Most of the games mentioned by OP are included in Debian.
It was "mazewars" and "search" I wasn't too sure about... Never played 'em and couldn't find 'em. But I saw the post mention sail - I used to play Sail back in college, so I knew that one wasn't a "lost treasure"...
enough sterilizing fluid to kill any rouge viruses
Rouge? I can't say I've heard of any red ones before, but that might be because they are small enough that the wavelength of light is such that colour has no meaning.
Don't be silly! If the viruses weren't different colours you wouldn't know what color pills to drop on 'em to make 'em disappear!
I put that extra vowel in "colour" just for you. XD
Could the NES have brought us "Katamari Damashii"? Could the SNES have brought us "Little Big Planet"?
I bet you could make fun versions of both of those games for the SNES, although the collaborative aspect of the latter would be missing. NES, not so much, but SNES has hardware scaling and rotation, as well as much more advanced scrolling. We were able to represent some pretty far-out graphical concepts before 3D came along.
Mode 7 is reasonable for a 3-D effect but it can't get you a 3-D environment - and you need a 3-D environment of some kind for Katamari - otherwise there's no decisions to be made in the game, just roll forward...
It'd probably be possible to do it as an isometric-view environment - though I think trying to draw the ball as it accumulates more objects could be a real problem. How would you do that? Accumulate snapshots of the collected sprites on a background layer and "roll" the ball by scrolling the layer around in a circular aperture? Or animate a couple hundred sprites moving around the surface of the ball? The fact that it's possible to implement the game on the SNES (even if, IMO, it wouldn't be a very good version of the game) is why I said "Katamari on the NES" instead of "Katamari on the SNES"...
But Little Big Planet without the physics engine, without the create mode - that wouldn't be LBP at all.
Anyway, my contention here is simply this: Yeah, it's true, you don't need powerful hardware to make a fun game, and having powerful hardware doesn't automatically make your game fun. But better hardware doesn't just get you better graphics - it gives you the ability to create things you couldn't create before.
People always seem to forget that when they talk about how better hardware doesn't equate to fun... Why have anything more powerful than the NES in that case? (And even that's generous, I could've said VCS) You've got to have hardware powerful enough to support what you're doing - there's no getting around that. So why is the Wii exactly enough computing power for gaming? I think the more powerful hardware in the PS3 is actually rather advantageous...
There are a variety of Rogue-like games out there that have been ported to current platforms, but the other ones, especially sail, search and mazewars, I haven't seen in years and years.
sail, at least, is part of the "bsdgames" package on Debian.
Is there really any useful purpose to decoding Sumerian clay tablets, or analysing dockyard records from the 18th Century? One of the things that differentiates civilised human beings from all other living things on this planet is that we study history and preserve things from the past. Perhaps it just doesn't need justification, it is part of what we are.
Are those Unix influences, or influences from an OS predating Unix? i.e. the same source that caused Unix to adopt that style? You make it sound like there was nothing before Unix.
Almost nothing. Unix was created on The Second Day.
A better game is very subjective. Better != fun. People want fun quality games (ie: bug free).
More polygons, higher rez textures, and a more complicated AI all pushing hardware to its limits don't make a better game; it just makes a potentially prettier game.
That depends on the game.
One "CPU muscle feature" that I think has been used to great effect lately is the physics engine. That capability simply doesn't exist without a certain level of power from the CPU. The use of a physics engine is essential to games like "World of Goo" (which does run on Wii, of course) or "Little Big Planet" - in both cases, the physics engine is simply the framework that establishes the rules of the game.
In the case of this Prince of Persia game, it sounds like the AI character in question is one who follows you around constantly. Among other things, I guess this character does things like stop you when you're about to jump off a dangerous ledge... This basic functionality could be provided without too complicated an AI (assuming you can't talk to them or anything, and assuming their obstacle-avoidance logic doesn't get too intricate... In which case they might sometimes have to mysteriously teleport out of the obstacle that's got them stuck to get back to the player's location...) - But, if you're going to have an NPC who is constantly present in the game, it's a little unnatural for them to not be at least slightly convincing as a real in-game person as opposed to just a device to enforce the game's structure...
