Bah! You can't add new planes without rebuilding the dialog box resource and compiling it into flightsim.dll. Weak, Google. But thanks for making everything else so easy to monkey with.
I guess I was a little too excited and posted before checking everything out. There are more files in the controller director for various sticks. And the files are pretty well documented. You can also create a custom HUD and keyboard setups. Damn! You can even change the gravity and atmosphere. And apparently you don't have to modify existing configs, you can add new ones and reference them in the flightsim.ini file (where you can also setup addition airports). Haven't tested that part yet. Fun-fun-fun!
It looks like: A0..3 = the four axes P0 = hat switch DE = elevators DA = ailerons DP_0 = power DR = rudder HAngle = head angle
I swapped A2 and A3 and everything was hunky-dory!
Check out the other *.ini files and see the there are also button press and release events that can be programmed: B0..n = buttons
Proceed at your own peril. And don't be a dummy like me, backup your files first!
If you want to get really adventurous here are the flight characteristics of the available aircraft (these are also plain text files): %PROGRAMFILES%\Google\Google Earth\res\flightsim\aircraft\*.acf
Yeah, it wasn't a full blown flight sim or anything, and it had pretty rotten controls, but it still provided me with a lot of harrowing entertainment. And it has the advantage of working at any flight speed and never stalling. The new flight sim is obviously a lot better in every other way and having joystick support is fantastic (if twitchy) as is being able to look around. They just need to make it configurable and add a helicopter mode and I'd be in heaven (or a smoking crater if you don't believe in that sort of thing).
Maybe that's a nod to subLOGIC's FS2, the first home flight sim to feature real locations and airports. Chicago's Meigs Field was the player's default starting point.
Clearly his obsession with Sonic the Hedgehog fostered his robocidal tendencies. What happened at V-Tech was a warning. It would only have been a matter of time before he took out his rage on a REAL robot. Thankfully the system works and stopped Cho before that could happen.
Pac-Man and Defender are not home computer games. They are arcade games and an arcade game needs to earn its keep one quarter at a time. For an arcade game, if the average length of a game lasts more than 3 minutes it is an utter failure. You are right, these days games are about perceived value. But where you're wrong is any notion that they ever weren't. If I pay a quater to play a game, I'm satisfied if it lasts a couple minutes. Paying a quarter to get a highscore and be the envy of my peers is a very small price pay for temporary immortality in the form of whatever vulgar word I can fit into three letters. If I pay $50 for a computer or console game, you damn well better believe I will not be satisfied playing the first two minutes of the game 200 times no matter how crappy a player I am. The price you pay for a video game is an unwritten contract between you and the developer that quantifies the amount of entertainment you can expect in return for your hard earned dollars. An arcade game is an a la carte experience and if I don't like the game I can stop playing long before I've spent fifty bucks. I agree that video games in general are easier than they used to be but you can't go around comparing arcade games with home video games, they are completely different animals.
In my graphic design studio I use a mouse (cordless Logitech MX Laser 1000, best mouse I've ever used). I've been using a mouse since the eighties and have never had any pain or tiredness from using them. My partner uses a trackball (Kensington Expert Mouse PRO). Neither one of us can understand how the other uses our preferred device. All I know is that trying the paint with a trackball is way more difficult than with a mouse. If all you have to do is click points and move them from place to place, I can see a trackball being a good alternative to the mouse. For fluid, precise "live" movement (like sketching or playing an FPS) a trackball just doesn't work. If you have to do any amount of freehand work, get a LARGE Wacom tablet. Don't skimp on the size, fidelity, or brand name. I have a small 10+ year old Wacom tablet that works as advertised but its tiny active area makes it all but useless. Think BIG.
Surely they aren't going to stop making SCSI drives. The article seems to imply that but I'll chalk it up to pure dumbfuckery on the part of the author.
Where are the inexpensive dev kits you promised last year, Nintendo? Sony and Microsoft are actually supporting homebrew, Nintendo is dragging their feet. I hope I can look forward to interesting and exciting news at E3 with regard to homebrew, dev kits, and VC originals... but I'm not holding my breath. Please live up to your promises, Nintendo, don't turn this into another GameCube broadband adapter.
I do think that it is a shame he won't be debating a real gaming lawyer, that's something I've been wanting for years, that's something that really needs to happen. But otherwise, I can't really agree with you. The gaming press basically doesn't matter. If he gets on CNN, how is the gaming press going to make a difference. Is Adam Sessler going to counter his points on national TV? God, I hope not. The truth is, the majority of the gaming press do more harm than good. These "journalists" are bloggers with woefully vocal sycophantic nitwit commentators that do everything to reinforce the image that gamers are unstable geeks. Fortunately, the only people who read these blogs are other gamers.
