Hmm. I don't think that applies to the general population. I know a lot of people who have pirated copies of Windows, but I don't know anyone who has bothered to apply whatever the crack is to validate as genuine. Most people really just don't care.
I wonder if this has anything to do with Microsoft refusing IE7 upgrades to non-genuine Windows installations. Everyone I know who has a pirated copy of Windows (mostly self-made boxes) uses Firefox, while nearly everyone I know who has a genuine copy of Windows (mostly laptops) uses IE7.
I'm not sure why they refuse it to non-genuine users anyway. I can understand security patches, but this? No one is going to go out and buy Windows just to use IE7.
It seems everything Microsoft does to curb piracy these days hurts its monopoly.
It looks to me like holding it by gripping the forward stock would make the situation much worse. I assume you'll keep your forward thumb on top of the controller, which would make it quite easy to reach all of the buttons, but I'm not really sure how comfortable (or accurate) that will be. Still, I'm really excited about Metroid Prime 3.
The bundle with the PSP doesn't contain any UMD movies; it comes with the Family Guy Freakin' Sweet Collection, which is just five episodes (mind you, the best five episodes of the first three seasons.) It also comes with Daxter and a 1 GB memory stick.
The most exciting announcement about the entire conference for me was the new PSP's TV-out feature. I was disappointed that it didn't have TV-out on release several years ago, and I am very excited about it now. It's finally like a portable console, and the portability is finally a reason to actually buy UMD content. It's one of the things that is making me consider getting one someday, and the $199 bundle does seem like a great deal.
Also, Echochrome looks totally awesome. If I don't play that game soon, I think I might die.
As soon as this application is open source, it's going to become something I installed on my box and played around with for a while. I don't think you understand what Launchpad is.
Part of the reason Canonical was in no hurry to ready Launchpad for open source was that it wasn't really meant to be hosted on a variety of different servers or instanced for each project, like Trac; it's a centralized system designed to host many projects concurrently, like SourceForge. In short, there was only supposed to be one Launchpad.
The fact that people wanted Launchpad open source to host their own projects meant that Canonical first had to design standards for communication between different instances of the software. This should allow you to, say, host your own project on your own Launchpad, but still have bug reports communicated automatically with Ubuntu.
Both are analog holes. If it's not a digital copy, it's not a quality copy, and thus not in a position to compete with the real thing. Do you want to pirate an mpeg of some guy taping his television screen, or do you want to bittorrent the actual dvd contents? Hi, I live in Canada. Recently, the MPAA has banned pre-screenings in theaters across *our entire country* because they think they lose too much business to camrips done in Canada.
There are thousands upon thousands of people pirating some guy taping the movie theater screen. Yes, people really do want to watch camrips. If DVDs couldn't be digitally ripped, then people would just tape their TVs, and pirates would absolutely download that; the only reason you don't see camrips still being downloaded for movies about to be released on DVD is because DRM DOESN'T WORK!
Yeah, that definitely wouldn't happen. The cable itself isn't that dense, so it has a very low terminal velocity, and most of the cable would burn up on re-entry. In any case a safety procedure in such a situation might be to simply release the cable from the bottom; the whole cable would end up in orbit, where it could conceivably be reattached.
The reason is because it slows down your control over the battlefield. The unit proportions in Starcraft were designed with a static camera in mind; that means battlecruisers, which in reality would be enormous ships, are really only six or so marines long on screen. This means you can individually control your marines and your battlecruisers simultaneously without worrying about the zoom level; you can give split-second decisions to each of your units, and the game view lends itself perfectly to that.
On the other hand, Supreme Commander was designed with a zoom camera in mind, which means they took the liberty of using more realistic proportions for their units. In theory you could control all your troops on the same zoom level, but in reality the zoom camera is anything but optional; the unit proportions force you to zoom in and out to give your troops individual tactical orders. It makes even the simplest tactical commands, such as focus firing, difficult, tedious, and extremely slow to execute.
>>I hope that Blizzard quits defining 'skill' as how fast a player can click, especially when we're using the mouse to play. [...] And while it is 'athletic' in one sense, I am not fond of risking carpal tunnel syndrome just so I can be good at a computer game.