My basic point in the post you replied to, however, was simply this: when you're working with limited hardware, you need to spend more time optimizing code to get something to run on it, than if you targeted a more powerful platform. That extra time spent optimizing the code, restructuring the levels so you can swap them from disc more efficiently, etc. - instead of spending all that time essentially fighting the machine to get it to do something close to the limit of its capabilities, you could spend that time making the game itself better. But that means that the game you're trying to create has to be a little bit farther from the absolute limit of the machine's capabilities: you either need a more powerful machine or a less elaborate game.
Never said that this expression evaluated to false. (And would it kill you to use a sentence here? I mean, really...)
But - when you're dealing with hardware of limited capabilities, you have to work harder to write and properly optimize the code than you would to write the equivalent program on a more powerful machine. When you're facing strict deadlines, that's a real problem.
From TFA it sounds like, in this case, the game just wouldn't have been a good fit for the hardware limitations of the Wii anyway. They would have had to change the game more drastically than they'd like - I can respect their desire not to make a half-assed port.
Personally I find that when there's a game I can invest myself in a bit, the payoff, the enjoyment I derive from doing well in the game, is worth it. For instance, I really enjoyed the old simulator-style games that were on the PC, before the first Playstation really took off. The games weren't as "smooth" and as generally accessible as console games tended to be - the player was expected to immerse themselves, to a certain extent, in the intricacies of the game. And that was part of the fun, part of the fantasy.
Saying that games are not meant to be complex - it ignores the long tradition of very popular complex games. RPGs, CCG, really old stuff like Chess or Go - games that either have a lot of complex rules, or a simple set of rules from when complex strategies emerge.
The AI of Elika was highly advanced and required a lot of processing power; the world size and dynamic loading, the draw distance, the number of polygons in the characters... If we had done a Wii version, it would have been toned down, probably linear; it wouldn't have been an open-world game, and so it would have been a very different experience."
Then the platform is not your target. The Wii isn't about pushing the latest fast hardware to its very limits, just so you can push a ridiculous amount of polygons per second onto the screen. It is about making games that are fun... and you can CERTAINLY do that within the confines of just about any machine. Remember the IBM XT? NES? Gameboy? Some of the best games I ever played had nothing but text, running on a 10mhz processor.
More powerful machines give you the potential for different kinds of fun. Could the NES have brought us "Katamari Damashii"? Could the SNES have brought us "Little Big Planet"? No. These games are simply, fundamentally beyond the capabilities of that hardware. Does this mean those machines weren't (or aren't) fun? Of course not - because when those machines were current people wrote a lot of fun games for them within the limitations of that hardware. But each time new powerful machines appear, they bring with them games that put that power to good use.
Now, someone writing games today can write software to fit the confines of the Wii, or they can develop for the other consoles. The point of TFA is that the two approaches don't blend well - when you write a game with the capabilities of the 360 or PS3 in mind, it doesn't translate well to the Wii. This is no different from saying that an NES game design wouldn't translate well to the Atari 2600 - the kinds of gameplay features you can incorporate and the quality of the overall experience are very much tied to the capabilities of the hardware.
There is nothing at all wrong with working within the constraints of a system and eeking out the absolute best you can from 'inferior' hardware.
Infact, having limited headroom forces innovative and new methods of doing what was taken for granted before.
Well, sure, but I think some people would rather spend that time making a better game, rather than fighting the limitations of the hardware, trying to get a game written for today's hardware to run on a less powerful machine.
If you design a game for a machine with 360 specs, it doesn't run very well on the Wii without redesign.
In other news, Mattes tried running Wii Sports on the 360, but it provided a "Watered down" experience.
The issue here is that the less computing/rendering power a gaming console, the harder you have to work to write a program that is equivalent to one you just wrote for a more powerful console. If the machine isn't as powerful, you have to spend more time optimizing your program to get the same level of performance.