JT's worst enemy is himself. Anytime he shows up in the mainstream press (which is actually extremely rare) he makes a fool of himself. That's good, that is something that I approve of. His arguments, if you can call them that, are patently absurd. I think the most recent time he hit the mainstream press was right after the VTech shootings. He and Dr. Phil both tried to play the odds and pin the killer down as a gamer, something that was unsubstantiated and shown not to be true. That might not phase JT, but Dr. Phil won't be making that mistake again. And even if it was true, guess what, most people play videogames. Correlation does not equal causation, and people are more than willing to entertain the idea that a seriously unstable person might enjoy playing a game were you kill people, knowing full well that it wasn't the game that made them unstable. Yeah, the media will continue to talk to JT when something extreme like this happens because he's an entertaining asshat. That doesn't make him relevant.
People aren't as dumb as you seem to think, they see right through JT. And even if they don't, it doesn't matter, because people don't decide policy. However, any time he shills a new law, and that law gets passed because some populist governor wants to make the news doing something "for the children", what happens? The ESA smacks that law right down. It's only then that JT has any semblance of relevance, the only time anyone needs to pay attention to him. Unfortunately, it looks like that needs to continue for a little longer so that other governments will finally wise up to his antics and stop costing their tax-paying constituents hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars. When one of these laws fails it is an embarrassment to all those involved in its passage. Whatever public policy you are referring to doesn't exist, or at least not for more than a couple of days. We have the ESA to thank for that, not the fringe press. JT will never be able to overturn the constitution, and there is no constitutional way he can hurt gaming. He is not as big a threat as everyone seems to think.
The PA folks posted they refuse to talk about "him" anymore and encourage the rest of the media to do the same.
Like Slashdot? Please?? Pretty please???
There is no point in reporting on this guy's every utterance. If and when he actually does some newsworthy (I know, a long shot), fine, report. All this grandstanding is meaningless and is not news.
My understanding is that midway through development, CBM bought Amiga and Atari had their money returned to them.
Basically correct. Amiga ran out of money and needed more. Atari was probably having money problem themselves at this point and stalled. Amiga got desperate and went to Commodore, and Commodore cut Atari a $500,000 check, essentially refunding the money Atari had given Amiga. Atari felt Amiga broke their commitment to deliver the goods and sued Commodore for it.
Slashdot Mirror
Except for the masses of us who have never seen a Wii in the wild, of course.
Wow, I wonder how many people actually get that reference (which, by the way, wasn't created by Carmack)?
http://www.beyond3d.com/content/articles/8/
I'd be 50% satisfied if someone would toss JT into a Schrödinger box.
Except for the crown jewels, Ultima IV, which was released as freeware about ten years ago by Origin under EA stewardship (if you can call it that).
I don't know, he might know plenty about systems. RJR and RMS are practically twins.
Bah! You can't add new planes without rebuilding the dialog box resource and compiling it into flightsim.dll. Weak, Google. But thanks for making everything else so easy to monkey with.
I guess I was a little too excited and posted before checking everything out. There are more files in the controller director for various sticks. And the files are pretty well documented. You can also create a custom HUD and keyboard setups. Damn! You can even change the gravity and atmosphere. And apparently you don't have to modify existing configs, you can add new ones and reference them in the flightsim.ini file (where you can also setup addition airports). Haven't tested that part yet. Fun-fun-fun!
%PROGRAMFILES%\Google\Google Earth\res\flightsim\controller\generic.ini
These others in the same directory seem to be for specific brands of controller:
genius_maxfighter_f16u.ini
speed_link_black_hawk.ini
speed_link_cougar_flightstick.ini
From generic.ini
It looks like:
A0..3 = the four axes
P0 = hat switch
DE = elevators
DA = ailerons
DP_0 = power
DR = rudder
HAngle = head angle
I swapped A2 and A3 and everything was hunky-dory!
Check out the other *.ini files and see the there are also button press and release events that can be programmed:
B0..n = buttons
Proceed at your own peril. And don't be a dummy like me, backup your files first!
If you want to get really adventurous here are the flight characteristics of the available aircraft (these are also plain text files):
%PROGRAMFILES%\Google\Google Earth\res\flightsim\aircraft\*.acf
It's like Christmas!
Yeah, it wasn't a full blown flight sim or anything, and it had pretty rotten controls, but it still provided me with a lot of harrowing entertainment. And it has the advantage of working at any flight speed and never stalling. The new flight sim is obviously a lot better in every other way and having joystick support is fantastic (if twitchy) as is being able to look around. They just need to make it configurable and add a helicopter mode and I'd be in heaven (or a smoking crater if you don't believe in that sort of thing).
Maybe that's a nod to subLOGIC's FS2, the first home flight sim to feature real locations and airports. Chicago's Meigs Field was the player's default starting point.
Basic flight controls have been in the Google Earth options since the beginning. Under Navigation, right there in plane sight. Groan, but true.
Clearly his obsession with Sonic the Hedgehog fostered his robocidal tendencies. What happened at V-Tech was a warning. It would only have been a matter of time before he took out his rage on a REAL robot. Thankfully the system works and stopped Cho before that could happen.
Seems to work, the entire page turned orange.
