"I don't care about Windows users" is a reasonable stance for someone who cares about Free Software to have. Consider, most people that care about FOSS want FOSS to be highly successful; Microsoft is clearly an enemy of the FOSS world-view. By not advertising their product or giving it widespread Windows boosting, they (in a small amount) hurt Microsoft.
On the flip side, by having a Windows client at all, they make it so that a FOSS user who is being forced into using Windows (for a job, because of some specific application that's forcing him to, setting stuff up for relatives, whatever) can still use the program they want to, have custom scripts/settings for, etc.
I'm just waiting for the/. Libertarian crowd to insist that they have every right to spam, that it's a viable business model, that the "free market" should be allowed to do whatever it wants, etc. After all, there's really not much difference between spam ads and an ad on a page- consider the following: 1. The advertisement is unsolicited. 2. The recipient is forced to expend his/her bandwidth on the ad. 3. Dealing with the advertisement (deleting it, blocking it, clicking through it if it's an interstitial) takes time away from the recipient.
So really, what's the difference? Why is one advertisement method "acceptable" and the other "unacceptable"? If you actually look at it rationally, there's no difference. It's just a different delivery method.
(Granted, the *content* of the spam- fake pharmaceuticals and body "enhancements" that wouldn't pass FDA muster - is a problem. That's not my point.)
My guess as to why the mentality is "web ads good, spam bad"? Corporate profits- it's okay to waste the time of individuals, but the instant you do something that starts to cut into corporate profits, it's bad! The fact that attacking spam helps the average individual is just incidental.
Metroid Prime 3 isn't really a FPS. It's more of a first-person Zelda game, with less well-defined "dungeons" (there's a lot of backtracking, needing items from THIS planet in order to do stuff on THAT planet, etc); it just happens to have a FPS viewpoint+combat system.
You're talking about a language in which the utterance "ain't" has been around for centuries and yet it has been insisted for equally long that "ain't ain't a word!"
Japanese has a phonetic "alphabet" of sorts that they use when writing things that don't have a symbol, such as foreign words or placenames.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katakana
Because in that case, it's logical. Well, almost. You could argue that it should read:
Bill said, "Go to the store.".
Because there's really two sentences there (the narrator's sentence as well as Bill's) but actually putting two periods is redundant and I have no problem with the internal period in that case.
Technology requires new words to be invented. Modern technology has also provided a medium, but seriously, new inventions need words for them. "Camera". "Car". "Truck". "Computer". "Ethernet". "Firewire".
Toss in a dictionary of TLA's and you've got an absurd number of words that were invented out of necessity for technology. Granted, some of them (such as FireWire) are trademarked brand names that expanded to the generic term (let's face it, IEEE 1394 just isn't as catchy to the layman) in meaning.
With all that said, if "I can has" lolcat-speak hits mainstream speech I'm going to have to strangle someone.
As much as that annoys me, I must say that they taught that as a valid way of doing things in my elementary school English classes. Then again, I'm one of those Americans that prefers the British style of punctuating quotes. In other words, I write something like:
Johnny said, "Bill went to the store".
whereas the American style is:
Johnny said, "Bill went to the store."
Obviously the former makes more sense because it nests properly: (sentence begins) (quote begins) (quote ends) (sentence ends).
That said, I refuse to put unnecessary u's in words like armor.;)
I played a Tomb Raider demo one time where the character movement was so clunky I opted to turn the character using the camera (which resulted in me using inverted controls for character movement). Oddly enough, I didn't really find it disorienting, but that's probably because I deliberately went out of my way to make the switch.
Re:Don't kill my lame but necessary supporting cas
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Yeah, this is the pits. Final Fantasy Tactics was notable for this (Yardow Fort City- Save Rafa! anyone?) and one trick you could pull was to remove the equipment from one of your characters to make it weaker than Rafa to lure the AI to that character. It didn't always work (depended on what the Ninjas had equipped and throwable) but when it did, Rafa ended up in a relatively safe position and you could deal with the Summoners.
Re:i think the best cutscene option would be this.
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The problem with "save-anywhere" is it can be abused: you could, for instance, save before you perform an attack in an RPG, and if it misses, reload the save and try again. A lot of portable games get it right, though- a quicksave that lets you turn it off for whatever reason, but automatically erases when you load it. You also have the permanent save at save points, of course.
