Slashdot Mirror

http://kotaku.com/stardock-lawsuits-dropped-ex-employee-apologizes-1377925759 The lawsuit was dropped and the employee apologized.

In fact it looks like they settled out of court after she stoled and destroyed data, in fact she ended up apologizing. http://kotaku.com/stardock-lawsuits-dropped-ex-employee-apologizes-1377925759

Real-Time Face Substitution Will Hide You In The Scariest Way Possible

http://kotaku.com/real-time-face-substitution-will-hide-you-in-the-scarie-1496953478

"Audun Mathias Ãygard's creative experiment uses real-time facial recognition to hide your face in a webcam feed with different masks."

http://auduno.github.io/clmtrackr/examples/facesubstitution.html

It's a shame it's by Stardock. Not only are they terrible at making games, their CEO Brad Wardell is an asshole: http://kotaku.com/5940401/pc-gaming-studio-said-she-ruined-their-game-but-only-after-she-sued-the-boss-for-sexual-harassment

On top of that, he made up a fake lawsuit and sued her to use his money to force her to drop the suit.

Fuck the new Star Control, it's not by Toys for Bob anyway.

Pippin Barr's "The artist is present" was released years ago - it's a game based on a real-life museum exhibit where you get to.. wait in line to look into Marina Abramovic's eyes.. in full 8-bit-esque glory.

http://kotaku.com/5841304/new-video-game-delivers-the-immersive-realism-of-waiting-5-hours-in-line-at-a-museum

check practically every gaming website out there that interviews a sony guy about the feature:

http://www.giantbomb.com/podcasts/a-chat-with-shuhei-yoshida/1600-670/

http://kotaku.com/the-ps4-might-be-a-decent-media-server-after-all-1463440125

http://kotaku.com/good-news-about-our-once-broken-ps4-1464813671

Valve originally stated they had plans to release new episodes for HL2 approximately every 6 to 8 months, with episodes 1 to 4 already planned. When this window passed without the third episode, many speculated that Valve had abandoned the episodic strategy and are working on an entirely new game.

From an interview in 2006

Including someone at Kotaku. http://kotaku.com/fyi-butts-are-off-limits-in-nintendo-games-but-penise-489492010

That's why I use my nipple instead.

http://kotaku.com/lock-your-new-iphone-with-nipples-apparently-1360743607

Instead of using a fingerprint, use a Nipple print!

Sure, they raised over $500k from 9000+ backers, but they hadn't raised that money to make a sweet swordfighting game... they raised that so they could raise their profile to get funding from more traditional sources. From Kotaku's take on it:

"Despite hitting its funding goal of $500,000 last year, development on the game is grinding to a halt, with Stephenson writing on the game's Kickstarter page that CLANG is now an "evenings and weekends" project because the money has run out, and many developers have sought contract work elsewhere.

But wait. That's not all. Turns out the money was never going to fund development of the game in the first place; the developers were simply using it as a starting point from which they could attract venture capitalist and/or publisher backing, which for whatever reason hasn't materialised."

Oh boy, this again. It's totally okay to be sexist and racist as long as it's self-aware. Excluding the fact that this wasn't actually self-aware. It was a joke specifically designed to reinforce the idea that it's okay to stare at women in public because all they are is statues to be gawked at. In the technology sector women face huge amounts of actual sexism, all the time, which I sort of assumed everyone was aware of. They are mocked and belittled, denied jobs, connections, promotions, because they lack credibility as tech experts, because they have boobs. Women in tech get reminded EVERY DAY that women don't understand computers (ha ha!) that women should stay in the kitchen (ha ha!) that ugly women are worthless as human beings (ha ha!), that women should be fine with being harassed by their male coworkers and women who aren't are all frigid bitches (ha ha!) and so much more. Don't you think this has an effect? That it keeps women out of tech? If your "joke" is designed to put down women and make them uncomfortable, it's not really a joke anymore, is it? It's harassment. If your ironic sexism is actually hurtful and upsetting, it's not ironic anymore, is it? It's just sexism. Why do you think nobody feels comfortable telling "ironic" racist jokes in mixed-race crowds? Because deep down, people know it's still kind of racist. A black person who hears a joke like that will be made uncomfortable and hurt. That's not funny. It's not lighthearted. It keeps people down, like it's designed to do.