If you connected a Wii controller to a 360, then rewriting Wii Sports to work on the 360 wouldn't be tremendously challenging from a technical standpoint. From a hardware standpoint there's nothing Wii can do that 360 or PS3 can't.
The end result of this is that game creators have less freedom in terms of what they can create on the Wii, because the limitations of the hardware are more of an imposition than on the other platforms.
Tell that to the black and Jewish victims of lynching in the south. Yes, in many cases vigilantism can be a form of law enforcement. The problem though is that when a group of citizens answers to no one the potential for abuse and stepping beyond law enforcement is definitely there. And while many of those lynched had committed capital offenses, most hadn't.
Indeed. I think the question to remember here is, who watches the watchmen?
Actually Palm has a history of providing unencrypted ROM images for their devices and explaining how to create your own ROM dumps from a device especially to registered developers. There are also numeroustools designed to allow people to customize these ROM images and install them on their devices some of which are supported by the device manufactures.
I doubt releasing the root image for the Pre was unintentional and I highly doubt Palm will do anything to discourage people customizing the root image and adding their own applications.
That was a whole different era. Since then Palm has been restructured a half dozen times, and fallen quite hard from their former glory as the #1 handheld platform. The new devices have all kinds of features the old ones didn't - features that some people won't want you to use with complete liberty. I don't think you can take it for granted that they'll continue playing by the rules they followed in the days of POSE and copilot.
Why is the Pre better? Can you give specific examples?
OK here are a few examples of top of my head:
Here's my deal:
For roughly ten years, I've used devices with the old PalmOS (v3-v5). That period is now coming to an end - and after all the bad design decisions they've heaped on in order to let developers continue to work with the same assumptions they used in 1996 (i.e., m68K device with all storage in RAM) the old platform is just a mess.
Now, when looking at the options I've got to replace my old Treo at some point, I'm not liking my options. iPhone isn't a great option for someone who likes to use their phone as a portable computer (what can I say? Sometimes I'm out somewhere with some time to kill, and I want to hack some code...) - Android or webOS could be possibilities, but the primary development models for these devices (i.e. target a VM for the Android, or write a web-style application for webOS) don't seem like a good fit for an embedded device.
The history of PalmOS is one of the things that makes me very hesitant to get a Pre without being very sure they've got their heads screwed on right with regard to the OS architecture this time around. PalmOS was a good design - for a handheld in the late nineties. Where they went wrong was sticking with that model after it stopped making any kind of sense at all. The combination of PACE (as the primary means of running applications on the device) and NVFS is an affront to everything that's decent in the world.
So I really gotta repeat the earlier question: what's so great about webOS? The idea of an OS where you write apps in HTML, CSS, and Javascript sound hideous to me, frankly...
What's that? A giant turtle known as Camara is attacking the city hmmm!? As you know the turtle Camara is attracted to fire I believe we can use this to lure him into a fight with Gaos.
Disney didn't make Anastasia, that was Dreamworks.
Lion King and Aladdin were made over 15 years ago, and Cinderella was made almost 50 years ago.
So, that doesn't do a lot to support the idea that Disney's turning out good films these days... I mean, you look at their more recent stuff - "The Emperor's New Groove", "Treasure Planet", "Chicken Little" - some of that just makes a person want to look away again.
Slashdot Mirror
Most of the games mentioned by OP are included in Debian.
It was "mazewars" and "search" I wasn't too sure about... Never played 'em and couldn't find 'em. But I saw the post mention sail - I used to play Sail back in college, so I knew that one wasn't a "lost treasure"...
enough sterilizing fluid to kill any rouge viruses
Rouge? I can't say I've heard of any red ones before, but that might be because they are small enough that the wavelength of light is such that colour has no meaning.
Don't be silly! If the viruses weren't different colours you wouldn't know what color pills to drop on 'em to make 'em disappear!