People would certainly define skill similarly in first person shooters. Most competitive video games are much more about manual dexterity than actual strategy. That whole comment is pretty childish; it's like saying "I hope the Olympics quits defining 'speed' as how fast a person can run, because I'm not fond of risking muscle damage just so I can be good at an athletic sport." If you don't want to play it this way, you don't have to, but realize that skill is defined simply in terms of who can win.
The group limit is not really a hindrance to professional players. You're ignoring one of the most useful hotkeys; alt+click on a unit selects the last group it was in. That means you just have to box select sets of 12 and set them to move apart, then alt+click one zergling from each group and send them to attack-move. A good player can send fifty zerglings off to attack simultaneously in less than a second. You can do it much more slowly if you line up your groups and send them in reverse order of distance, so the back units catch up to the front ones as you send out the orders.
Many of the ideas you put forth encourage people to be bad at the game. For example, load balancing is a terrible idea because your barracks are often scattered across the map (and this is especially the case as Zerg). By your own admission you want to forget about the strategic placement of your barracks and just amalgamate them into one big rally point. That's the opposite of how you should play. This is why professional players set their buildings to control groups rather than masses of units so they can instantly train units at specific locations on the map. Similarly, free unit queues encourage players to queue up fifty marines and just wait indefinitely as they pour out, rather than paying attention to their resource usage and finding the right opportunity to spend them. Again, the opposite of how you should play.
Your whole post really just speaks of inexperience. I don't mean to offend, but you need to make better use of hotkeys, and you just need more practice at playing the game. I can understand if you don't want to have do these things, but don't ask the developers to dumb down the game so that you can compete with us. The reason we play Starcraft is because these are the nuances that differentiate skilled players from unskilled ones; this is what makes Starcraft a competitive game.
The developer walkthrough is running at a 16x9 resolution, which I found to be quite strange since widescreen monitors are 16x10; I assume it was set up that way to match a widescreen projector rather than a monitor. The screenshots at IGN are all 4x3. This probably means the game is designed to run at any resolution and aspect ratio. In 3D games, though, the resolution is irrelevant to the size of objects on the screen. You're interested in the zoom level, and it doesn't look like that will be something you'll be able to modify.
Scrolling around can be a pain, but zooming around would probably be much worse. The developers for Starcraft 2 cited the zoom camera in Supreme Commander as being one of the things that held it back from being a competitive game. Good Starcraft players don't generally find panning to be a hindrance because there are a large number of hotkeys that can help you navigate around the map.
Holding ALT and pressing a number will center the view on that control group, as will double tapping the number. Holding CTRL and pressing F2 to F4 will save the current view to that function key, and pressing that function key will restore it to the saved view. Pressing space after any event will center the view on that event. Clicking the unit photo in the UI centers the view on the currently selected units. We'll likely see nearly identical hotkeys in Starcraft 2. At tournament levels, some players use the arrow keys to pan, because the half-second it takes to move the mouse to the edge of the screen leaves your units at the hands of the enemy for far too long;-)
Of course he'd have legally done better to just say that, but then it wouldn't be as effective. The whole point is that companies fight against fair use, and will intimidate you into giving up your right to fair use (by, say, not using the whole logo) to avoid getting a lawsuit that will bankrupt you even if you're right.
You should have watched the whole thing; it was much more than a mere explanation of copyright, as the summary claims.
Sorry, I didn't realize you were the same person as GGP. I thought you were someone else jumping into the discussion.
The reason you may find the game rush-centric is because that's very much how the AI plays. The AI is very good at the opening game, but quite mediocre later on. You're correct in that the game does involve a lot of rushing, but rushes are quite defensible, and the game is much more than an early unit race.
I do agree though that the game would certainly have benefited from different AI settings. If it's any consolation, many people I know (including myself) found the AI far too difficult for beginners, and found it hard to get into the game; the computer will often obliterate new players without giving them the chance to explore the tech tree. Once you're into it though, it's quite possible to single-handedly defeat multiple teamed computers.
AI difficulty levels were introduced in Warcraft III, however, so hopefully we'll see the same in Starcraft 2.
