I haven't had a chance to really read the specifics of this yet, but does this mean that the action script 3 compiler/vm/etc is open sourced as part of this? As in, can it be embedded for example as a scripting language for a game, like lua, squirrel, etc.
Is this the first step towards Mega Maid
?
Spaceballs style vacuum equipped with this technology could save us from being more responsible
Just jettison the bag towards the sun for cleanup?
haha that came out badly, without the br tag. "I gotta * shit myself" * insert br tag.
Christ, so we have de-evolved into the requirement to br our newlines manually? I guess the post form couldn't be asked to detect something so trivial?
Thanks for the flamebait, but seriously since you appear to doubt the uselessness of porting DX10, consider this.
Of the many changes in DX10, one of them is a more focused set of requirements for DX10 compatible cards. When a game developer is writing a DX10 game, they are writing it with these specifications in mind. Do you think for a second that Crysis, Alan Wake, Shadowrun, UT3 or whatever other DX10 game in development is going to run worth a crap in a software DX10? I wasn't aware there was such a demand to run the DX10 sample apps. This to me is the main reason for calling this project useless. There's also legality issues, the question of whether this is even real or not, and assuming it is real, to what degree of support is to be expected in the absence of Vista.
In fact, like most rewrites of software projects, particularly in the gaming area, most of the focus and attractiveness of DX10 comes from its refactoring of some of the problem areas of previous DX versions in order to provide large speedups. For example, in DX9 and below, draw calls are very expensive, and a game can easily start choking and performing very badly on just a couple thousand draw calls. Each draw call has very large CPU overhead to it. It doesn't take much to hit this draw call cap and become CPU limited. DX10, due to the new API and driver model has been written with this in mind, resulting in a huge reduction in draw call cost. OpenGL already has pretty cheap draw call cost.
I'll agree that marketing probably played a huge role in DX10 Vista only, but I wouldn't be surprised if this was in part due to the engineers getting to a point where they just had to say "Look, there's some big foundation level problems with DX that we can't improve much on without rewriting it." Any software engineer should understand the need to refactor sometimes, and sometimes you can't keep backward compatibility. Vista naturally provides a target for such a rewrite. It wouldn't make sense to have XP Service Pack 2 or whatever replace the XP driver model and whatever other parts of the foundations of XP is needed just to get DX10 on XP. DX10 is a major rewrite to the entire API and how it interfaces to the hardware. Could they have ported it to XP? Probably at huge cost, which in business terms mean hell no. It just isn't worth it. So marketing gets to use it to pimp Vista too. It's a win all around for MS, and for gamers and developers who do run DX10 there is potential for alot more over DX9. It's unfortunate it comes at the price of the turd formerly known as Vista.
Seems to me like a common sense approach, similar to how nearly all the previously PS3 exclusive non first party developers have used the same common sense and decided to go cross platform and not artificially limit themselves to a platform that is nowhere near having a majority. Widening your audience can only have positive effects for sales.
Maybe it's just me, but I'd trust a basically trained 18 year old military member to have much more respect and personal responsibility than I would just about any college student with alcohol. Many colleges these days are all about partying and drinking. There is no training for responsible drinking. Holding a gun doesn't hose your reasoning and judgment so that you get in fights, sleep around, or worst case drive and end up killing someone else. I've never heard anyone single out maturity level as the problem behind drinking laws, but even if they did, age is a meaningless indication of maturity level. How someone is raised has a much greater effect. I've met pre-teens with more sense, respect, and maturity than adults. Unfortunately the law can't really be that flexible in making exceptions. I would cringe at the thought how how much worse colleges might be were they all allowed to legally drink at 18.
Forgive me if i interpreted your response of
The legal freedom, sure I do. That's the way it should be. You deal with in-game actions such as cheating in the game. What the hell is wrong with just banning people? as a response to
The fact is, you DON'T have the freedom to cheat freely and get away with it, so yes, stopping cheating is a good thing as some implied right to cheat.