I put that extra vowel in "colour" just for you. XD
Ted Turner
CAPTAIN PLAAANEEET!
Could the NES have brought us "Katamari Damashii"? Could the SNES have brought us "Little Big Planet"?
I bet you could make fun versions of both of those games for the SNES, although the collaborative aspect of the latter would be missing. NES, not so much, but SNES has hardware scaling and rotation, as well as much more advanced scrolling. We were able to represent some pretty far-out graphical concepts before 3D came along.
Mode 7 is reasonable for a 3-D effect but it can't get you a 3-D environment - and you need a 3-D environment of some kind for Katamari - otherwise there's no decisions to be made in the game, just roll forward...
It'd probably be possible to do it as an isometric-view environment - though I think trying to draw the ball as it accumulates more objects could be a real problem. How would you do that? Accumulate snapshots of the collected sprites on a background layer and "roll" the ball by scrolling the layer around in a circular aperture? Or animate a couple hundred sprites moving around the surface of the ball? The fact that it's possible to implement the game on the SNES (even if, IMO, it wouldn't be a very good version of the game) is why I said "Katamari on the NES" instead of "Katamari on the SNES"...
But Little Big Planet without the physics engine, without the create mode - that wouldn't be LBP at all.
Anyway, my contention here is simply this: Yeah, it's true, you don't need powerful hardware to make a fun game, and having powerful hardware doesn't automatically make your game fun. But better hardware doesn't just get you better graphics - it gives you the ability to create things you couldn't create before.
People always seem to forget that when they talk about how better hardware doesn't equate to fun... Why have anything more powerful than the NES in that case? (And even that's generous, I could've said VCS) You've got to have hardware powerful enough to support what you're doing - there's no getting around that. So why is the Wii exactly enough computing power for gaming? I think the more powerful hardware in the PS3 is actually rather advantageous...
Shit... if this is gonna be that kind of article, I'm gonna stick my dick in the mashed potatoes.
Fuck the Creationists!
Is there really any useful purpose to be served by dredging this up? Don't these guys have anything better to do?
I say, "Why not?" It's interesting. That's enough.
There are a variety of Rogue-like games out there that have been ported to current platforms, but the other ones, especially sail, search and mazewars, I haven't seen in years and years.
sail, at least, is part of the "bsdgames" package on Debian.
Is there really any useful purpose to decoding Sumerian clay tablets, or analysing dockyard records from the 18th Century? One of the things that differentiates civilised human beings from all other living things on this planet is that we study history and preserve things from the past. Perhaps it just doesn't need justification, it is part of what we are.
Or to restoring old cars...
Are those Unix influences, or influences from an OS predating Unix? i.e. the same source that caused Unix to adopt that style? You make it sound like there was nothing before Unix.
Almost nothing. Unix was created on The Second Day.
void wok(char *phrase1, char *phrase2) {
strfry(phrase1);
strfry(phrase2);
}
I am jealous. Jealous of the rhyme and of the rhyme routine.
A better game is very subjective. Better != fun. People want fun quality games (ie: bug free).
More polygons, higher rez textures, and a more complicated AI all pushing hardware to its limits don't make a better game; it just makes a potentially prettier game.
That depends on the game.
One "CPU muscle feature" that I think has been used to great effect lately is the physics engine. That capability simply doesn't exist without a certain level of power from the CPU. The use of a physics engine is essential to games like "World of Goo" (which does run on Wii, of course) or "Little Big Planet" - in both cases, the physics engine is simply the framework that establishes the rules of the game.
In the case of this Prince of Persia game, it sounds like the AI character in question is one who follows you around constantly. Among other things, I guess this character does things like stop you when you're about to jump off a dangerous ledge... This basic functionality could be provided without too complicated an AI (assuming you can't talk to them or anything, and assuming their obstacle-avoidance logic doesn't get too intricate... In which case they might sometimes have to mysteriously teleport out of the obstacle that's got them stuck to get back to the player's location...) - But, if you're going to have an NPC who is constantly present in the game, it's a little unnatural for them to not be at least slightly convincing as a real in-game person as opposed to just a device to enforce the game's structure...