If you're considering "quality" only to be the taste of the food, then your assessment is biased. McDonalds has great service, and is an extremely fast meal. It's also affordable; it's significantly less costly than going to an actual restaurant.
If you lump all of these things together into say, "value", then McDonalds really does have good value, and its popularity is indicative of that. The fact that I can walk in, pay six dollars, and be eating a full meal within five minutes makes up for the fact that it's not as tasty as an expensive steak I'd have to wait half an hour for.
The popularity of something is always indicative of the fact that it has some quality that less popular alternatives lack (even if that quality is simply viral, like MySpace). In the case of RTS games, gamers are not typically inclined to "go with what's hip", but rather, they go with what they find competitive and fun. Rather than looking for what qualities Starcraft has that Warcraft III doesn't, you've simply dismissed it based on a biased opinion of popularity.
None of these gameplay changes you state are improvements to the RTS genre. The squad model in Dawn of War is terrible. It helps bad players who can't control their units properly, but it's a big hindrance to high-level players who micromanage their troops. I would much prefer if they had an option to turn it off so I could control my troops individually. I can't stress this enough; no one who actually likes Starcraft would want to use the squad model.
Resurrecting heroes in Warcraft 3 is widely considered to be a mistake rather than a step forward for real-time strategy.
The resource model in Dawn of War also puts tremendous limits on gameplay dynamics involving resource gathering. Resource attacks in Starcraft involve running past base defenses to slaughter SCVs; planting siege tanks on an elevation within range of probes; burrowing drones or recalling probes to instantly recover from a resource attack; dropshipping an assault force directly into the opponent's mineral field to bypass defenses; and even in the gameplay footage for Starcraft 2 we already see even deeper resource gameplay with jetpack troopers coming in from behind to assault a group of mining probes. That's just considering resource combat; something as simple as deciding how many resource gatherers to build is tremendously important in Starcraft and varies widely based on the strategy you play. The Starcraft resource model is very deep, and the vanilla flag model in Dawn of War or Company of Heroes is just boring in comparison.
Call me a fanboy if you want, but everything about Dawn of War is terribly simplistic. It feels like a game made for bad gamers.
Besides, if all RTS games adopted all the same features, we'd just have a bunch of different variations on the same basic game. I'd rather have different games.
I live in a townhouse with five other guys. There's an extra computer in our living room for when friends come over. For the past month, pretty much every day we've been playing 4-7 player games of the original Starcraft. We'll play a game, then we'll all sit down and watch the replay, talk excitedly about the game for an hour, then play another one again and again.
The reason we play Starcraft instead of the myriad of new RTS games available is because the gameplay mechanics in Starcraft are damn near perfect. Starcraft's greatest strength is how competitive it is; how there is ALWAYS more to learn and more to practice, and how a tournament player can obliterate even a veteran player without breaking a sweat. I think the game's competitiveness would suffer from more realistic gameplay mechanics.
Sorry to say, but you may be in the minority as far as wanting different gameplay goes. We really do want more of the same thing.
Actually, it shouldn't need to repartition the drive or make a custom ISO at all: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/install.exe (don't worry, this is a wiki page, not a link to an executable)
That's the spec for a simple Windows executable you download which would automatically download a Ubuntu hard drive image via bittorrent and install GRUB. No need to deal with pesky CDs. It's a small step from there to integrate the migration assistant into it.
Excuse me, how would such a knowledge help anyone but Microsoft developers? No one but those developers have access to source code, certainly not Slashdot readers.
Should we not help Microsoft developers, just because this is Slashdot?
Some people are interested in the problem and in how to fix it. Believe it or not, some people actually like Windows.
I'm certainly not one of those people; I've been using Ubuntu for two years. I'm just saying, they exist, hence the question. Besides, even if we're not Windows users, most of us would like to see Windows more secure; everyone would benefit from having less botnets around.
They should've given developers a year (or so) to update their applications to be aware of privileges They did. Vista was in beta-testing for a long time.
I pine for the days of being able to uninstall a program fully from my system by deleting its folder. Or being able to simply copy a configuration file from one computer to the next and having all my settings preserved. You do realize you just described Linux, right?