I never claimed not being around cheaters as a right, I simply support a developer in beating/banning cheaters whenever possible, and in the larger cases of someone profiting from selling cheating programs built from reverse engineering and violating the EULA, they should come down on this guy like a ton of bricks IF the EULA has been deemed to have that binding authority. The whole point of bringing up BNETD is that the judges ruled that the programmers did indeed violate the EULA, giving it some level of legal binding. That specifically applies to this glider program as well, but simply banning the account of the program author is meaningless. They can't tell when he logs on to RE each new version after a breaking wow patch, but he is without doubt doing it. What choice is there to shut it down other than taking to court? Turn a blind eye?
We aren't talking about the right to cheat. We are talking about the right to do whatever I want to RAM that I bought and paid for with my hard earned money. I can forgive the willingness to give up liberties for protection from terrorists but you're rolling over just because of some kids cheating on a video game? That's pathetic! Sure you can do whatever you want with your RAM. When that involves 'hacking' a game and selling the resulting cheat I hope you get sued too, though hopefully for something a little more solid than copyright infringement, which doesn't seem to apply specifically to this situation. Nobody in 'rolling over' by hoping a cheat author gets shut down and the users banned.
Maybe something to do with months to years of responsible training of proper use of combat equipment, in a job that requires a reasonable amount of responsibility and respect for others.
Versus, a high school or college kid that has neither responsibility, nor respect for others getting drunk at a party and killing themselves or an innocent on the way home, which happens far more often than an irresponsible military member doing the same.
It's not hard to remain ignorant on the differences between the two when you don't bother thinking about it for 5 seconds. There's much more at play than simply the age of the participants.
That's because you missed the point. I wasn't implying you actually try to find a game that is free of cheaters. I was trying to show you how ridiculous the idea of a game with no cheaters is. It's not going to happen.
No shit, and I said that in the previous post as well. Just because cheating will never be stamped out completely doesn't mean the developers should turn a blind eye to it. The best that can be hoped for is that being banned becomes such a risk(and losing significant time invested in your avatar) that people choose not to. Every MP, MMO, FPS, RTS, RPG, etc game that many people want to play has cheaters. If your solution is just to not play them, then that isn't a solution at all. Rounding up 32-54 friends for an honest game is also not a solution. It's fine for small Gears of Wars type games or RTS games, but it doesn't apply to MMO games nor does it make sense for large player FPS games. Further, sticking with your friends for gaming means you can't play competitively. Again, not a solution. The only solution is to try to make people choose not to cheat by creating enough risk if they do.
What skill? Clicking buttons? Memorizing key sequences? I fail to see the skill. If you consider that a skill why isn't configuring bot settings a skill. That involves clicking buttons and memorizing key sequences.
Skill is referring to more than MMO games, such as FPS games where cheating is even more of a problem, since we seem to be on the subject of cheating in general. I figured that was implied by the sentence following that, "Likewise, in MMO games..."
The legal freedom, sure I do. That's the way it should be. You deal with in-game actions such as cheating in the game. What the hell is wrong with just banning people?
Bull, you don't have the right to cheat. Such as one of the definitions of rights "Powers or privileges granted by an agreement or law.", of which users have been granted neither to cheat, and in fact been made to agree not to. Simply because you can and possibly get away with it doesn't make it a right. Again, given the previous case againt BNETD, which iirc featured in part the EULA as a valid agreement, effectively makes it against the rules to cheat. Honestly though, please point me to what grants people the right to cheat, I'm very interested in learning more about this.
I'd be fine if they just banned the hell out of everyone caught using cheats. By jacking up the risk of getting caught high enough it would seem to me that it would eventually become an insignificant problem.
By supporting cheaters being shut down, I'm not supporting frivolous laws. IANAL, but if it's true that violating the EULA, which has been deemed legally enforceable if a recall in a previous Blizzard case(emulators), and still using the software constitutes copyright infringement as several others have posted, then it would appear to me that this case isn't frivolous at all.
It's common sense that cheating and gaining an unfair advantage in a competitive driven game(which MMO games still are, and certainly FPS, RTS, etc games), completely voids any meaningful competition or comparison of ability or skill or status among the player group as a whole, which in fact ruins the competition of the game. I fail to see how this can be considered anything but fact and common sense.
