If you liked Descent, you are going to love FreeSpace. The Shivans are scarier than shit when you have your first run-in with them, and the story is definitely on par with Marathon and its ilk.
You need to shoot about 3-4 seconds ahead of your opponent and this can only really be done with the energy weapons, because they travel instantaneously.
The usual strategy in Mech3 is to wave a pulse laser around like a wand, until you find the target's "lag spot". Then you have the information you need to compensate for lag, using energy weapons or otherwise. I agree that 3-4 seconds of leading is a bit ridiculous, though.
Just be glad you weren't playing Mech2, where none of the weapons hit instantly, and leading is almost as bad.
I should point out that some Half-Life mods (such as Action Half-Life) have lag compensation. You're aiming at the target (not leading at all), and you are informed of whether you hit the target after the usual round-trip time. The server knows what the state of the game was when you pulled the trigger, and hence, you don't have to compensate for lag because it's doing the job for you, and in a much more reliable way (it's not affected by ping spikes, etc). The server's decision of whether or not you hit the target is based on where the target was when you pulled the trigger, not where it is now. Very sweet. Note that, in AHL, lag compensation only applies to hit-scan weapons (ie, guns), though I imagine this could be done for other kinds of weapons.
This would be great as proposed, but unfortunately, Congress has a remarkable aptitude for screwing things like this up, in a very bad way, no doubt with a little "help" from commercial software vendors looking to kill off Open Source. Specifically, the liability wouldn't follow the money.
Or, in my words, "You cant pass the buck when theres no buck."
Shouldn't that be "You can't pass the buck when there's no one to pass it to" ?
It infuriates me to no end. Think of all the min wage retail jockeys that could be making a little more in a tech job if these corps spread the love around a little more at the cost of some *gasp* accountability in their management ranks.
The problem is, if you are accountable for anything, you are likely to lose your job very quickly, since you'll be used as everyone's whipping boy. Gets real ugly real quick. Since most people don't find homelessness and death by starvation particularly appealing, they make sure they're successfully blamed for as little as possible.
If someone does grow testicles (and a few money trees in the backyard), and declares that "the buck stops here" (sound familiar?), what happens if a problem really is someone else's fault? One can't blame them, because she'll be considered a filthy liar, which is even worse than being blamed for something. Therefore, it is still preferable to blame some worthless sweatshop worker (otherwise known as an "engineer").
This lack of accountability can be and is exploited by senior executives of large corporations to embezzle money or the like; cf. Adelphia, et al. Then the market crashes, execs are taken away in handcuffs everywhere you turn, and so forth. Eventually the situation blows over, everyone forgets all about it, and the cycle begins anew.
You need specialists, or you need to go out of your way to show that your general developers have specific training in multiple fields. If I put out a bid for a website that requires graphics work and a database, then you had BETTER show me that there will be a professional graphic designer and a DBA working on the project, in addition to the web developers. If that's not possible, I need to know the certifications and training that your general developers have had in those fields. "Self Taught" earns your bid a short trip to my circular file.
Translation from PHBese: We are not interested in your skills, nor are we interested in what you can do. We only care about how many famous college professors you've {paid,sucked} off, and how well you did it; we're hoping you'll do that for us, too.
Never ever argue technology with the client. Our datacenter is pretty standardized: We run IPlanet on the webservers, Oracle on the databases, and Solaris as the OS for everything. When we put things out for bid, we make it clear that our websites/software must run on this platform, and that our web sites MUST be written in JSP. Given that, I've never understood why so many bidders see fit to argue the point; "PERL is better!", "Linux is cheaper", "Apache is more stable", "IIS is the web standard", and other pitches may or may not be true, but I really don't care. If my RFP says that you must use technologies A, B, & C, then that bid had better use those technologies. Anything else gets you dumped.
See any room for improvement? Suggest it! The bidders who won the last eval I chaired partially did so because they improved our own requirements. When the developers saw our RFP and saw the requirments and features, they realized a better way to solve one of our problems and suggested it. We were so impressed with the improved suggestion that they got the project.
Translation from PHBese: We want suggestions for improvement, but since we have all the answers, you'll be told to F yourself if you actually make any suggestions.