I kind of like the concept of UAC. So do we. That's why it was invented twenty five years ago. Save yourself the headache, order your free CDs here.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm. I don't think that applies to the general population. I know a lot of people who have pirated copies of Windows, but I don't know anyone who has bothered to apply whatever the crack is to validate as genuine. Most people really just don't care.
I wonder if this has anything to do with Microsoft refusing IE7 upgrades to non-genuine Windows installations. Everyone I know who has a pirated copy of Windows (mostly self-made boxes) uses Firefox, while nearly everyone I know who has a genuine copy of Windows (mostly laptops) uses IE7.
I'm not sure why they refuse it to non-genuine users anyway. I can understand security patches, but this? No one is going to go out and buy Windows just to use IE7.
It seems everything Microsoft does to curb piracy these days hurts its monopoly.
Here ya go:
e r.jpg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Accessory_zapp
http://e3nin.nintendo.com/wii_accessories.html
It looks to me like holding it by gripping the forward stock would make the situation much worse. I assume you'll keep your forward thumb on top of the controller, which would make it quite easy to reach all of the buttons, but I'm not really sure how comfortable (or accurate) that will be. Still, I'm really excited about Metroid Prime 3.
The bundle with the PSP doesn't contain any UMD movies; it comes with the Family Guy Freakin' Sweet Collection, which is just five episodes (mind you, the best five episodes of the first three seasons.) It also comes with Daxter and a 1 GB memory stick.
The most exciting announcement about the entire conference for me was the new PSP's TV-out feature. I was disappointed that it didn't have TV-out on release several years ago, and I am very excited about it now. It's finally like a portable console, and the portability is finally a reason to actually buy UMD content. It's one of the things that is making me consider getting one someday, and the $199 bundle does seem like a great deal.
Also, Echochrome looks totally awesome. If I don't play that game soon, I think I might die.
Part of the reason Canonical was in no hurry to ready Launchpad for open source was that it wasn't really meant to be hosted on a variety of different servers or instanced for each project, like Trac; it's a centralized system designed to host many projects concurrently, like SourceForge. In short, there was only supposed to be one Launchpad.
The fact that people wanted Launchpad open source to host their own projects meant that Canonical first had to design standards for communication between different instances of the software. This should allow you to, say, host your own project on your own Launchpad, but still have bug reports communicated automatically with Ubuntu.
Nope, you're thinking of robots. Only cloned robots rebel against their creators.
Take a look at this: http://www.torrentspy.com/search?query=cam
There are thousands upon thousands of people pirating some guy taping the movie theater screen. Yes, people really do want to watch camrips. If DVDs couldn't be digitally ripped, then people would just tape their TVs, and pirates would absolutely download that; the only reason you don't see camrips still being downloaded for movies about to be released on DVD is because DRM DOESN'T WORK!
Dude, have you even *played* MechWarrior?
Actually the Higgs won't prove anything about GUTs. It's part of the Standard Model.
Yeah, that definitely wouldn't happen. The cable itself isn't that dense, so it has a very low terminal velocity, and most of the cable would burn up on re-entry. In any case a safety procedure in such a situation might be to simply release the cable from the bottom; the whole cable would end up in orbit, where it could conceivably be reattached.
The reason is because it slows down your control over the battlefield. The unit proportions in Starcraft were designed with a static camera in mind; that means battlecruisers, which in reality would be enormous ships, are really only six or so marines long on screen. This means you can individually control your marines and your battlecruisers simultaneously without worrying about the zoom level; you can give split-second decisions to each of your units, and the game view lends itself perfectly to that.
On the other hand, Supreme Commander was designed with a zoom camera in mind, which means they took the liberty of using more realistic proportions for their units. In theory you could control all your troops on the same zoom level, but in reality the zoom camera is anything but optional; the unit proportions force you to zoom in and out to give your troops individual tactical orders. It makes even the simplest tactical commands, such as focus firing, difficult, tedious, and extremely slow to execute.
>>I hope that Blizzard quits defining 'skill' as how fast a player can click, especially when we're using the mouse to play. [...] And while it is 'athletic' in one sense, I am not fond of risking carpal tunnel syndrome just so I can be good at a computer game.