My basic point in the post you replied to, however, was simply this: when you're working with limited hardware, you need to spend more time optimizing code to get something to run on it, than if you targeted a more powerful platform. That extra time spent optimizing the code, restructuring the levels so you can swap them from disc more efficiently, etc. - instead of spending all that time essentially fighting the machine to get it to do something close to the limit of its capabilities, you could spend that time making the game itself better. But that means that the game you're trying to create has to be a little bit farther from the absolute limit of the machine's capabilities: you either need a more powerful machine or a less elaborate game.
prettier graphics != better game.
Never said that this expression evaluated to false. (And would it kill you to use a sentence here? I mean, really...)
But - when you're dealing with hardware of limited capabilities, you have to work harder to write and properly optimize the code than you would to write the equivalent program on a more powerful machine. When you're facing strict deadlines, that's a real problem.
From TFA it sounds like, in this case, the game just wouldn't have been a good fit for the hardware limitations of the Wii anyway. They would have had to change the game more drastically than they'd like - I can respect their desire not to make a half-assed port.
Games are NOT meant to be complex.
That's just one perspective, isn't it?
Personally I find that when there's a game I can invest myself in a bit, the payoff, the enjoyment I derive from doing well in the game, is worth it. For instance, I really enjoyed the old simulator-style games that were on the PC, before the first Playstation really took off. The games weren't as "smooth" and as generally accessible as console games tended to be - the player was expected to immerse themselves, to a certain extent, in the intricacies of the game. And that was part of the fun, part of the fantasy.
Saying that games are not meant to be complex - it ignores the long tradition of very popular complex games. RPGs, CCG, really old stuff like Chess or Go - games that either have a lot of complex rules, or a simple set of rules from when complex strategies emerge.
The AI of Elika was highly advanced and required a lot of processing power; the world size and dynamic loading, the draw distance, the number of polygons in the characters... If we had done a Wii version, it would have been toned down, probably linear; it wouldn't have been an open-world game, and so it would have been a very different experience."
Then the platform is not your target. The Wii isn't about pushing the latest fast hardware to its very limits, just so you can push a ridiculous amount of polygons per second onto the screen. It is about making games that are fun... and you can CERTAINLY do that within the confines of just about any machine. Remember the IBM XT? NES? Gameboy? Some of the best games I ever played had nothing but text, running on a 10mhz processor.
More powerful machines give you the potential for different kinds of fun. Could the NES have brought us "Katamari Damashii"? Could the SNES have brought us "Little Big Planet"? No. These games are simply, fundamentally beyond the capabilities of that hardware. Does this mean those machines weren't (or aren't) fun? Of course not - because when those machines were current people wrote a lot of fun games for them within the limitations of that hardware. But each time new powerful machines appear, they bring with them games that put that power to good use.
Now, someone writing games today can write software to fit the confines of the Wii, or they can develop for the other consoles. The point of TFA is that the two approaches don't blend well - when you write a game with the capabilities of the 360 or PS3 in mind, it doesn't translate well to the Wii. This is no different from saying that an NES game design wouldn't translate well to the Atari 2600 - the kinds of gameplay features you can incorporate and the quality of the overall experience are very much tied to the capabilities of the hardware.
There is nothing at all wrong with working within the constraints of a system and eeking out the absolute best you can from 'inferior' hardware.
Infact, having limited headroom forces innovative and new methods of doing what was taken for granted before.
Well, sure, but I think some people would rather spend that time making a better game, rather than fighting the limitations of the hardware, trying to get a game written for today's hardware to run on a less powerful machine.
If you design a game for a machine with 360 specs, it doesn't run very well on the Wii without redesign.
In other news, Mattes tried running Wii Sports on the 360, but it provided a "Watered down" experience.