Every joke has a target and a message. If the target were sexism, that would be fine. But it's not. The message is, "haha women are basically just for sex, so it's totally natural for men to make them uncomfortable all the time because if they didn't want that kind of treatment, why would they wear makeup, right?" And you expect women to laugh at that? You expect ANYONE to be okay with that?

for more articles that explain this better than I can, please see:
Kotaku article on nerd sexism: http://kotaku.com/5868595/nerds-and-male-privilege
Blog post on why women are unhappy in the geek community: http://sakurasaurus.wordpress.com/2012/03/19/the-girl-geek-community-is-hidden-ever-wondered-why/
Why women don't just "lighten up": http://therealkatie.net/blog/2012/mar/21/lighten-up/
Women nerds speak out against systemic sexism in the industry:http://www.polygon.com/2013/3/28/4155650/women-in-the-gaming-industry-share-their-number-one-reason-to-be-in

tl;dr The huge, painful, actual problem of sexism >>>>>>>> your desire to not have to be "PC". Deal with it!

~cue the jokes about how I'm PMSing

Sony did release a video hyping up what you can do with the sharing/streaming (no youtube here so I can only give you the kotaku link which leads to the youtube)

http://kotaku.com/its-hard-not-to-get-pumped-about-this-ps4-feature-1280580372

One other thing I noticed: it appears Vita TV will support same screen multiplayer

Statistics on how many people turn the depth slider off don't exist, but most people have it turned on. The best I could find is that 28% of people who are vocal about it don't like it. Having some experience with the game industry that probably means that over 95% play with the depth setting on. But again, statistics don't exist.
Also, you may be interested to read this account about the 3DS by a stereoblind person.

eh, the functional guys scream and yell when you call lisp or erlang functional. I mean, they have side effects! No, you have to program in lambda calculus or some other gimped language that's not actually capable of doing anything useful.

I think you mean "not actually capable of doing everything useful." Functional programming is a wonderful paradigm for handling a whole lot of serious numerical data. It is clean to the point of being almost bomb-proof. Yes, real user-space applications has interaction as its main goal, so FP's term "side-effect" seems almost insulting.

So no, you can't write a whole software package functionally, but if FP was integrated properly into multi-paradigm programming, it would simplify debugging no end. What do I mean by properly? FP should be a restricted subsystem. No side-effects: no prints, no inputs, no state changes or variable asserts. This has to be an unbreakable rule (with the possible exception of debug info). Procedures can call functions, and functions can call other functions, but functions can't call procedures. This has to be an unbreakable rule, and I don't beleive most multi-paradigm languages enforce it. Why does it have to be unbreakable? Because the whole point is to reduce debugging effort. With true FP, bug tracking is (relatively) easy: if the function gives the wrong answer, there's a bug in it; if it gives the right answer, there's no bug. But as soon as you allow state changes and other side effects, it's a procedure, not a function, and a side-effect bug might only show itself further down the line (eg you accidentally leave an A in the print buffer and the next message gets an erroneous A at the start) and you're left on a looooong hunt.

Have you read the Kotaku article on the "beauty" of the Doom 3 source code? One of the things the author liked so much about it was the way that iD established conventions for procedure parameters that made it clear which variables were inputs and which were outputs, and used const to prevent inadvertant changes. Good practice, given the limitations of the language, but limitations they are, and in the end it all looks like "jumping through hoops" to me. FP doesn't let you use arguments as outputs: arguments are inputs, anf your outputs are the returned result. Doom 3 is a prime example of where functional-programming-within-procedural-programming would be supremely useful: a 3D engine is pure geometry, maths, functions. For every single user input there are millions of determinstic calculations made. Whole swathes of code operate in the background before a single dot is placed on screen. A lot of that's time when no state-change actions are required, or even wanted... such changes are genuine "side-effects": i.e. bugs.

Games, just like any other art ever produced, are subject to criticism. Some of this criticism is constructive and some is not. Some of it is downright insipid. The difference between games and most other art is that the audience is well versed in Internet-fu and sadly, is usually immature.