People would certainly define skill similarly in first person shooters. Most competitive video games are much more about manual dexterity than actual strategy. That whole comment is pretty childish; it's like saying "I hope the Olympics quits defining 'speed' as how fast a person can run, because I'm not fond of risking muscle damage just so I can be good at an athletic sport." If you don't want to play it this way, you don't have to, but realize that skill is defined simply in terms of who can win.
The group limit is not really a hindrance to professional players. You're ignoring one of the most useful hotkeys; alt+click on a unit selects the last group it was in. That means you just have to box select sets of 12 and set them to move apart, then alt+click one zergling from each group and send them to attack-move. A good player can send fifty zerglings off to attack simultaneously in less than a second. You can do it much more slowly if you line up your groups and send them in reverse order of distance, so the back units catch up to the front ones as you send out the orders.
Many of the ideas you put forth encourage people to be bad at the game. For example, load balancing is a terrible idea because your barracks are often scattered across the map (and this is especially the case as Zerg). By your own admission you want to forget about the strategic placement of your barracks and just amalgamate them into one big rally point. That's the opposite of how you should play. This is why professional players set their buildings to control groups rather than masses of units so they can instantly train units at specific locations on the map. Similarly, free unit queues encourage players to queue up fifty marines and just wait indefinitely as they pour out, rather than paying attention to their resource usage and finding the right opportunity to spend them. Again, the opposite of how you should play.
Your whole post really just speaks of inexperience. I don't mean to offend, but you need to make better use of hotkeys, and you just need more practice at playing the game. I can understand if you don't want to have do these things, but don't ask the developers to dumb down the game so that you can compete with us. The reason we play Starcraft is because these are the nuances that differentiate skilled players from unskilled ones; this is what makes Starcraft a competitive game.
The developer walkthrough is running at a 16x9 resolution, which I found to be quite strange since widescreen monitors are 16x10; I assume it was set up that way to match a widescreen projector rather than a monitor. The screenshots at IGN are all 4x3. This probably means the game is designed to run at any resolution and aspect ratio. In 3D games, though, the resolution is irrelevant to the size of objects on the screen. You're interested in the zoom level, and it doesn't look like that will be something you'll be able to modify.
;-)
Scrolling around can be a pain, but zooming around would probably be much worse. The developers for Starcraft 2 cited the zoom camera in Supreme Commander as being one of the things that held it back from being a competitive game. Good Starcraft players don't generally find panning to be a hindrance because there are a large number of hotkeys that can help you navigate around the map.
Holding ALT and pressing a number will center the view on that control group, as will double tapping the number. Holding CTRL and pressing F2 to F4 will save the current view to that function key, and pressing that function key will restore it to the saved view. Pressing space after any event will center the view on that event. Clicking the unit photo in the UI centers the view on the currently selected units. We'll likely see nearly identical hotkeys in Starcraft 2. At tournament levels, some players use the arrow keys to pan, because the half-second it takes to move the mouse to the edge of the screen leaves your units at the hands of the enemy for far too long
Of course he'd have legally done better to just say that, but then it wouldn't be as effective. The whole point is that companies fight against fair use, and will intimidate you into giving up your right to fair use (by, say, not using the whole logo) to avoid getting a lawsuit that will bankrupt you even if you're right.
You should have watched the whole thing; it was much more than a mere explanation of copyright, as the summary claims.
Sorry, I didn't realize you were the same person as GGP. I thought you were someone else jumping into the discussion.
The reason you may find the game rush-centric is because that's very much how the AI plays. The AI is very good at the opening game, but quite mediocre later on. You're correct in that the game does involve a lot of rushing, but rushes are quite defensible, and the game is much more than an early unit race.
I do agree though that the game would certainly have benefited from different AI settings. If it's any consolation, many people I know (including myself) found the AI far too difficult for beginners, and found it hard to get into the game; the computer will often obliterate new players without giving them the chance to explore the tech tree. Once you're into it though, it's quite possible to single-handedly defeat multiple teamed computers.