I agree with this, in theory. Furthermore, this should be applicable to the entire game. It should be possible to figure out the entire game without having to resort to "process of elimination" of "Okay, try weapon one... Now try weapon two... etc".
The problem is, if you expend lots of ammo on various weapons or whatever trying to GET the solution, you may as well be better off resetting anyway.
It's sort of a catch-22 as there's really not much of a way to do this without making it too easy/obvious to figure out (like all the old SNES style games with giant flashing "shoot me" spots on the bosses).
The important thing IMO is to make it able to be figured out without having to resort to a FAQ or something- everything in the game should be doable without looking it up in a FAQ. None of this "one-time item in a back alley in city X that you permanently miss if you do something else first" bullshit. (Screw you, FFX.) None of this "there are extras all over the world map but you have to know the coordinates to get there, and there's no ingame hints to the coordinate location" nonsense. (Screw off, FFX.)
In short, a player should be ABLE to do everything- including every sidequest and getting every item- by the time he's done with the game, and there should be no "point of no return" for anything. What a "point of no return" does is it forces the player to either read FAQs or strategy guides the first time they play the game, or to start over if they want a "master file".
Re:Camera limitations due to CPU limitations
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Before someone bites off my face, I should clarify that obviously technological limitations change things. I'm referring to modern gaming, not the days of yore where you HAD to fake 3d and allowing people to look around completely "freely" would completely shatter any illusion of a coherent game world. Ditto for budget constraints in flash games (which is what some people use the term "casual gaming" to refer to)- but in the world of mainstream (read: console games (and quality PC games) that aren't Britney and Barbie or movie tie-ins not named Goldeneye) gaming, you have to give the option for the skilled players to have full control over their character and the camera (if applicable).
Re:Camera limitations due to CPU limitations
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If you're referring to the "2.5D" engine in Doom, Heretic, Hexen, and Duke Nukem 3D, that was an engineering compromise.
I'm referring to games as recent as Metroid Prime 3, which doesn't really let you look up all the way, which has been absolutely irritating in a couple spots so far (note: I'm not finished with the game so no spoilers please!) with areas that you can see but not lock on to with the scanner because you can't go up all the way.
Sometimes it isn't an engineering compromise but a simplicity compromise. If you want to simplify the design down to four directions and a fire button so that you can attract casual players, then what controls the camera?
Allowing for the second joystick to move the camera around doesn't make the game any more "complicated". A casual player that doesn't know about it will simply ignore it, and the skilled players will use it to their advantage. If you're taking out a set of controls that is fairly common among third person view games just to "attract casual players", then you deserve to lose your job for it, because that's a shitty decision- adding it won't scare away any casual players and it will make any parts of the game with bad camera angles better for the skilled players.
Re:Subtitles for deaf people vs. for foreigners
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Games where all the action takes place in a plane such as Mario Bros don't really have a "camera" to speak of that can get stuck behind walls, behind your character, obscuring the view of things, etc. 2d games just don't have camera problems. In first person games, your vision moves the camera- you move and look around. Now, games in first person view which artificially limit your field of view (e.g. you can't look straight up to see what's with the ledge above you) are a problem. Games in third person that have a fixed camera in each area and don't let you either look around in first person or adjust the actual gameplay camera are the problem i was specifically thinking of. Think Metal Gear Solid without the ability to drop into first person to look around.
I assume the radio one does something like left/right is previous/next station and the Forza one has either left/right or up/down as previous/next overlay? My point is that the d-pad (whether in pairs or as a whole pad) is typically used for related functions. It'd be like declaring that the c-buttons on the N64 pad are "4 separate buttons" in a game like Mario 64 where they all serve one shared function- moving the camera. Sure, the PS2 technically has 17 buttons plus two joysticks. They're NEVER used for 17 functions, so there's really only a dozen or so functions at most you have to learn. It's not "buttons" that the player memorizes, after all, but functions.
I just found Odin Sphere "too weird" and had to stop playing it. I'll get back into it at some point, but does the combat ever get better than "hack at the enemies and hope you don't get hit, then back off and charge back in again"?