Just like any other artists, developers need to have somewhat thick skins when it comes to taking their criticism. Some like Phil Fish will either start or escalate a flame war and then try to play a victim afterwards. I'm definitely not justifying the comments made against him or his game, but he was not completely blameless in how the events went down.

Like I said, the gaming audience is often immature. Many pieces have been written about how it needs to grow up and how bullying needs to stop but it's not going to change overnight, if ever.

So how about this devs, stop making the violence porn that keeps the gaming audience in its immature larval state and start making more games like Spec Ops: The Line that forces the gamer to think. Bully wasn't flawless but at least it tried. Those are the only two games that I would consider to be mature out of the thousands that the ESRB has rated M.

Games, just like any other art ever produced, are subject to criticism. Some of this criticism is constructive and some is not. Some of it is downright insipid. The difference between games and most other art is that the audience is well versed in Internet-fu and sadly, is usually immature.

Just like any other artists, developers need to have somewhat thick skins when it comes to taking their criticism. Some like Phil Fish will either start or escalate a flame war and then try to play a victim afterwards. I'm definitely not justifying the comments made against him or his game, but he was not completely blameless in how the events went down.

Like I said, the gaming audience is often immature. Many pieces have been written about how it needs to grow up and how bullying needs to stop but it's not going to change overnight, if ever.

So how about this devs, stop making the violence porn that keeps the gaming audience in its immature larval state and start making more games like Spec Ops: The Line that forces the gamer to think. Bully wasn't flawless but at least it tried. Those are the only two games that I would consider to be mature out of the thousands that the ESRB has rated M.

Wasn't there an apple app that did that as well?

Yes, there was. It was rejected on the grounds it would do harm to your device.

Though I think there were others as well.

I'm not sure how I should feel about the rejection. Angry because they rejected it, or pleased because it was a stupid app that honestly would probably result in a very negative user reaction as thousands of people drop and break their phones.

Earlier numbers by Business Week may have reported that Microsoft is losing $126 on every Xbox 360 sold

and

Pricing the PlayStation 3 below its production cost caused Sony to lose $2.16 billion in 2007 and $1.16 billion in 2008, the company revealed today.

I think you have merely overlooked a significant segment of the market which is mobile gaming. As far as I am aware, Nintendo has a super successful mobile gaming device called the Gameboy or DS/3DS that still accepts cartridges. I guess 'cartridge' applies in every way, since its not specifically a 'memory device' like a USB stick, as certain regions are Read Only. There is even a market for new Super Nintendo Games; http://kotaku.com/5889091/new-game-for-1991s-favorite-console-arriving-in-2013, not to mention NeoGeo/MVS style cartridge systems. I personally feel that cartidge-based gaming hasn't yet been surpassed by a better storage medium in terms of resilience.

The actual idea of installing a game from the game media (ie. BD or DVD) may sound like a good idea to some however when you think about it is not that great since you actually have to fully install the game which could be anywhere between a few GB to 40 or more GB and most BD based games are in the order of many GB, so assuming 10GB to 20GB for example you would probably be able to install between 40 and 15 games (500GB disk allowing a few GB for the OS) before you would have to delete one to make way for another. PC gamers get around this by installing larger disks although I am quote sure the XBox1 will allow you to do this to but at a much greater price (sort of like the Xbox360 now)

One thing the buyer of the XBox1 will have to do on purchase is to connect to the Internet to implement the changes then you can stay offline ( see here ).

Geeks are less likely... You must be joking.
The guys who couldn't get a date in school are now in a position of power and you don't think they will abuse that or bear a slight grudge?... Right, and I have a bridge to sell you. Have you even looked at female characters in games, particularly their "armor", it usually looks more like a stripper outfit than any form of actual protection. There is your first indication.

You would probably be surprised how many players around you in games are women playing as men. Some so they get less hassle, others because they don't want to look like a stripper. I know a few who even go so far as having their BF handle voice (when they can) while they play just to hide that much better. Personally, I play openly as female, but most of the time, it's only with people I play with on a regular basis and know I can trust, otherwise it can be too much trouble.

Here is a good link to one woman's experience. If I remember right, there was some discussion of boycots in the discussion, but I'm not digging through that mess.
http://kotaku.com/5919386/so-what-if-im-a-woman-let-me-play-the-damn-game

Oh and bee sure to look at this site for the crap we see regularly:
http://fatuglyorslutty.com/

There are no pics of scantily clad women at all in the article.