AI difficulty levels were introduced in Warcraft III, however, so hopefully we'll see the same in Starcraft 2.
If you're considering "quality" only to be the taste of the food, then your assessment is biased. McDonalds has great service, and is an extremely fast meal. It's also affordable; it's significantly less costly than going to an actual restaurant.
If you lump all of these things together into say, "value", then McDonalds really does have good value, and its popularity is indicative of that. The fact that I can walk in, pay six dollars, and be eating a full meal within five minutes makes up for the fact that it's not as tasty as an expensive steak I'd have to wait half an hour for.
The popularity of something is always indicative of the fact that it has some quality that less popular alternatives lack (even if that quality is simply viral, like MySpace). In the case of RTS games, gamers are not typically inclined to "go with what's hip", but rather, they go with what they find competitive and fun. Rather than looking for what qualities Starcraft has that Warcraft III doesn't, you've simply dismissed it based on a biased opinion of popularity.
None of these gameplay changes you state are improvements to the RTS genre. The squad model in Dawn of War is terrible. It helps bad players who can't control their units properly, but it's a big hindrance to high-level players who micromanage their troops. I would much prefer if they had an option to turn it off so I could control my troops individually. I can't stress this enough; no one who actually likes Starcraft would want to use the squad model.
Resurrecting heroes in Warcraft 3 is widely considered to be a mistake rather than a step forward for real-time strategy.
The resource model in Dawn of War also puts tremendous limits on gameplay dynamics involving resource gathering. Resource attacks in Starcraft involve running past base defenses to slaughter SCVs; planting siege tanks on an elevation within range of probes; burrowing drones or recalling probes to instantly recover from a resource attack; dropshipping an assault force directly into the opponent's mineral field to bypass defenses; and even in the gameplay footage for Starcraft 2 we already see even deeper resource gameplay with jetpack troopers coming in from behind to assault a group of mining probes. That's just considering resource combat; something as simple as deciding how many resource gatherers to build is tremendously important in Starcraft and varies widely based on the strategy you play. The Starcraft resource model is very deep, and the vanilla flag model in Dawn of War or Company of Heroes is just boring in comparison.
Call me a fanboy if you want, but everything about Dawn of War is terribly simplistic. It feels like a game made for bad gamers.
Besides, if all RTS games adopted all the same features, we'd just have a bunch of different variations on the same basic game. I'd rather have different games.
Official Website: Starcraft2.com
The CGI trailer and gameplay footage are available in high quality versions (and in english) at the following link:
Movies
It uses BitTorrent the same way WoW patches work, hence the executables. The downloader for Windows seems to work perfectly using WINE.
Also, screenshots! Screenshots
I live in a townhouse with five other guys. There's an extra computer in our living room for when friends come over. For the past month, pretty much every day we've been playing 4-7 player games of the original Starcraft. We'll play a game, then we'll all sit down and watch the replay, talk excitedly about the game for an hour, then play another one again and again.
The reason we play Starcraft instead of the myriad of new RTS games available is because the gameplay mechanics in Starcraft are damn near perfect. Starcraft's greatest strength is how competitive it is; how there is ALWAYS more to learn and more to practice, and how a tournament player can obliterate even a veteran player without breaking a sweat. I think the game's competitiveness would suffer from more realistic gameplay mechanics.
Sorry to say, but you may be in the minority as far as wanting different gameplay goes. We really do want more of the same thing.
Actually, it shouldn't need to repartition the drive or make a custom ISO at all: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/install.exe (don't worry, this is a wiki page, not a link to an executable)
That's the spec for a simple Windows executable you download which would automatically download a Ubuntu hard drive image via bittorrent and install GRUB. No need to deal with pesky CDs. It's a small step from there to integrate the migration assistant into it.
Sounds like Core War.
Should we not help Microsoft developers, just because this is Slashdot?
Some people are interested in the problem and in how to fix it. Believe it or not, some people actually like Windows.
I'm certainly not one of those people; I've been using Ubuntu for two years. I'm just saying, they exist, hence the question. Besides, even if we're not Windows users, most of us would like to see Windows more secure; everyone would benefit from having less botnets around.
Shit, parent is me. Login didn't take.