I find it strange that he complains about "17 buttons" on the PS2/PS3 and Xbox.
L1, L2, L3, R1, R2, R3, triangle, O, X, Square. That's ten. Start and Select make 12. The "analog" button isn't used in gameplay, but that's 13. Then what? Counting the d-pad as 4 buttons is silly because in MOST games it, like the joysticks, simply serves one purpose. Most games ignore L3 and R3, or use it for some function that's tied to the joystick it's on (e.g. using R3 to recenter the camera when the right stick controls the camera).
The start button has done the same thing in every game since the Super Nintendo era, so complaining about it is silly. It's standard. It pauses the game and/or brings up the menu. Period. Select is rarely used and could be gotten rid of. Analog was used on the PSX and some PS2 games for toggling the controller mode (again, standard among every game because it actually applied to the controller), but it had no role in game.
The joystick or d-pad is always used for movement. Granted, some FPS's use the d-pad for things like "switch weapons with left/right and zoom with up/down" in which case it's really two additional functions. (not 4! It's a logical pair and if you know that "right on the d-pad is next weapon" it's obvious that "left on the d-pad is previous weapon"!)
Ultimately, I think the most complicated console game I've played in terms of keymapping are the FPS'es like Timesplitters where all 8 shoulder+face buttons were used and you used the left-right and up-down pairs for weapon swapping and zooming, and the two joysticks did move/strafe and turn/look; making for a total of 12 functions- counting "fire" and "secondary fire" as different concepts.
I don't think 12 functions is too much to expect someone to know for a complicated game.
Compare this to a fighting game, say Virtua Fighter, which technically has an 8-way joystick (or uses the d-pad for 8-way movement) and 3 buttons. Kick, punch, guard. That's simple, right? Well, there's kick+punch, punch+guard, kick+guard, kick+punch, kick+punch+guard, down-forward kick, etc, making for movelists with over 100 commands. Almost every modern fighting game (minus Smash Brothers) has upwards of 50 commands and even Smash Brothers has quite a high number of moves with just "attack, special, shield" thanks to being able to smash them, smash in the air, smash while running, etc.
Shoot, compare it to Nethack, which used nearly every button on the keyboard (lower AND uppercase) for something.
Complaining about console games having "too many buttons" is absurd. PC games are where this "problem" really lies, and if done right (such as Civilization 4- all the buttons were really just shortcut keys to something you could get at through the GUI somehow) it's not a problem.
Granted, if every direction on the d-pad and the 8 general directions on each joystick did different functions that weren't even logically connected, he'd have a complaint, but I'd argue that such a design would be a bad user interface in general because it's not using the expected behavior of the joystick/d-pad.
He's spot on about allowing controller remapping, subtitles for deaf people or kids whose parents make them turn the volume off, forced-death boss fights (I remember one in Chrono Cross where I used a massive number of potions, curative spells, ethers, etc to survive and continually damaged the boss, ultimately giving up and letting him kill me just to see if I was "supposed" to lose it- and promptly reset so I could redo it without losing all the items.)
Also, tutorial levels should damn well be optional. Cutscenes should be skippable (though make it buttonmasher-proof like Xenosaga did) and re-viewable. Not everyone is playing the game for the first time.
I fully disagree with "never ask the player if he wants to save his game", as does anyone else who's ever gotten stuck in Riovanes Castle in Final Fantasy Tactics without a backup save. (Yes, I got through. Yell and Auto-potion are a ridiculous
The Dems should be playing fair and square. The Republicans are so far in a hole you know they're going to be doing dirty tricks, but the Dems have the advantage and should take the moral high ground.
You know, sometimes you should just keep your mouth shut and not make the bad pun. Take the high ground instead, it's not like everyone can be as good a comedian as Carlos Mencia....maybe I'm being a bit too harsh?
Well, of course. The Republican party has shot itself in the foot and has to resort to dirty tricks to get elected- they certainly aren't getting elected any other way. The Dems, on the other hand, have no excuse and should be above this bullshit.
Let's not forget, Diebold voting machines are waiting in the wings also.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, I didn't really read into the xenophobic side of your argument, but the censorship side.