The funny thing is the author of the second article seems to actually approve of this sort of thing.

In an interview with Kotaku, Phil Harrison, a MS VP, stated the following:

"The bits that are on that disc, you can give it to your friend and they can install it on an Xbox One," he said. "They would then have to purchase the right to play that game through Xbox Live."

"They would be paying the same price we paid, or less?" we asked.

"Letâ(TM)s assume itâ(TM)s a new game, so the answer is yes, it will be the same price," Harrison said."

Yes, that's right, you can't sell your used games because they'll end up costing the person you sell it to full price anyway. Want to lend a game to a friend? Sorry, full price. Want to bring it over to their house to play? Sorry, full price.

Disgusting.

(Donâ(TM)t worry; you can still play a single-player game without being connected to the Internet.)

However, developers can make single-player games that rely on Azure, which would result in the online single-player game, and Microsoft obviously hopes they do:

Xbox One will give game developers the ability to create games that use Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing service, which means that they might be able to offload certain computing tasks to the cloud rather than process them on the Xbox One hardware itself. This would necessitate the game requiring a connection.

Are developers forced to create games that have these online features, and are thus not playable offline? They are not, Xbox exec Whitten said to Wired — but “I hope they do.” So the always-online future may come in incremental steps.

-- Kotaku

captcha is "dislike"

What does a Japanese man need with CS6 when he can create beautiful art with Microsoft Excel .

chinese version of world of warcraft

http://kotaku.com/5904240/marvel-at-chinas-ballsy-rip+offs/

Don't know about that
http://kotaku.com/5985874/ps4-will-not-require-an-always+online-connection

It turns out that it was much ado about nothing.

At least nothing that was Apple's fault.

http://kotaku.com/apple-cleared-of-blame-censored-comic-will-be-sold-o-472133460

So s/nerd rage/impotent nerd rage/ bwahahaha

It turns out that this wasn't the case.

http://kotaku.com/apple-cleared-of-blame-censored-comic-will-be-sold-o-472133460

http://kotaku.com/apple-cleared-of-blame-censored-comic-will-be-sold-o-472133460

Apparently it's news about no news.

If you support gun control now, you are just helping lay the groundwork for stringent GAME control later.

Just published, a good article on Kotaku making the case why game and gun supporters need to start treating each other with respect, instead of as enemies.

cancels SW1313? WTF??? http://kotaku.com/disney-shuts-down-lucasarts-468473749

Maybe the Cubans could give the game platform to Viet Nam, and they could come up with a plotline where you follow Ho Chi Min to his defeat of the imperialist US invaders. There's jungles and tropical climate in both situations, right.

Viet Nam's version shipped a year and a half ago: http://kotaku.com/5864287/defeat-the-french-in-vietnams-7554-military-shooter/

Regardless of the online vs offline debate - which is interesting to Slashdot readers for a variety of reasons (DRM, cloud, corporations lying to the users (do they ever not?), etc.), is it even a fun game?

After seeing videos and reports like these:
http://kotaku.com/5990362/with-simple-ai-like-this-why-does-simcity-need-cloud-computing

I'm inclined to think that the answer may well be 'no'. At which point it really doesn't matter much whether you play it online or offline, does it?

There is some truth to that that the Chairman of SEGA went to microsoft and begged them xbox dreamcast compatible but microsoft said no. Probably because it would need to run wince which microsoft knew was shit. http://kotaku.com/5447897/how-xbox-could-have-helped-the-dreamcast-survive

After the Dreamcast got discontinued. miccrosoft snapped up a SEGA executive to head their xbox marketing and promotion department.

The ironic thing is that (at least according to rumor) Blizzard actually wanted Warcraft to be a Warhammer game, but GW was so anal about protecting their IP that they refused to license it. So they missed out out on roughly a kajillion dollars of profit and brand exposure and the video games they came out with in the 90s were pretty mediocre.

Not just a rumor: http://kotaku.com/5929161/how-warcraft-was-almost-a-warhammer-game-and-how-that-saved-wow If Games Workshop had eased up on the stubbornness and need to control everything, millions of people would be playing (and paying for) "World of Warhammer" instead of "World of Warcraft".

