The problem isn't the leveling, it's the grinding. In most CRPGs, the game play (as I see it) goes like so:
Walk into a maze whose primary purpose is to force you to do a lot of exploring (read: walking around aimlessly) so that you have to fight a whole lot of random encounters with puny little enemies. Fighting in these random encounters is more or less mindless, because they're puny and their real purpose isn't to present a challenge so much as to level your party up. This makes you powerful enough to go on to the next maze. . .
If the entire purpose of the "forced maze" is killing monsters to gain XP so I can level, then yes I agree with you. However I don't think the exploration aspect is so bad, as long as its not totally monotonus. Irenicus' dungeon, which had 'maze' like aspects in BGII for example, I thought was done quite well. I have personally never played the the FF series but from what I garner from other people playing it, there did seem to be alot of monotony at certain points. I remember watching my roomate playing playign one time and he had to repeatedly feed this bird for some reason. The worst part was that whenever he fed the bird there was this little cutscene that played which lasted maybe 10 seconds. And he had to do that like 20 times in a row!
Personally I think you should only gain XP for completing quests. Then you could have lots of mini-quests like 'rescue X ' where X is guarded by a pair of ogres. To appease the fighter types you could have the option of slaying the ogres. On the other hand there might be another way to do it, like say sneaking in and releasing the prisoner, and sneaking back out (I love to sneak). Or scaring them off somehow, or maybe bribe/charming them. Another quest could involve 'deliver X to Y' (I know, I know a FedEx quest!) but doing so might involve fighting your way through hostile territory.
Remember when the grocery stores use to ask for paper or plastic? Now paper bags have all but disappeared. I think the reason for those commercials was there was perception, true or not, that plastics were not environmentally friendly. I remember a commercial claiming that plasticcs could be recycled more easily than paper and cost lest energy to produce, which was supposed to offset for the fact that they didn't biodegrade in landfills like paper did.
Physics and biology are the same. Well, there's some chemistry stuck in between the two, but you can't have chemistry without physics!
Hardly. It is possible to understand things at a macroscopic level without reducing them to interactiosn of smaller parts. Ultimate understanding of course, does boil down to reductionism, but to say that you cannot understand something at all without reductionism is a gross overstatement.
I think a good way to do a Trek game would be something along the lines of Deus Ex, a plot-driven FPS/RPG hybrid. Deus Ex FPS action was not all that great. What made it a great game was the plot and character interaction.
Do they use more than 18% of the expenditure of State?
If not, on what ethical basis do we justify taking from them what they or their parents have earned and spending it on ourselves?
Because the rich have more stake in the state keeping the status quo intact (i.e. enforcing property rights, repelling foreigh takeover) than the poor. Not to mention many often receive indirect benefits in the form of subisidies, etc. from the government.
Actually there is somewhat of a point, since the ultimate source of biological energy is the sun, comparing its efficiency to other methods that involve solar is fair game. Unless they are actually talking about putting the protein *in the vehicle*, to produce hydrogen on the fly, then I would be impressed. If you have an efficient way to produce hydrogen from water on the fly, you wouldn't have to have store hydrogen directly which is extremely difficult to stora at the necessary energy densities for vehicular automotion (either needs extremely low temperature or extremely high pressures)
What do you think a physics professor's reaction would be if they had a student who said they still "believed" in the theory of the lumineferous ether?
As an American of Italian ancestry, I also think it will be a good long time before a Southern European president will be elected. Just wait and see how the media chews up Giuliani.
It has nothing to do with him being of Italian descent. Giuliani is far too liberal to get past the primaries. Think of the Republican version of Joe Lieberman. In addition his personal life is going to turn him off from the "family values" voters.
Re:Read "The origins of exceptional abilities"
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There was this famous pianist (I forgot which) who said something like this
"If I dont practice for a day, my critics notice. If I don't practice for two days, my audience notirces. If I don't practice for threee days, I notice."
I agree with your point about KoToR. Everyone sane person should have been carrying ragned weapons with the sole exception of Jedi. When I first encountered the 'longsword' I was like WTF am I playing Star Wars or D&D. And the explation for this was really contrived 'we can't discharge weapons on the brigde, and um, guns don't work well at close range - and err, they've got energy shields and we only know how to build the special energy-shield bypassing technology into melee weapons'. Uhuh. Melee was way more powerful than any ranged weapons, and that to me is just wrong in a sci-fi setting (except for the really, really special cases like Jedi).
About the instant-kill thing - you can have energy shields, and stormtrooopers have armor. It would be cool if they had graphic effects of the armor pieces being blasted off or the energy shield being successively weakened. That would help with that 'suspension of disbelief' problem of creatures not being insta-killed with a powerful energy blast. But it should probably knock them on their asses.