"I don't care about Windows users" is a reasonable stance for someone who cares about Free Software to have. Consider, most people that care about FOSS want FOSS to be highly successful; Microsoft is clearly an enemy of the FOSS world-view. By not advertising their product or giving it widespread Windows boosting, they (in a small amount) hurt Microsoft. On the flip side, by having a Windows client at all, they make it so that a FOSS user who is being forced into using Windows (for a job, because of some specific application that's forcing him to, setting stuff up for relatives, whatever) can still use the program they want to, have custom scripts/settings for, etc.
I'm just waiting for the /. Libertarian crowd to insist that they have every right to spam, that it's a viable business model, that the "free market" should be allowed to do whatever it wants, etc. After all, there's really not much difference between spam ads and an ad on a page- consider the following:
1. The advertisement is unsolicited.
2. The recipient is forced to expend his/her bandwidth on the ad.
3. Dealing with the advertisement (deleting it, blocking it, clicking through it if it's an interstitial) takes time away from the recipient.
So really, what's the difference? Why is one advertisement method "acceptable" and the other "unacceptable"? If you actually look at it rationally, there's no difference. It's just a different delivery method.
(Granted, the *content* of the spam- fake pharmaceuticals and body "enhancements" that wouldn't pass FDA muster - is a problem. That's not my point.)
My guess as to why the mentality is "web ads good, spam bad"? Corporate profits- it's okay to waste the time of individuals, but the instant you do something that starts to cut into corporate profits, it's bad! The fact that attacking spam helps the average individual is just incidental.
Metroid Prime 3 isn't really a FPS. It's more of a first-person Zelda game, with less well-defined "dungeons" (there's a lot of backtracking, needing items from THIS planet in order to do stuff on THAT planet, etc); it just happens to have a FPS viewpoint+combat system.
You're talking about a language in which the utterance "ain't" has been around for centuries and yet it has been insisted for equally long that "ain't ain't a word!"
Japanese has a phonetic "alphabet" of sorts that they use when writing things that don't have a symbol, such as foreign words or placenames.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katakana
Like what?
// ?
System.out.println("Hello, world.");
Because in that case it makes perfect sense.
(code begins) (open paren) (String begins) (sentence begins) (sentence ends) (String ends) (close paren) (code ends)
I have no problem with a sentence like:
Bill said, "Go to the store."
Because in that case, it's logical. Well, almost. You could argue that it should read:
Bill said, "Go to the store.".
Because there's really two sentences there (the narrator's sentence as well as Bill's) but actually putting two periods is redundant and I have no problem with the internal period in that case.
Technology requires new words to be invented. Modern technology has also provided a medium, but seriously, new inventions need words for them. "Camera". "Car". "Truck". "Computer". "Ethernet". "Firewire". Toss in a dictionary of TLA's and you've got an absurd number of words that were invented out of necessity for technology. Granted, some of them (such as FireWire) are trademarked brand names that expanded to the generic term (let's face it, IEEE 1394 just isn't as catchy to the layman) in meaning.
With all that said, if "I can has" lolcat-speak hits mainstream speech I'm going to have to strangle someone.
As much as that annoys me, I must say that they taught that as a valid way of doing things in my elementary school English classes. Then again, I'm one of those Americans that prefers the British style of punctuating quotes. In other words, I write something like: ;)
Johnny said, "Bill went to the store".
whereas the American style is:
Johnny said, "Bill went to the store."
Obviously the former makes more sense because it nests properly: (sentence begins) (quote begins) (quote ends) (sentence ends).
That said, I refuse to put unnecessary u's in words like armor.
Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!
/b/tard neologism is. Technology is driving language now.
Or the Slashdot Effect. Or Fark. Or lollercoaster/roflcopter/lmaonade/whatever the latest
Fuck is actually much more than a verb, you dumb fuck. Now fucking give me the money or I'll blow your fucking brains out.
I played a Tomb Raider demo one time where the character movement was so clunky I opted to turn the character using the camera (which resulted in me using inverted controls for character movement). Oddly enough, I didn't really find it disorienting, but that's probably because I deliberately went out of my way to make the switch.