No, this has nothing to do with hardcore vs. casual gaming (that's a tangential topic). What I'm saying is that Apple simply doesn't get gaming, period, nor do I even think that the picture you've painted is factual (e.g. the majority of households in the U.S. have a current-gen console, suggesting that tablets and smartphones haven't proven to be enough to fulfill their gaming needs). Moreover, your statement is predicated on the assumption that because a company has made a platform on which successful games can be made, that they themselves must also get gaming (i.e. "PCs have lots of great games, and HP makes PCs, so HP must get gaming"). While that may be the case, I do not believe that is by any means a safe assumption.

To date, Apple's success in this area has been largely accidental. They've made repeated statements to the effect that they were caught entirely by surprise at the fact that gaming took off in the way it did on the platform they built. But just because some developers have been able to make good games on Apple's platform does not mean that Apple itself really groks gaming. Their last dedicated gaming product was the ill-fated Pippin, and while the company has come a LONG way since then, reports over the years have indicated that their efforts to improve gaming on their platforms have been halfhearted and misguided.

For instance, I recall a story that Gabe Newell used to tell (but can't find a link for it, unfortunately) about how Apple would contact Valve periodically after Half-Life came out, asking them what they could do to make the Mac a more appealing platform for Valve's games. An earnest Apple rep would come out to Valve HQ, sit down for a few hours, take down copious notes over issues with the hardware and software that were keeping Valve off the Mac, would go back to Apple, and then would never be heard from again. The next year Valve would get the same call and a fresh, earnest Apple rep would come out and repeat the process.

As another example, consider Apple's primary product that's dedicated to gaming right now: Game Center in iOS. The feature has been baked into iOS for a few years at this point, yet it rarely gets used by games, other than for achievements, simply because it isn't that useful of a tool to most gamers or game developers. In fact, the first popular game that actually used it (Letterpress) was able to bring Game Center to its knees in just a few days, despite only using it for player matching and notifying players it was their turn.

Don't get me wrong, I love both my iPhone and iPad (and my Macs, yes, plural), and my collection of iOS games is over a hundred strong, but that doesn't change the fact that I believe it's the developers who get gaming, not Apple, and that any attempts on Apple's part to usurp the role of dedicated gaming consoles would be a setback to gaming, in that we would see the will of a company that doesn't get gaming being imposed on the community as a whole. I'm fine with them being a player in the market, but the idea that Apple can "[roll] the console guys really easily" is one I do not find appealing whatsoever.

Gamestop stock dropped about $1.30 yesterday upon the news of this patent.
Citation

While I concede that to each their own, there's some things with which I want to counter your arguments-

Console games are just...you just start playing already, no need for all the driver-installation fuzz. Very practical.

What's different about PCs? I have installed my graphics driver exactly once - when I first built my PC and installed Windows on it. The time when games required complex setup (IRQ/DMA settings on Soundblaster cards in the DOS days, remember?) is long gone, like with anything else you just install the game and play.

The PC is much more forgiving when it comes to BUG fixes, PC versions tend to have more bugs and bug-patch releases, on consoles - you can't afford this so the games actually comes with less bugs in my experience.

I agree.. but when console games DO wind up with bugs they're much more expensive and time consuming for the developer to fix. As an example, there's talk of a third DLC for Skyrim after Dawnguard and Hearthfire, but the first one is yet to make an appearance for the PS3 after earlier reports that it might not be even made available because it was more complicated to port to the PS3.

Less cheating: One of my no#1 pet peeves when it comes to online gaming, are cheating bastards, they destroy the fun for everyone else, and they can literally WIPE out an entire planet of avid gamers with their stupid aimbots...

100% agree.

Games last longer: This might sound a bit odd, but I love to keep my games forever, and so I keep the consoles forever as well. I still have my Atari 2600, repaired the joystick a 100+ times, but enough OT. The games last longer because the games ages with the consoles. When you purchase NEW PC's or upgrade, you need endless patches and driver updates - buzz killington right there!

One word - virtualization! I use D-Fend Reloaded, a DOSBox front-end to play ancient DOS games like Commander Keene, Fallout 1 and System Shock. I've played several games made over the last 10 years without any problems on Windows 7 64bit, some of them require XP compatibility mode.