Good point. Another thign that used to intrigue me about human evolution is how crummy our physical abilities are compared to most animals that would somehow compete with us. Why didn't the tribes of early humans all get eaten by lions or other speedy predators? And on the predator side, how would we have been able to catch up with zebras and antelopes? We are slow, weak and are poor tree climbers. It puzzled me until I learned about how much more endurant we are compared to most other animals. Theres not many mammals that are going to be able to run a marathon like we do. Endurance is not going to help the prey very much unless they are of comparabnle speed to their predators. But if a predator can run down and track the prey until they are exhausted(as some hunter-gather tribes in African have been documented to do), then it becomes a advantage even if the prey is alot faster than the predator. As for defending against predators, group size was probably key. A pack of 5-10 humans reasonably equipped even with simple weapons would probably be enough to take on a single lion or other dangerous predator, or at least strongly discrouage them from attacking. I guess eyesight would also help with avoiding predators. My own pet theory is the reason why male humans have better nightvision and females have better color discrimination is that men stood watch at night and while females kept an eye out for predators during the day while the men were hunting. Thats also probably why men tend to be nightowls (I know I am:-)
Well Adolf I hope you refuse antibiotics the next time you get a infection. Afterall lacking resistance to a disease counts is as a much a 'genetic defect' as much as anything else. Actually, you should probably refuse a good chunk of medical treatment almost all ailments have some genetic component.
Automobiles have to fight against wind drag and rolling friction, for which there are theoretical miniumums, so the minimum energy consuption is alot greater than zero even assuming no/little acceleration.
The obvious solution to this is to have a separate "Tutorial" for players that want to do it. I don't know why game developers insist on having you go through the Tutorial mission. Seems like such an easy thing to do.
Indefinite patents? Don't think so. You can patent a new idea that builds on the work of any patent (indeed, that was one of the reasons for the patent system), but so can anybody else.
To be fair, even if it were someone else, voting machines that submit the vote in electronic form simply have fundamental problems with accountability. Yes, Diebold has had some atrocious engineering problems, but even if you took the best group of engineers on the planet and asked them to replace the pencil or hole punch machine with a fully electronic form, they'd still have a vastly more exploitable system than the traditional system.
Why don't you have the best of both worlds. After voting on an electronic box, a paper receipt is printed and reviewed by the voter who slips it into a ballot box.
Kernels also crash from drivers causing the hardware to do Very Bad Things. The USB driver can DMA a mouse packet right over the scheduler code or page tables, and there isn't a damn thing that memory protection can do about it. CRASH, big time. A driver can put a device into some weird state where it locks up the PCI bus. Say bye-bye to all devices on the bus. A driver can cause a "screaming interrupt", which is where an interrupt is left demanding attention and never gets turned off. That eats 100% CPU. If the motherboard provides a way to stop this, great, but then any device sharing the same interrupt will be dead.
Isn't this what a microkernel avoids, as most drivers are run in user mode?
31:17 Now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him.
31:18 But all the women children, that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves.
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The problem isn't the leveling, it's the grinding. In most CRPGs, the game play (as I see it) goes like so: Walk into a maze whose primary purpose is to force you to do a lot of exploring (read: walking around aimlessly) so that you have to fight a whole lot of random encounters with puny little enemies. Fighting in these random encounters is more or less mindless, because they're puny and their real purpose isn't to present a challenge so much as to level your party up. This makes you powerful enough to go on to the next maze. . .
If the entire purpose of the "forced maze" is killing monsters to gain XP so I can level, then yes I agree with you. However I don't think the exploration aspect is so bad, as long as its not totally monotonus. Irenicus' dungeon, which had 'maze' like aspects in BGII for example, I thought was done quite well. I have personally never played the the FF series but from what I garner from other people playing it, there did seem to be alot of monotony at certain points. I remember watching my roomate playing playign one time and he had to repeatedly feed this bird for some reason. The worst part was that whenever he fed the bird there was this little cutscene that played which lasted maybe 10 seconds. And he had to do that like 20 times in a row!
Personally I think you should only gain XP for completing quests. Then you could have lots of mini-quests like 'rescue X ' where X is guarded by a pair of ogres. To appease the fighter types you could have the option of slaying the ogres. On the other hand there might be another way to do it, like say sneaking in and releasing the prisoner, and sneaking back out (I love to sneak). Or scaring them off somehow, or maybe bribe/charming them. Another quest could involve 'deliver X to Y' (I know, I know a FedEx quest!) but doing so might involve fighting your way through hostile territory.
Remember when the grocery stores use to ask for paper or plastic? Now paper bags have all but disappeared. I think the reason for those commercials was there was perception, true or not, that plastics were not environmentally friendly. I remember a commercial claiming that plasticcs could be recycled more easily than paper and cost lest energy to produce, which was supposed to offset for the fact that they didn't biodegrade in landfills like paper did.
Recycle.
I don't see any reason why all those coke bottles can't just be sterlized and used again with new labels.
Physics and biology are the same. Well, there's some chemistry stuck in between the two, but you can't have chemistry without physics!
Hardly. It is possible to understand things at a macroscopic level without reducing them to interactiosn of smaller parts. Ultimate understanding of course, does boil down to reductionism, but to say that you cannot understand something at all without reductionism is a gross overstatement.
I think a good way to do a Trek game would be something along the lines of Deus Ex, a plot-driven FPS/RPG hybrid. Deus Ex FPS action was not all that great. What made it a great game was the plot and character interaction.