Yeah, this is the pits. Final Fantasy Tactics was notable for this (Yardow Fort City- Save Rafa! anyone?) and one trick you could pull was to remove the equipment from one of your characters to make it weaker than Rafa to lure the AI to that character. It didn't always work (depended on what the Ninjas had equipped and throwable) but when it did, Rafa ended up in a relatively safe position and you could deal with the Summoners.
The problem with "save-anywhere" is it can be abused: you could, for instance, save before you perform an attack in an RPG, and if it misses, reload the save and try again. A lot of portable games get it right, though- a quicksave that lets you turn it off for whatever reason, but automatically erases when you load it. You also have the permanent save at save points, of course.
I agree with this, in theory. Furthermore, this should be applicable to the entire game. It should be possible to figure out the entire game without having to resort to "process of elimination" of "Okay, try weapon one... Now try weapon two... etc". The problem is, if you expend lots of ammo on various weapons or whatever trying to GET the solution, you may as well be better off resetting anyway. It's sort of a catch-22 as there's really not much of a way to do this without making it too easy/obvious to figure out (like all the old SNES style games with giant flashing "shoot me" spots on the bosses). The important thing IMO is to make it able to be figured out without having to resort to a FAQ or something- everything in the game should be doable without looking it up in a FAQ. None of this "one-time item in a back alley in city X that you permanently miss if you do something else first" bullshit. (Screw you, FFX.) None of this "there are extras all over the world map but you have to know the coordinates to get there, and there's no ingame hints to the coordinate location" nonsense. (Screw off, FFX.) In short, a player should be ABLE to do everything- including every sidequest and getting every item- by the time he's done with the game, and there should be no "point of no return" for anything. What a "point of no return" does is it forces the player to either read FAQs or strategy guides the first time they play the game, or to start over if they want a "master file".
Before someone bites off my face, I should clarify that obviously technological limitations change things. I'm referring to modern gaming, not the days of yore where you HAD to fake 3d and allowing people to look around completely "freely" would completely shatter any illusion of a coherent game world. Ditto for budget constraints in flash games (which is what some people use the term "casual gaming" to refer to)- but in the world of mainstream (read: console games (and quality PC games) that aren't Britney and Barbie or movie tie-ins not named Goldeneye) gaming, you have to give the option for the skilled players to have full control over their character and the camera (if applicable).
I'm referring to games as recent as Metroid Prime 3, which doesn't really let you look up all the way, which has been absolutely irritating in a couple spots so far (note: I'm not finished with the game so no spoilers please!) with areas that you can see but not lock on to with the scanner because you can't go up all the way.
Allowing for the second joystick to move the camera around doesn't make the game any more "complicated". A casual player that doesn't know about it will simply ignore it, and the skilled players will use it to their advantage. If you're taking out a set of controls that is fairly common among third person view games just to "attract casual players", then you deserve to lose your job for it, because that's a shitty decision- adding it won't scare away any casual players and it will make any parts of the game with bad camera angles better for the skilled players.
Games where all the action takes place in a plane such as Mario Bros don't really have a "camera" to speak of that can get stuck behind walls, behind your character, obscuring the view of things, etc. 2d games just don't have camera problems. In first person games, your vision moves the camera- you move and look around. Now, games in first person view which artificially limit your field of view (e.g. you can't look straight up to see what's with the ledge above you) are a problem. Games in third person that have a fixed camera in each area and don't let you either look around in first person or adjust the actual gameplay camera are the problem i was specifically thinking of. Think Metal Gear Solid without the ability to drop into first person to look around.
I assume the radio one does something like left/right is previous/next station and the Forza one has either left/right or up/down as previous/next overlay? My point is that the d-pad (whether in pairs or as a whole pad) is typically used for related functions. It'd be like declaring that the c-buttons on the N64 pad are "4 separate buttons" in a game like Mario 64 where they all serve one shared function- moving the camera. Sure, the PS2 technically has 17 buttons plus two joysticks. They're NEVER used for 17 functions, so there's really only a dozen or so functions at most you have to learn. It's not "buttons" that the player memorizes, after all, but functions.
I just found Odin Sphere "too weird" and had to stop playing it. I'll get back into it at some point, but does the combat ever get better than "hack at the enemies and hope you don't get hit, then back off and charge back in again"?