If you have a decent graphics card there's no end to gaming on Windows, there aren't as many bugs or driver/hardware issues as there might have been about 6-7 years ago.

They may not have licenses for all their old games.
E.g., their right to sell the Fallout games ends at the end of 2013, so they'll want to milk it while they can.

As far as I can tell, Interplay is mostly a afterimage of old IP these days - the developers have moved on to other studios.
Both Obsidian and inXile emphasized their Interplay heritage in their recent Kickstarters.

No it's those damn Democrats slaughtering entire villages with their evil socialist powers.

I gotta agree, kinda hard to see what audience they are aiming for with the frankly bizarre line ups they have been having of late. And Bayonetta 2 as a launch title? Since when does softcore porn fit into the casual player demographic? yeah I can really see the soccer moms sitting down to play Bayonetta 2.

For a funnier take on the Wii U everyone ought to watch Francis the fanboy's take on the subject, although by the end you have to wonder if they needed to call an ambulance for his ass, dude really needs to lay off the cheeseburgers.

He isn't saying that they're shoehorning multiplayer into every game. He's saying that every game should include an online component of some sort, as he says right here. They're not saying that games should all have multiplayer involved. They're saying that they should involve the internet in some way. There is nothing wrong with this. For example, take optional high score challenges in Mirror's Edge. The Sim City example, where online is required, is a bad example because that's just one game and the game was designed to be multiplayer-centric from the start. There are many, many single player games, like Mass Effect, that don't require the multiplayer or online functionality whatsoever. This is just FUD. EA isn't the best company around, sure, but including online features in single player games is definitely possible and it can't always be a bad thing depending on how it's implemented.

Mass Effect is a great example. Thanks for bringing it up. When the series began, Bioware wasn't part of EA and there was no online component. EA's Mass Effect 3, on the other hand, requires players to either pvp or play an awful iPhone game to improve the effectiveness of their forces and unlock the most positive ending. This is the sort of shoehorning EA demands.

He isn't saying that they're shoehorning multiplayer into every game. He's saying that every game should include an online component of some sort, as he says right here. They're not saying that games should all have multiplayer involved. They're saying that they should involve the internet in some way. There is nothing wrong with this. For example, take optional high score challenges in Mirror's Edge. The Sim City example, where online is required, is a bad example because that's just one game and the game was designed to be multiplayer-centric from the start. There are many, many single player games, like Mass Effect, that don't require the multiplayer or online functionality whatsoever. This is just FUD. EA isn't the best company around, sure, but including online features in single player games is definitely possible and it can't always be a bad thing depending on how it's implemented.

You're making the incorrect assumption that all of the mods are additional quests/storyline content. There's a lot more to it than that. The graphical overhauls are absolutely stunning, usually with a much smaller performance hit (if any) than you would expect. There's also major gameplay mechanic/game balance overhauls that just plain make everything more fun/interesting. Bethesda has actually gotten into the habit of borrowing ideas from popular mods to put in the next game in the series. The most obvious being iron sights and weapon modifications that were 3rd party mods in FO3 became a standard thing in FONV.

But they are selling it and promoting it as a functional Desktop OS.

If Microsoft said that Win8 was only for tablets, phones, and game consoles then I don't think anyone would have a problem with it. But they're promoting it as the next evolution of their Desktop OS, even though it is terrible for most desktop PC tasks. (Nevermind what PARC researchers have to say; the gaming-oriented review of Windows 8 at Kotaku is blistering.)

For tablets, phones, and game consoles Windows 8 might be a big step forward. But for PC application users it's a step back to the 1990s, and they have a good reason to complain about that.

You can blame that model on JRPGs -- freedom of choice is taken away because like to pretend their narrative is supposed to the focused -- but they forgot the first rule -- you are making a fucking game, NOT a movie.

As Chris Hecker recently said
  "It annoys me when people focus on the linear content in games, rather than the gameplay. We are always going to be shitty movies if we keep emphasizing that direction."

http://kotaku.com/5923134/weve-got--jonathan-blow-the-witness-braid-and-chris-hecker-spy-party-here-to-answer-your-best-questions

I guess they'll release Battlefield 4 before "the future" then, as it is the same EA that predicts that in the future all games will be free.