There's no physics reason that bullet paths can't be plotted accurately to include gravity, wind, humidity, etc...computers are great at that sort of thing.
Sure there is. It's called limited computing resources. Collision tests involving parabolas and volumetric effects are far more costly than simple line-primitive collision tests.
Basically you build up a city and army and sent your army across to attack the opponents city. Which is exactly what a RTS is.
No offense, I'm not singling you out, but that is exactly the kind of attitude that has made the RTS genre utterly stagnant for so many years. A game like Pikmin makes most other RTSes look creatively bankrupt. There is so much room for innovation in the genre, but nobody seems to have the vision or intestinal fortitude to break the mold and move forward in new and interesting ways. Most RTSes feel like Dune 2.5 next to Pikmin. Shigeru Miyamoto looked at everything that all RTSes have in common and determined that those were the features that needed the most change in order to create a truly new game experience. I wish more developers would adopt that sort of design mindset, a philosophy which in retrospect seems incredibly obvious. Yet year after year, across all genres, we only see tiny incremental refinements of preexisting games because most mainstream developers refuse to embrace risk.
Apparently the average player expects to win regularly, even if probability allows for long strings of losses. If you lose two even fights in a row in a game of Civilization, you are literally guaranteed to win the third, IIRC. This is how their "karma" system is implemented.
M.U.L.E. does something similar. Each of the four players is ranked throughout the game, 1st place through 4th place. At the beginning of each player's turns there is a ~25% chance of a random event, good or bad news for the player which helps or hurts them in some way. The player in first place never gets good news, and the two players in last place never get bad news.
Read what you just wrote then slap yourself for me. You should have just stopped at "Jazz is". "Improv" appears 19 times in the 37 paragraphs about Jazz on Wikipedia. Counterpoint appears zero times.
If you honestly believe good games stop being good when a new console comes out, you really need to see a shrink. Your post makes me want to fire up my Genesis and play Landstalker, Wonderboy in Monster World, Gunstar Heroes, Jungle Strike, Sonic, Starflight, and Mean Bean Machine. Where is the comparable experience on X360? You can keep your Halo 3, Gear of War, Call of Duty 4, and every other 1M+ seller on X360; I'm not interested.
Emulators are excluded? WTF is that supposed to mean.
Why can't they find programmers on the market that are willing to learn COBOL and fix their system?
You've apparently never tinkered in the mind-rot that is COBOL. COBOL made me change majors. This coming from someone with 10 years of programming experience going in.
"The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense." -- Edsger Dijkstra
I make all my clients pay for their hosting and domains themselves. I'll generally set them up with someone good, and then drill into their heads how important it is to pay the bill on time when it comes around next year. I tried the reseller thing and it is too big a pain in the ass to track down all the money. You end up doing all the work and taking all the risk. Screw that. Leave it to the professionals and focus on site design and implementation.
cubic polynomial solver using a water tank, a balance beam, two scalepans, and a variety of solids to represent terms of the equation: a cone for x^3, a paraboloid for x^2 and cylinder for cx, and a sphere for d
In the Tinkertoy Computer, Dewdney covers the well known Tic-Tac-Toe playing Tinkertoy computer built by MIT, as well as a fanciful computer based on ropes and pulleys featuring an inverter, an OR gate, an AND gate, a multiplexer, a flip-flop, and an adder.
In A.K.Dewdney's Scientific American column (and subsequent books) he documents many unusual mechanical computing devices that solve a range of computationally expensive problems. In a chaptered entitled Analog Gadgets in the book The Armchair Universe he describes several mechanical computing devices that solve a number of many computationally expensive problems (with some caveats):
* a spaghetti powered sorting machine * computing a convex hull using a board, nails and a rubber band * finding the shortest path joining two nodes of a graph network using brass rings and string * finding the minimum Steiner-tree for any number of nodes using pegs sandwiched between parallel sheets of plastic dipped in a soup solution * a prime calculator using a pair of lasers and parallel mirrors
In the next chapter, Gadgets Revisited, he presents:
* a way to compute the best-fit trend of a graph using a board, nails, rubber bands, and a rod * finding the longest path through a network of nodes using segments of string knotted together * computing the forth power of a number based on the principle of elasticity and the deflection of a bar of aluminum * or the third power of a number by using the same principle applied to a weight placed on the bar * light refraction computed with soap film suspended between stepped surfaces * optimal position for a refinery using a board with holes, string, a brass ring, and weights proportional to the cost of transportation for each source of raw material * number averaging using interconnected graduated glass cylinders * cubic polynomial solver using a water tank, a balance beam, two scalepans, and a variety of solids to represent terms of the equation: a cone for x, a paraboloid for x and cylinder for cx, and a sphere for d
Once again school kids without rights are being exposed and desensitized to horrible human rights abuses they will learn to accept as "normal" when they become adults. The sickening jackbooted dehumanization of America marches on.
Hmmm. That doesn't sound any better than the Atari Mindlink developed in the early eighties. That thing was reported to give players terrible headaches.
Slashdot Mirror
How does that help? If a bullet fired horizontally from shoulder height takes a half of a second to fall, that's still 30 times as many calculations.
Sure there is. It's called limited computing resources. Collision tests involving parabolas and volumetric effects are far more costly than simple line-primitive collision tests.