What about goodies? Maintentance? Most good bids (read:expensive)
Translation from PHBese: The more you charge for your services, the more credible you are. We don't care if you can actually get the job done, as long as you charge us an arm and a leg for trying. It makes you seem competent, since we wouldn't know actual competency from something that emerged from a horse's posterior. Oh, and we like to contradict ourselves a lot.
Be professional. Bids will often have bidder meetings where some of the top proposers get called in to answer questions or clarify their proposals. If you get called to one of these, you need to remember this: These are not your friends, or your bosses, or your co-workers, they are your potential clients and you need to treat them as such. This means no bluejeans and t-shirts with Google logos on them. Put on some slacks and a tie (and a coat if it's a large or formal institution), and toss that big pile of papers in a briefcase. If you can't present yourself properly, how can we expect you to rpesent us properly?
Translation from PHBese: Leave your engineers in the sweatshop. We talk to other PHBs only. It's a plus if you're wearing a necktie; we hate people whose brains are functioning properly.
What's so ludicrous about that? I thought of something similar when I was a kid (13ish, IIRC), albeit using conventional explosives instead of nuclear blasts.
I don't think Starcraft is a very good example. Blizzard is essentially the Microsoft of multiplayer games; their usual strategy for dealing with cheating is by using lawyers, not engineers.
They are neither "very well defined", nor are the specifications "public" in a sense particularly useful for open source implementations, nor do those define anything that could be considered a "core feature set".
How so?
This is yet another indication that Sun is even more of a control freak than Microsoft, and it makes Java an unattractive target for open source efforts.
Then explain why GCJ, Kaffe, Classpath, et al exist.
On the other hand, in the final season of ST:TNG, they promoted him to godhood , which might be an ego-rush.
Being able to move to and through "other planes of existence" does not imply godhood. Pretty close, though. I'm sure Q soiled himself when he found out about that.;)
There's plenty of prior art, but nobody in their right mind is going to point any of it out. Slashdot readers don't want to point it out because they benefit from such a patent, and those who have committed the act don't want to point it out because they lose their patents if they do.
First of all, before I comment on what you said, I must state that my position is that the patent system should be abolished entirely, as it no longer serves its original purpose: to give individual (or small groups of) inventors the ability to protect their invention(s). Today, it's mostly large companies that get patents. Therefore, the patent system is not serving its purpose. What would you do if one of your possessions were to stop working and it seemed impossible to repair it? Since the patent system is obviously not going away anytime soon, I have some ideas as to how to improve it a bit.
there are already people paid to do this very job. The guy who let this through was not doing his job, maybe he should be replaced.
They're overloaded, so they are being pushed to move patents through quickly. This should not be the case. Instead, the examiners should examine each patent thoroughly, and if there are more patent applications than the examiners can handle, you either hire more examiners (after passing rigorous qualification, of course) or you build up a backlog and tough shit for the applicants.
Maybe what's needed is some sort of incentive system, in which the pay of a reviewer will (among other factors) depend on the number of frivolous patents which he let through.
How about getting fired if any frivolous patents got through? That's generally what happens when a worker fails to do its job. Why let patent examiners off easy? Also, "frivolous patent" has to be defined specifically or this will never work.
Alternatively the company filing a patent should have to pay penalties if it can later be shown that no sufficient research for prior art was made. After all, that's already their obligation.
Sounds good, but you need to be much more specific about what "sufficient research" is. Also, the penalty should be a revocation of the patent with no refund of any fees paid to the patent office regarding that patent (eg, application fees), and forcing the applicant to refund or otherwise make up for all patent license fees, patent cross-licenses, or other considerations given in exchange for the use of that patent.
My justification for all of these strict policies I've proposed is simple. Companies play hard-ball with their patents, so the patent office should play hard-ball with the companies, too.
So, rendering engine improvement is essentially incremental from here?
I believe that, eventually, games will use real-time ray tracers as their rendering engines. This is as different from Quake as Quake is from Doom. It also seems inevitable because of what can be done with it -- most notably lighting/shadow effects, but you also get true curved surfaces, as opposed to the (admittedly very good) approximations used by Quake 3's curved surface support. Ray tracing is also easily SMP-able.