Btw, who are 'we' ? How are 'we' paying millions of dollars for this lawsuit? And how are 'we' regulating ourselves, when cheating is still a huge problem in every genre of games? Your 'solution' is to place responsibility for dealing with cheaters on every individual honest player. Where's the logic in that? Sueing someone who is profiting from a program which allows people to cheat and farm doesn't seem that far fetched to me, but IANAL. The author reverse engineered the game to create this program(DMCA?), and then profits from it by releasing the program that allows people to cheat. I can't imagine this is all perfectly legal, but that's for the court to decide. Sure
Yea and like every other cheat program that 'checks for cheat x running', the same day after it is detected a new version of the cheat comes out which is not detected. That's not to say this isn't useful, if it sees you are running it and outright bans you, even if the author keeps updating it to be non detected there would be such a high risk with using it that most people wouldn't want to risk losing their account on it.
Could there be legal issues with that? Could a banned user sue for denial of expected services or something if banned by Blizzard? Suppose a user did make a legal deal out of it, would Blizzards logs be evidence enough to justify a banning on the person. Isn't there some legal expectations with a company you are paying subscription to is providing a service such as this that the user be able to access the service to some level? I'm just guessing, there may not be, or it may not be applicable to these cases.
Wow this is some bullshit logic. I hate cheaters too, but if I were to follow your ridiculous advice and not play games with cheaters that would cut out any and every single multi-player game in existence. Real good idea there.
Cheaters should be shut down, period. To imply that they should be allowed to run rampant in the name of their 'freedom', is really stupid. "Freedom" from what? To make the game miserable for others? Anyone is free to cheat in their copies of single player games, but in multi player games it is expected and should be enforced by the developers and or anti-cheat software that the players are competing on their 'skill' only, and not some wall hack, aim bot, etc doing the important work for them. Likewise for MMO games everyone should be on relatively equal levels. It feels good every time Blizzard or another developer bans x-tens of thousands of accounts.
The fact is, you DON'T have the freedom to cheat freely and get away with it, so yes, stopping cheating is a good thing, though unfortunately like piracy it will never be eliminated completely. Even if every game turned into dumb terminals cheaters are already inventive with how they automate the input process, or give other advantages, spiked models, wall hacks, etc. That doesn't mean they shouldn't bother.
Cheating should be stopped because it ruins the competition of the games, because it makes any real skill some players may have mean nothing, because it invalidates organized competition(clans, ranked matches, contests, etc), because it's griefing anyone that plays the game as intended, because it gives the cheater an unfair advantage(obviously), and last but not least, because it's common fucking sense. Those good enough reasons for you?
Your client take the position that my middle-aged, conservative clients should speculate regarding the identity of persons your clients' claim used their AOL account to download pornographic-lyric gangsta rap tracks as predicate to possible case resolution. In an age of Wintel-virus created bot-farms, spoofs, and easily cracked WEP encrypted wireless home networks (among other easy hacks), the only tech-savvy response to such a request is, "You've got to be kidding." The extensive press that has been generated over computer security (and the insecurity of Windows XP and its predecessors) underscores the complete absence of facts on which probable cause to sue my clients could be established and your clients' willingness (even insistence) that others be implicated in Big Music's speculative, "driftnet" litigation tactics. Sorry: Mr. Merchant cannot and will not expose himself to still more litigation by speculating. Ohhh snap. My favorite part.
Clearly you have no clue about the locations or the people that live in the problem areas. Your blaming of the victims is a clear show of your ignorance.
It's common knowledge that 'next gen' games cost significantly more than last generation..NET is useless on consoles, unless your studio plans to limit itself to Xbox and XNA, which last I checked isn't set up yet for commercial products yet. A huge jump in art quality makes up most of the increased costs. Art teams for AAA games on the 'next gen' consoles(Wii excluded), can easily be twice as many people as a AAA game for last generation(ps2, xbox). When you go from 2000-4,000 poly character models with a diffuse texture map to 6000-10000 poly character models with a diffuse map, normal map, specular map, etc, and a much higher quality and quantity animation sets, of course the cost is going to go up. Level design and detail of course is also going up significantly, with the new consoles ability to handle it. It's an unfortunate reality of the industry. The higher the quality of the graphics gets, the more difficult and time consuming(and therefor costly) it is to create that content.
No idea what the 2nd part of your rant is all about.
