go live
# Tuesday at 11:59am PST game servers go live. If you received a key and created your stress test event account you can begin playing the game
# Friday night player event starting at 3:00pm PST and ending at 7:00pm PST. Everyone in the stress test will have the opportunity to win a closed beta account
# Saturday at 11:59pm PST game servers close

To compare, I still like WoW more so far. Check out other posters' comments on Blue's News.

The Daily Texan (with gross photographs) reports on Thursday outside the Frank Erwin Center, a horde of zombies attacked the "American Idol" auditions. No one was hurt.

The zombies, 15 fake-bloodied actors in all, lurched out from under the IH-35 overpass and shuffled toward the Erwin Center, where they encountered the pop-star hopefuls.

Most of the 100 or so young people gathered outside had just been rejected by the "American Idol" review board, and they were talking, singing and waiting for rides home when the zombies arrived. "Braaaaaaains!" the zombies said. Nick Muntean, a UT radio-television-film graduate student who organized and participated in the zombie horde, added, "Television rots your braaaaaaains!" The pop-star wannabes were largely unimpressed.

Seen on Blue's News. I wonder if there are video clips of this!

This past event was better. Even the zombies look cooler (grosser)! Copied and pasted from AQFL:

The Daily Texan (with gross photographs) reports on Thursday outside the Frank Erwin Center, a horde of zombies attacked the "American Idol" auditions. No one was hurt.

The zombies, 15 fake-bloodied actors in all, lurched out from under the IH-35 overpass and shuffled toward the Erwin Center, where they encountered the pop-star hopefuls.

Most of the 100 or so young people gathered outside had just been rejected by the "American Idol" review board, and they were talking, singing and waiting for rides home when the zombies arrived. "Braaaaaaains!" the zombies said. Nick Muntean, a UT radio-television-film graduate student who organized and participated in the zombie horde, added, "Television rots your braaaaaaains!" The pop-star wannabes were largely unimpressed.

Seen on Blue's News. I wonder if there are video clips of this!

See Blue's News about the pictures, ASCII arts, the dumb Internet fad, etc.

You don't even need to go that far. Just encourage game developers (Id, Epic, Blizzard, etc.) that choose to program in OpenGL, or utilize other open standards, and the games port nearly flawlessly to Linux. Just have a look at UT2004, America's Army, and Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory. Get these engines into the hands of talented people like Ryan Gordon at http://icculus.org/ http://www.bluesnews.com/plans/477/, and you can see that it looks very promising. BTW, WoW works amazingly well using Wine alone.

Read Blue's News, start submitting Links of the Day.
Read I Cringely, post a topic as soon as his latest article is up.

There are others, but I don't read them...

Seumas: So? I don't get cable and satellite TV so I wouldn't know. Even Blue's News mentioned this site yesterday. It may be old to you, but it's new to some people like me.