Or perhaps I'm completely off kilter and ray tracing is counterproductive and/or unnecessary. Anyone care to comment?
I seem to recall that "Descent" had arbitrary 3D (along with MAPPING!, which the Quake series simply doesn't have)
Quake's lack of an automap is a design decision, not a technological limitation. This was probably to increase the fear/realism factor of the game. All of the engine facilities for doing an automap in Quake are already there -- freeze the game state, don't draw models (monsters, items, etc), ignore PVS, draw only brushes the player has already seen, go noclip (without affecting the player's real position, of course), maybe do some other stuff, and draw everything in wireframe. This is, of course, an oversimplification of what needs to be done, but the point here is that it's well within John Carmack's power to do it.
Descent used the same trick, only it used two raycasts, so instead of boxes, you got tunnels.
And there was no problem doing room-over-room, positioning ships above/below each other, etc. It may not have been true 3D (I always thought it was until now), but it was damn close.
He also has a keen understanding of 3D graphics and networking. Remember that he's the one that designed Quake's client-server architecture, some variant of which is used by (almost?) every modern FPS. He also designed Quake's rendering engine -- software 3D (complete with texture mapping, particles, dynamic lighting, etc) on a fast 486 and barely a sprite in sight! How cool is that?
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know about you, but I would prefer being shot to being killed by starvation and exposure.
If you liked Descent, you are going to love FreeSpace. The Shivans are scarier than shit when you have your first run-in with them, and the story is definitely on par with Marathon and its ilk.
Just be glad you weren't playing Mech2, where none of the weapons hit instantly, and leading is almost as bad.
I should point out that some Half-Life mods (such as Action Half-Life) have lag compensation. You're aiming at the target (not leading at all), and you are informed of whether you hit the target after the usual round-trip time. The server knows what the state of the game was when you pulled the trigger, and hence, you don't have to compensate for lag because it's doing the job for you, and in a much more reliable way (it's not affected by ping spikes, etc). The server's decision of whether or not you hit the target is based on where the target was when you pulled the trigger, not where it is now. Very sweet. Note that, in AHL, lag compensation only applies to hit-scan weapons (ie, guns), though I imagine this could be done for other kinds of weapons.
What prevents copyright and patents from being applied to Open Source?
This would be great as proposed, but unfortunately, Congress has a remarkable aptitude for screwing things like this up, in a very bad way, no doubt with a little "help" from commercial software vendors looking to kill off Open Source. Specifically, the liability wouldn't follow the money.
If someone does grow testicles (and a few money trees in the backyard), and declares that "the buck stops here" (sound familiar?), what happens if a problem really is someone else's fault? One can't blame them, because she'll be considered a filthy liar, which is even worse than being blamed for something. Therefore, it is still preferable to blame some worthless sweatshop worker (otherwise known as an "engineer").
This lack of accountability can be and is exploited by senior executives of large corporations to embezzle money or the like; cf. Adelphia, et al. Then the market crashes, execs are taken away in handcuffs everywhere you turn, and so forth. Eventually the situation blows over, everyone forgets all about it, and the cycle begins anew.
Capitalism at its finest.
What's so ludicrous about that? I thought of something similar when I was a kid (13ish, IIRC), albeit using conventional explosives instead of nuclear blasts.
There's plenty of prior art, but nobody in their right mind is going to point any of it out. Slashdot readers don't want to point it out because they benefit from such a patent, and those who have committed the act don't want to point it out because they lose their patents if they do.
My justification for all of these strict policies I've proposed is simple. Companies play hard-ball with their patents, so the patent office should play hard-ball with the companies, too.
So, they've patented the function of the Reply button?
If you have a mailing list with 500 subscribers, then you have 500 CCs in each message's header. Can you say waste of bandwidth?
Or perhaps I'm completely off kilter and ray tracing is counterproductive and/or unnecessary. Anyone care to comment?
He also has a keen understanding of 3D graphics and networking. Remember that he's the one that designed Quake's client-server architecture, some variant of which is used by (almost?) every modern FPS. He also designed Quake's rendering engine -- software 3D (complete with texture mapping, particles, dynamic lighting, etc) on a fast 486 and barely a sprite in sight! How cool is that?