People pay tons of money for even more garbage than this. Virgin Mary in a pancake or grilled cheese will make you a pretty good chunk of change. Matter of fact, think I saw her on my toilet paper this morning, I feel a payday coming up.
I believe in my own personal god. I even know who he is. It's me. The only person there is to rely on for my own happiness, well being, and success is myself. There is nobody answering prayers for winning the lottery, or getting a raise, or curing my sick mother, or for a computer glitch to zero out my student loans:) Most of these things, along with most everything else that involves me is my responsibility. I bite my tongue every time I hear someone say "it's gods will", especially when it comes to things like birth control, or someone being murdered or otherwise killed. I guess some people need the comfort of thinking they know that someone is looking out for them constantly, but to me it just seems so ridiculous. Will we ever get past superstitious nonsense like religion, or is humanity doomed to be forever afraid of what happens when they die, where they came from, etc?
Slashdot Mirror
I haven't had a chance to really read the specifics of this yet, but does this mean that the action script 3 compiler/vm/etc is open sourced as part of this? As in, can it be embedded for example as a scripting language for a game, like lua, squirrel, etc.
Is this the first step towards Mega Maid ?
Spaceballs style vacuum equipped with this technology could save us from being more responsible
Just jettison the bag towards the sun for cleanup?
One step closer to running Vista! Baby steps.
Another bit of a gut check for the Rectum Insertion Academy of America.
haha that came out badly, without the br tag. "I gotta * shit myself" * insert br tag. Christ, so we have de-evolved into the requirement to br our newlines manually? I guess the post form couldn't be asked to detect something so trivial?
So uh, is there an option somewhere to get the posting not to eat my newlines? I gotta
shit myself?
Thanks for the flamebait, but seriously since you appear to doubt the uselessness of porting DX10, consider this. Of the many changes in DX10, one of them is a more focused set of requirements for DX10 compatible cards. When a game developer is writing a DX10 game, they are writing it with these specifications in mind. Do you think for a second that Crysis, Alan Wake, Shadowrun, UT3 or whatever other DX10 game in development is going to run worth a crap in a software DX10? I wasn't aware there was such a demand to run the DX10 sample apps. This to me is the main reason for calling this project useless. There's also legality issues, the question of whether this is even real or not, and assuming it is real, to what degree of support is to be expected in the absence of Vista. In fact, like most rewrites of software projects, particularly in the gaming area, most of the focus and attractiveness of DX10 comes from its refactoring of some of the problem areas of previous DX versions in order to provide large speedups. For example, in DX9 and below, draw calls are very expensive, and a game can easily start choking and performing very badly on just a couple thousand draw calls. Each draw call has very large CPU overhead to it. It doesn't take much to hit this draw call cap and become CPU limited. DX10, due to the new API and driver model has been written with this in mind, resulting in a huge reduction in draw call cost. OpenGL already has pretty cheap draw call cost. I'll agree that marketing probably played a huge role in DX10 Vista only, but I wouldn't be surprised if this was in part due to the engineers getting to a point where they just had to say "Look, there's some big foundation level problems with DX that we can't improve much on without rewriting it." Any software engineer should understand the need to refactor sometimes, and sometimes you can't keep backward compatibility. Vista naturally provides a target for such a rewrite. It wouldn't make sense to have XP Service Pack 2 or whatever replace the XP driver model and whatever other parts of the foundations of XP is needed just to get DX10 on XP. DX10 is a major rewrite to the entire API and how it interfaces to the hardware. Could they have ported it to XP? Probably at huge cost, which in business terms mean hell no. It just isn't worth it. So marketing gets to use it to pimp Vista too. It's a win all around for MS, and for gamers and developers who do run DX10 there is potential for alot more over DX9. It's unfortunate it comes at the price of the turd formerly known as Vista.
Imagine what the community of online coders could accomplish if the majority of them spent their time on useful projects.
Seems to me like a common sense approach, similar to how nearly all the previously PS3 exclusive non first party developers have used the same common sense and decided to go cross platform and not artificially limit themselves to a platform that is nowhere near having a majority. Widening your audience can only have positive effects for sales.