No offense, I'm not singling you out, but that is exactly the kind of attitude that has made the RTS genre utterly stagnant for so many years. A game like Pikmin makes most other RTSes look creatively bankrupt. There is so much room for innovation in the genre, but nobody seems to have the vision or intestinal fortitude to break the mold and move forward in new and interesting ways. Most RTSes feel like Dune 2.5 next to Pikmin. Shigeru Miyamoto looked at everything that all RTSes have in common and determined that those were the features that needed the most change in order to create a truly new game experience. I wish more developers would adopt that sort of design mindset, a philosophy which in retrospect seems incredibly obvious. Yet year after year, across all genres, we only see tiny incremental refinements of preexisting games because most mainstream developers refuse to embrace risk.
M.U.L.E. does something similar. Each of the four players is ranked throughout the game, 1st place through 4th place. At the beginning of each player's turns there is a ~25% chance of a random event, good or bad news for the player which helps or hurts them in some way. The player in first place never gets good news, and the two players in last place never get bad news.
I warned them this would happen. That's why I drink only distilled water, or rain water, and only pure grain alcohol.
I'm surprised the editors missed that typo.
Read what you just wrote then slap yourself for me. You should have just stopped at "Jazz is". "Improv" appears 19 times in the 37 paragraphs about Jazz on Wikipedia. Counterpoint appears zero times.
"Sun replace RAID with RAID"
No, they replaced it with "RAD"; they took the "I" right out of it.
Or by matches, newspaper, and a receptacle. Just don't forget the clay brick and string.
Well there's your problem.
Thank you. Read it, people, if you don't like Diablo III "WoW Gayness". Lead designer Jay Wilson nails it.
I'm not sure if nervous laughter counts as Funny, but this is Insightful as all get out.
Thanks for posting that. I try to pay very close attention to Siggraph, I'm not sure how I missed that paper. Fascinating stuff.
The first two are meh-worthy, but the last one approaches magic-grade technology. Wow!
If you honestly believe good games stop being good when a new console comes out, you really need to see a shrink. Your post makes me want to fire up my Genesis and play Landstalker, Wonderboy in Monster World, Gunstar Heroes, Jungle Strike, Sonic, Starflight, and Mean Bean Machine. Where is the comparable experience on X360? You can keep your Halo 3, Gear of War, Call of Duty 4, and every other 1M+ seller on X360; I'm not interested.
Emulators are excluded? WTF is that supposed to mean.
You've apparently never tinkered in the mind-rot that is COBOL. COBOL made me change majors. This coming from someone with 10 years of programming experience going in.
"The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense." -- Edsger Dijkstra
No, you fix it again, Tony.
Who do you think you are? Netcraft?
I'm offended, you insensitive clod!
I make all my clients pay for their hosting and domains themselves. I'll generally set them up with someone good, and then drill into their heads how important it is to pay the bill on time when it comes around next year. I tried the reseller thing and it is too big a pain in the ass to track down all the money. You end up doing all the work and taking all the risk. Screw that. Leave it to the professionals and focus on site design and implementation.
That should have read:
In the Tinkertoy Computer, Dewdney covers the well known Tic-Tac-Toe playing Tinkertoy computer built by MIT, as well as a fanciful computer based on ropes and pulleys featuring an inverter, an OR gate, an AND gate, a multiplexer, a flip-flop, and an adder.
In A.K.Dewdney's Scientific American column (and subsequent books) he documents many unusual mechanical computing devices that solve a range of computationally expensive problems. In a chaptered entitled Analog Gadgets in the book The Armchair Universe he describes several mechanical computing devices that solve a number of many computationally expensive problems (with some caveats):
* a spaghetti powered sorting machine
* computing a convex hull using a board, nails and a rubber band
* finding the shortest path joining two nodes of a graph network using brass rings and string
* finding the minimum Steiner-tree for any number of nodes using pegs sandwiched between parallel sheets of plastic dipped in a soup solution
* a prime calculator using a pair of lasers and parallel mirrors
In the next chapter, Gadgets Revisited, he presents:
* a way to compute the best-fit trend of a graph using a board, nails, rubber bands, and a rod
* finding the longest path through a network of nodes using segments of string knotted together
* computing the forth power of a number based on the principle of elasticity and the deflection of a bar of aluminum
* or the third power of a number by using the same principle applied to a weight placed on the bar
* light refraction computed with soap film suspended between stepped surfaces
* optimal position for a refinery using a board with holes, string, a brass ring, and weights proportional to the cost of transportation for each source of raw material
* number averaging using interconnected graduated glass cylinders
* cubic polynomial solver using a water tank, a balance beam, two scalepans, and a variety of solids to represent terms of the equation: a cone for x, a paraboloid for x and cylinder for cx, and a sphere for d
Once again school kids without rights are being exposed and desensitized to horrible human rights abuses they will learn to accept as "normal" when they become adults. The sickening jackbooted dehumanization of America marches on.
He's a lousy joke at best.
Hmmm. That doesn't sound any better than the Atari Mindlink developed in the early eighties. That thing was reported to give players terrible headaches.
http://www.atarimuseum.com/videogames/consoles/2600/mindlink.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_Mindlink