Pac-Man and Defender are not home computer games. They are arcade games and an arcade game needs to earn its keep one quarter at a time. For an arcade game, if the average length of a game lasts more than 3 minutes it is an utter failure. You are right, these days games are about perceived value. But where you're wrong is any notion that they ever weren't. If I pay a quater to play a game, I'm satisfied if it lasts a couple minutes. Paying a quarter to get a highscore and be the envy of my peers is a very small price pay for temporary immortality in the form of whatever vulgar word I can fit into three letters. If I pay $50 for a computer or console game, you damn well better believe I will not be satisfied playing the first two minutes of the game 200 times no matter how crappy a player I am. The price you pay for a video game is an unwritten contract between you and the developer that quantifies the amount of entertainment you can expect in return for your hard earned dollars. An arcade game is an a la carte experience and if I don't like the game I can stop playing long before I've spent fifty bucks. I agree that video games in general are easier than they used to be but you can't go around comparing arcade games with home video games, they are completely different animals.
I blame Phil Spector. Thank God he's been brought to trial for his crimes.
In my graphic design studio I use a mouse (cordless Logitech MX Laser 1000, best mouse I've ever used). I've been using a mouse since the eighties and have never had any pain or tiredness from using them. My partner uses a trackball (Kensington Expert Mouse PRO). Neither one of us can understand how the other uses our preferred device. All I know is that trying the paint with a trackball is way more difficult than with a mouse. If all you have to do is click points and move them from place to place, I can see a trackball being a good alternative to the mouse. For fluid, precise "live" movement (like sketching or playing an FPS) a trackball just doesn't work. If you have to do any amount of freehand work, get a LARGE Wacom tablet. Don't skimp on the size, fidelity, or brand name. I have a small 10+ year old Wacom tablet that works as advertised but its tiny active area makes it all but useless. Think BIG.
Fuckin-A, Bubba. Somebody MOD that mother up.
Surely they aren't going to stop making SCSI drives. The article seems to imply that but I'll chalk it up to pure dumbfuckery on the part of the author.
Where are the inexpensive dev kits you promised last year, Nintendo? Sony and Microsoft are actually supporting homebrew, Nintendo is dragging their feet. I hope I can look forward to interesting and exciting news at E3 with regard to homebrew, dev kits, and VC originals ... but I'm not holding my breath. Please live up to your promises, Nintendo, don't turn this into another GameCube broadband adapter.
Moore's Law applies to processing power, not economics.
I do think that it is a shame he won't be debating a real gaming lawyer, that's something I've been wanting for years, that's something that really needs to happen. But otherwise, I can't really agree with you. The gaming press basically doesn't matter. If he gets on CNN, how is the gaming press going to make a difference. Is Adam Sessler going to counter his points on national TV? God, I hope not. The truth is, the majority of the gaming press do more harm than good. These "journalists" are bloggers with woefully vocal sycophantic nitwit commentators that do everything to reinforce the image that gamers are unstable geeks. Fortunately, the only people who read these blogs are other gamers.
JT's worst enemy is himself. Anytime he shows up in the mainstream press (which is actually extremely rare) he makes a fool of himself. That's good, that is something that I approve of. His arguments, if you can call them that, are patently absurd. I think the most recent time he hit the mainstream press was right after the VTech shootings. He and Dr. Phil both tried to play the odds and pin the killer down as a gamer, something that was unsubstantiated and shown not to be true. That might not phase JT, but Dr. Phil won't be making that mistake again. And even if it was true, guess what, most people play videogames. Correlation does not equal causation, and people are more than willing to entertain the idea that a seriously unstable person might enjoy playing a game were you kill people, knowing full well that it wasn't the game that made them unstable. Yeah, the media will continue to talk to JT when something extreme like this happens because he's an entertaining asshat. That doesn't make him relevant.
People aren't as dumb as you seem to think, they see right through JT. And even if they don't, it doesn't matter, because people don't decide policy. However, any time he shills a new law, and that law gets passed because some populist governor wants to make the news doing something "for the children", what happens? The ESA smacks that law right down. It's only then that JT has any semblance of relevance, the only time anyone needs to pay attention to him. Unfortunately, it looks like that needs to continue for a little longer so that other governments will finally wise up to his antics and stop costing their tax-paying constituents hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars. When one of these laws fails it is an embarrassment to all those involved in its passage. Whatever public policy you are referring to doesn't exist, or at least not for more than a couple of days. We have the ESA to thank for that, not the fringe press. JT will never be able to overturn the constitution, and there is no constitutional way he can hurt gaming. He is not as big a threat as everyone seems to think.
Dude, get a 1-Up.
Like Slashdot? Please?? Pretty please???
There is no point in reporting on this guy's every utterance. If and when he actually does some newsworthy (I know, a long shot), fine, report. All this grandstanding is meaningless and is not news.
Stop making this guy relevant, he is NOT.
I think I might have gotten my Apple ][+ at the same store as you!