Maybe it's just me, but I'd trust a basically trained 18 year old military member to have much more respect and personal responsibility than I would just about any college student with alcohol. Many colleges these days are all about partying and drinking. There is no training for responsible drinking. Holding a gun doesn't hose your reasoning and judgment so that you get in fights, sleep around, or worst case drive and end up killing someone else. I've never heard anyone single out maturity level as the problem behind drinking laws, but even if they did, age is a meaningless indication of maturity level. How someone is raised has a much greater effect. I've met pre-teens with more sense, respect, and maturity than adults. Unfortunately the law can't really be that flexible in making exceptions. I would cringe at the thought how how much worse colleges might be were they all allowed to legally drink at 18.
Maybe something to do with months to years of responsible training of proper use of combat equipment, in a job that requires a reasonable amount of responsibility and respect for others. Versus, a high school or college kid that has neither responsibility, nor respect for others getting drunk at a party and killing themselves or an innocent on the way home, which happens far more often than an irresponsible military member doing the same. It's not hard to remain ignorant on the differences between the two when you don't bother thinking about it for 5 seconds. There's much more at play than simply the age of the participants.
grr, why is this shit removing my newlines?
That's because you missed the point. I wasn't implying you actually try to find a game that is free of cheaters. I was trying to show you how ridiculous the idea of a game with no cheaters is. It's not going to happen.
No shit, and I said that in the previous post as well. Just because cheating will never be stamped out completely doesn't mean the developers should turn a blind eye to it. The best that can be hoped for is that being banned becomes such a risk(and losing significant time invested in your avatar) that people choose not to. Every MP, MMO, FPS, RTS, RPG, etc game that many people want to play has cheaters. If your solution is just to not play them, then that isn't a solution at all. Rounding up 32-54 friends for an honest game is also not a solution. It's fine for small Gears of Wars type games or RTS games, but it doesn't apply to MMO games nor does it make sense for large player FPS games. Further, sticking with your friends for gaming means you can't play competitively. Again, not a solution. The only solution is to try to make people choose not to cheat by creating enough risk if they do.
What skill? Clicking buttons? Memorizing key sequences? I fail to see the skill. If you consider that a skill why isn't configuring bot settings a skill. That involves clicking buttons and memorizing key sequences.
Skill is referring to more than MMO games, such as FPS games where cheating is even more of a problem, since we seem to be on the subject of cheating in general. I figured that was implied by the sentence following that, "Likewise, in MMO games..."
The legal freedom, sure I do. That's the way it should be. You deal with in-game actions such as cheating in the game. What the hell is wrong with just banning people?
Bull, you don't have the right to cheat. Such as one of the definitions of rights "Powers or privileges granted by an agreement or law.", of which users have been granted neither to cheat, and in fact been made to agree not to. Simply because you can and possibly get away with it doesn't make it a right. Again, given the previous case againt BNETD, which iirc featured in part the EULA as a valid agreement, effectively makes it against the rules to cheat. Honestly though, please point me to what grants people the right to cheat, I'm very interested in learning more about this. I'd be fine if they just banned the hell out of everyone caught using cheats. By jacking up the risk of getting caught high enough it would seem to me that it would eventually become an insignificant problem. By supporting cheaters being shut down, I'm not supporting frivolous laws. IANAL, but if it's true that violating the EULA, which has been deemed legally enforceable if a recall in a previous Blizzard case(emulators), and still using the software constitutes copyright infringement as several others have posted, then it would appear to me that this case isn't frivolous at all. It's common sense that cheating and gaining an unfair advantage in a competitive driven game(which MMO games still are, and certainly FPS, RTS, etc games), completely voids any meaningful competition or comparison of ability or skill or status among the player group as a whole, which in fact ruins the competition of the game. I fail to see how this can be considered anything but fact and common sense. Btw, who are 'we' ? How are 'we' paying millions of dollars for this lawsuit? And how are 'we' regulating ourselves, when cheating is still a huge problem in every genre of games? Your 'solution' is to place responsibility for dealing with cheaters on every individual honest player. Where's the logic in that? Sueing someone who is profiting from a program which allows people to cheat and farm doesn't seem that far fetched to me, but IANAL. The author reverse engineered the game to create this program(DMCA?), and then profits from it by releasing the program that allows people to cheat. I can't imagine this is all perfectly legal, but that's for the court to decide. Sure
Yea and like every other cheat program that 'checks for cheat x running', the same day after it is detected a new version of the cheat comes out which is not detected. That's not to say this isn't useful, if it sees you are running it and outright bans you, even if the author keeps updating it to be non detected there would be such a high risk with using it that most people wouldn't want to risk losing their account on it. Could there be legal issues with that? Could a banned user sue for denial of expected services or something if banned by Blizzard? Suppose a user did make a legal deal out of it, would Blizzards logs be evidence enough to justify a banning on the person. Isn't there some legal expectations with a company you are paying subscription to is providing a service such as this that the user be able to access the service to some level? I'm just guessing, there may not be, or it may not be applicable to these cases.
Wow this is some bullshit logic. I hate cheaters too, but if I were to follow your ridiculous advice and not play games with cheaters that would cut out any and every single multi-player game in existence. Real good idea there. Cheaters should be shut down, period. To imply that they should be allowed to run rampant in the name of their 'freedom', is really stupid. "Freedom" from what? To make the game miserable for others? Anyone is free to cheat in their copies of single player games, but in multi player games it is expected and should be enforced by the developers and or anti-cheat software that the players are competing on their 'skill' only, and not some wall hack, aim bot, etc doing the important work for them. Likewise for MMO games everyone should be on relatively equal levels. It feels good every time Blizzard or another developer bans x-tens of thousands of accounts. The fact is, you DON'T have the freedom to cheat freely and get away with it, so yes, stopping cheating is a good thing, though unfortunately like piracy it will never be eliminated completely. Even if every game turned into dumb terminals cheaters are already inventive with how they automate the input process, or give other advantages, spiked models, wall hacks, etc. That doesn't mean they shouldn't bother. Cheating should be stopped because it ruins the competition of the games, because it makes any real skill some players may have mean nothing, because it invalidates organized competition(clans, ranked matches, contests, etc), because it's griefing anyone that plays the game as intended, because it gives the cheater an unfair advantage(obviously), and last but not least, because it's common fucking sense. Those good enough reasons for you?
Is this the Bill O'Reilly school, where one can major in douche-baggery?
Clearly you have no clue about the locations or the people that live in the problem areas. Your blaming of the victims is a clear show of your ignorance.
In that case we need to recruit Kevin Costner to be among the first settlers.
Better take a flamethrower just in case. If they aren't wow'd by the flame you have something to fall back on.
That's right up there with that Hispanic fella that rose from the grave.
It's common knowledge that 'next gen' games cost significantly more than last generation. .NET is useless on consoles, unless your studio plans to limit itself to Xbox and XNA, which last I checked isn't set up yet for commercial products yet. A huge jump in art quality makes up most of the increased costs. Art teams for AAA games on the 'next gen' consoles(Wii excluded), can easily be twice as many people as a AAA game for last generation(ps2, xbox). When you go from 2000-4,000 poly character models with a diffuse texture map to 6000-10000 poly character models with a diffuse map, normal map, specular map, etc, and a much higher quality and quantity animation sets, of course the cost is going to go up. Level design and detail of course is also going up significantly, with the new consoles ability to handle it. It's an unfortunate reality of the industry. The higher the quality of the graphics gets, the more difficult and time consuming(and therefor costly) it is to create that content.
No idea what the 2nd part of your rant is all about.
People pay tons of money for even more garbage than this. Virgin Mary in a pancake or grilled cheese will make you a pretty good chunk of change. Matter of fact, think I saw her on my toilet paper this morning, I feel a payday coming up.
I believe in my own personal god. I even know who he is. It's me. The only person there is to rely on for my own happiness, well being, and success is myself. There is nobody answering prayers for winning the lottery, or getting a raise, or curing my sick mother, or for a computer glitch to zero out my student loans :) Most of these things, along with most everything else that involves me is my responsibility. I bite my tongue every time I hear someone say "it's gods will", especially when it comes to things like birth control, or someone being murdered or otherwise killed. I guess some people need the comfort of thinking they know that someone is looking out for them constantly, but to me it just seems so ridiculous. Will we ever get past superstitious nonsense like religion, or is humanity doomed to be forever afraid of what happens when they die, where they came from, etc?