I find it strange that he complains about "17 buttons" on the PS2/PS3 and Xbox.
L1, L2, L3, R1, R2, R3, triangle, O, X, Square. That's ten. Start and Select make 12. The "analog" button isn't used in gameplay, but that's 13. Then what? Counting the d-pad as 4 buttons is silly because in MOST games it, like the joysticks, simply serves one purpose.
Most games ignore L3 and R3, or use it for some function that's tied to the joystick it's on (e.g. using R3 to recenter the camera when the right stick controls the camera).
The start button has done the same thing in every game since the Super Nintendo era, so complaining about it is silly. It's standard. It pauses the game and/or brings up the menu. Period. Select is rarely used and could be gotten rid of. Analog was used on the PSX and some PS2 games for toggling the controller mode (again, standard among every game because it actually applied to the controller), but it had no role in game.
The joystick or d-pad is always used for movement. Granted, some FPS's use the d-pad for things like "switch weapons with left/right and zoom with up/down" in which case it's really two additional functions. (not 4! It's a logical pair and if you know that "right on the d-pad is next weapon" it's obvious that "left on the d-pad is previous weapon"!)
Ultimately, I think the most complicated console game I've played in terms of keymapping are the FPS'es like Timesplitters where all 8 shoulder+face buttons were used and you used the left-right and up-down pairs for weapon swapping and zooming, and the two joysticks did move/strafe and turn/look; making for a total of 12 functions- counting "fire" and "secondary fire" as different concepts.
I don't think 12 functions is too much to expect someone to know for a complicated game.
Compare this to a fighting game, say Virtua Fighter, which technically has an 8-way joystick (or uses the d-pad for 8-way movement) and 3 buttons. Kick, punch, guard. That's simple, right? Well, there's kick+punch, punch+guard, kick+guard, kick+punch, kick+punch+guard, down-forward kick, etc, making for movelists with over 100 commands. Almost every modern fighting game (minus Smash Brothers) has upwards of 50 commands and even Smash Brothers has quite a high number of moves with just "attack, special, shield" thanks to being able to smash them, smash in the air, smash while running, etc.
Shoot, compare it to Nethack, which used nearly every button on the keyboard (lower AND uppercase) for something.
Complaining about console games having "too many buttons" is absurd. PC games are where this "problem" really lies, and if done right (such as Civilization 4- all the buttons were really just shortcut keys to something you could get at through the GUI somehow) it's not a problem.
Granted, if every direction on the d-pad and the 8 general directions on each joystick did different functions that weren't even logically connected, he'd have a complaint, but I'd argue that such a design would be a bad user interface in general because it's not using the expected behavior of the joystick/d-pad.
He's spot on about allowing controller remapping, subtitles for deaf people or kids whose parents make them turn the volume off, forced-death boss fights (I remember one in Chrono Cross where I used a massive number of potions, curative spells, ethers, etc to survive and continually damaged the boss, ultimately giving up and letting him kill me just to see if I was "supposed" to lose it- and promptly reset so I could redo it without losing all the items.)
Also, tutorial levels should damn well be optional. Cutscenes should be skippable (though make it buttonmasher-proof like Xenosaga did) and re-viewable. Not everyone is playing the game for the first time.
I fully disagree with "never ask the player if he wants to save his game", as does anyone else who's ever gotten stuck in Riovanes Castle in Final Fantasy Tactics without a backup save. (Yes, I got through. Yell and Auto-potion are a ridiculous
Your hope ends here... and your meaningless existence along with it!
The Dems should be playing fair and square. The Republicans are so far in a hole you know they're going to be doing dirty tricks, but the Dems have the advantage and should take the moral high ground.
This is just pathetic.
You know, sometimes you should just keep your mouth shut and not make the bad pun. Take the high ground instead, it's not like everyone can be as good a comedian as Carlos Mencia. ...maybe I'm being a bit too harsh?
Well, of course. The Republican party has shot itself in the foot and has to resort to dirty tricks to get elected- they certainly aren't getting elected any other way. The Dems, on the other hand, have no excuse and should be above this bullshit.
Let's not forget, Diebold voting machines are waiting in the wings also.