The issue here is that the less computing/rendering power a gaming console, the harder you have to work to write a program that is equivalent to one you just wrote for a more powerful console. If the machine isn't as powerful, you have to spend more time optimizing your program to get the same level of performance.
If you connected a Wii controller to a 360, then rewriting Wii Sports to work on the 360 wouldn't be tremendously challenging from a technical standpoint. From a hardware standpoint there's nothing Wii can do that 360 or PS3 can't.
The end result of this is that game creators have less freedom in terms of what they can create on the Wii, because the limitations of the hardware are more of an imposition than on the other platforms.
Tell that to the black and Jewish victims of lynching in the south. Yes, in many cases vigilantism can be a form of law enforcement. The problem though is that when a group of citizens answers to no one the potential for abuse and stepping beyond law enforcement is definitely there. And while many of those lynched had committed capital offenses, most hadn't.
Indeed. I think the question to remember here is, who watches the watchmen?
Gamera you say? What? What's that?
Actually Palm has a history of providing unencrypted ROM images for their devices and explaining how to create your own ROM dumps from a device especially to registered developers. There are also numerous tools designed to allow people to customize these ROM images and install them on their devices some of which are supported by the device manufactures.
I doubt releasing the root image for the Pre was unintentional and I highly doubt Palm will do anything to discourage people customizing the root image and adding their own applications.
That was a whole different era. Since then Palm has been restructured a half dozen times, and fallen quite hard from their former glory as the #1 handheld platform. The new devices have all kinds of features the old ones didn't - features that some people won't want you to use with complete liberty. I don't think you can take it for granted that they'll continue playing by the rules they followed in the days of POSE and copilot.
Why is the Pre better? Can you give specific examples?
OK here are a few examples of top of my head:
Here's my deal:
For roughly ten years, I've used devices with the old PalmOS (v3-v5). That period is now coming to an end - and after all the bad design decisions they've heaped on in order to let developers continue to work with the same assumptions they used in 1996 (i.e., m68K device with all storage in RAM) the old platform is just a mess.
Now, when looking at the options I've got to replace my old Treo at some point, I'm not liking my options. iPhone isn't a great option for someone who likes to use their phone as a portable computer (what can I say? Sometimes I'm out somewhere with some time to kill, and I want to hack some code...) - Android or webOS could be possibilities, but the primary development models for these devices (i.e. target a VM for the Android, or write a web-style application for webOS) don't seem like a good fit for an embedded device.
The history of PalmOS is one of the things that makes me very hesitant to get a Pre without being very sure they've got their heads screwed on right with regard to the OS architecture this time around. PalmOS was a good design - for a handheld in the late nineties. Where they went wrong was sticking with that model after it stopped making any kind of sense at all. The combination of PACE (as the primary means of running applications on the device) and NVFS is an affront to everything that's decent in the world.
So I really gotta repeat the earlier question: what's so great about webOS? The idea of an OS where you write apps in HTML, CSS, and Javascript sound hideous to me, frankly...
What's that? A giant turtle known as Camara is attacking the city hmmm!? As you know the turtle Camara is attracted to fire I believe we can use this to lure him into a fight with Gaos.
Why would DRM be listed as a "feature"?
Oh, wrong kind of DRM?
That threw me at first, too. :)
First of all, Pixar has two announced films not mentioned here - The Bear and the Bow and Newt - both of which are original properties.
Wait, isn't that three? The Bear, The Bow, and Newt?
And how many people are in Hamilton Joe Frank an Reynolds anyway?
Disney didn't make Anastasia, that was Dreamworks.
Lion King and Aladdin were made over 15 years ago, and Cinderella was made almost 50 years ago.
So, that doesn't do a lot to support the idea that Disney's turning out good films these days... I mean, you look at their more recent stuff - "The Emperor's New Groove", "Treasure Planet", "Chicken Little" - some of that just makes a person want to look away again.
Moderators should stop posting funny idle.slashdot videos in main site. Whats next, lolcats?
..^^
= oo =
I can haz mod pointz?