I dont't thats intersting at all. Virtually all instrument readings are analog, until they are digitized by an ADC.
Well in the U.S. this is done in the form of the estate tax. Although it is not perfect it ensures that you can't have a pseudo- aristocracy.
Do they use more than 18% of the expenditure of State?
If not, on what ethical basis do we justify taking from them what they or their parents have earned and spending it on ourselves?
Because the rich have more stake in the state keeping the status quo intact (i.e. enforcing property rights, repelling foreigh takeover) than the poor. Not to mention many often receive indirect benefits in the form of subisidies, etc. from the government.
Actually there is somewhat of a point, since the ultimate source of biological energy is the sun, comparing its efficiency to other methods that involve solar is fair game. Unless they are actually talking about putting the protein *in the vehicle*, to produce hydrogen on the fly, then I would be impressed. If you have an efficient way to produce hydrogen from water on the fly, you wouldn't have to have store hydrogen directly which is extremely difficult to stora at the necessary energy densities for vehicular automotion (either needs extremely low temperature or extremely high pressures)
What do you think a physics professor's reaction would be if they had a student who said they still "believed" in the theory of the lumineferous ether?
As an American of Italian ancestry, I also think it will be a good long time before a Southern European president will be elected. Just wait and see how the media chews up Giuliani.
It has nothing to do with him being of Italian descent. Giuliani is far too liberal to get past the primaries. Think of the Republican version of Joe Lieberman. In addition his personal life is going to turn him off from the "family values" voters.
There was this famous pianist (I forgot which) who said something like this
"If I dont practice for a day, my critics notice. If I don't practice for two days, my audience notirces. If I don't practice for threee days, I notice."
I agree with your point about KoToR. Everyone sane person should have been carrying ragned weapons with the sole exception of Jedi. When I first encountered the 'longsword' I was like WTF am I playing Star Wars or D&D. And the explation for this was really contrived 'we can't discharge weapons on the brigde, and um, guns don't work well at close range - and err, they've got energy shields and we only know how to build the special energy-shield bypassing technology into melee weapons'. Uhuh. Melee was way more powerful than any ranged weapons, and that to me is just wrong in a sci-fi setting (except for the really, really special cases like Jedi).
About the instant-kill thing - you can have energy shields, and stormtrooopers have armor. It would be cool if they had graphic effects of the armor pieces being blasted off or the energy shield being successively weakened. That would help with that 'suspension of disbelief' problem of creatures not being insta-killed with a powerful energy blast. But it should probably knock them on their asses.
Good point. Another thign that used to intrigue me about human evolution is how crummy our physical abilities are compared to most animals that would somehow compete with us. Why didn't the tribes of early humans all get eaten by lions or other speedy predators? And on the predator side, how would we have been able to catch up with zebras and antelopes? We are slow, weak and are poor tree climbers. It puzzled me until I learned about how much more endurant we are compared to most other animals. Theres not many mammals that are going to be able to run a marathon like we do. Endurance is not going to help the prey very much unless they are of comparabnle speed to their predators. But if a predator can run down and track the prey until they are exhausted(as some hunter-gather tribes in African have been documented to do), then it becomes a advantage even if the prey is alot faster than the predator. As for defending against predators, group size was probably key. A pack of 5-10 humans reasonably equipped even with simple weapons would probably be enough to take on a single lion or other dangerous predator, or at least strongly discrouage them from attacking. I guess eyesight would also help with avoiding predators. My own pet theory is the reason why male humans have better nightvision and females have better color discrimination is that men stood watch at night and while females kept an eye out for predators during the day while the men were hunting. Thats also probably why men tend to be nightowls (I know I am :-)
Warren Spector - Thief, Deus Ex. I guess you're right it has been almost a decade (Thief was 1998 I believe)
Well Adolf I hope you refuse antibiotics the next time you get a infection. Afterall lacking resistance to a disease counts is as a much a 'genetic defect' as much as anything else. Actually, you should probably refuse a good chunk of medical treatment almost all ailments have some genetic component.
Automobiles have to fight against wind drag and rolling friction, for which there are theoretical miniumums, so the minimum energy consuption is alot greater than zero even assuming no/little acceleration.
In case anyone missed the reference, this was paraphrase from the movie Braveheart. (substituting "Longshanks" for "Bill Gates")
The obvious solution to this is to have a separate "Tutorial" for players that want to do it. I don't know why game developers insist on having you go through the Tutorial mission. Seems like such an easy thing to do.
Indefinite patents? Don't think so. You can patent a new idea that builds on the work of any patent (indeed, that was one of the reasons for the patent system), but so can anybody else.
20 years down the road ...
the patent will have expired
How about
4. Relist directory contents when the window gains focus
Why don't you have the best of both worlds. After voting on an electronic box, a paper receipt is printed and reviewed by the voter who slips it into a ballot box.
Isn't this what a microkernel avoids, as most drivers are run in user mode?
I think he's referring to slaughter of the Midianites in Numbers 31: