Exactly! What happened to the days of multiplayer-only spawn installs? Starcraft and Diablo II both included this feature, and both games had LAN play (one could argue that LAN play was vital to Starcraft's success, though not really for Diablo II).
Blizzard, you used to be cool. Now you're just a money-grubbing corporate behemoth. If you were trying to lose our respect, congratulations, you did it very well.
The difference is, Blizzard didn't include bear mace in their first iteration of the game, and bear mace was not integral to the success of the first game.
LAN play, on the other hand, was key to Starcraft I's success.
No no, I understand your point. I'm just saying that as long as nerds are willing to do the footwork themselves, which is currently the case, Blizzard has no incentive to do it themselves - and plenty of incentives to not do it themselves.
It's not really fair to compare indie game developers who provide WINE-compatible games to Blizzard. Indie games are generally orders of magnitude smaller than titles like Starcraft II, and if the indie developer knows he's going cross-platform he'll probably do the graphics in OpenGL. Blizzard, on the other hand, might be doing SCII graphics with DirectX, which I'll get to in a minute.
Officially providing a WINE-run version of SCII means they'd be taking on burdens like:
- Supporting not just bugs in SCII, but bugs in WINE that affect SCII adversely. - Supporting complex areas in WINE like the DirectX-to-OpenGL wrapper code, which is probably fairly hairy. - Specifically looking for developers proficient with WINE. - Supporting their version of WINE on dozens of distributions, on both 32-bit and 64-bit architectures. That means lots and lots and lots of QA boxes, and lots and lots and lots of QA people, not to mention the IT overhead of this stuff. - Testing game patches extensively on not just the Windows version of the game but on the WINE version. - Heaven help us if a bugfix in a SCII is different for the WINE version than for the SCII version - divergent codebases with only minor differences are bad news.... and there are probably a dozen more reasons they wouldn't want to do it themselves.
I agree that they could do it, but I can't in good conscience call the reason they don't "sloth".
Then why can't two people behind the same router play a game on battle.net where one of them is hosting? (With very little effort you'll find plenty of posts here on slashdot indicating that if you have two players behind a router, connected to battle.net, and they try to start a Starcraft game that way, one of them can't connect.) I could elaborate on the apparent technical reasons (public vs private IP addresses, for example) but I don't think it's necessary.
My point is, it's a little more complicated than you're making it out to be, and Blizzard has given exactly zero indication that Starcraft II will be any different.
More to the point, if I have 8 guys at my place trying to start a pseudo-LAN game via Battle.net, can Blizzard make it work without making me reconfigure my router? (Assume that a single person playing via Battle.net works fine with that router configuration.) The answer is probably "no", or at least "yes, if X, Y, and Z are true" which is bound to fail for a large portion of gamers. Furthermore, if each client thinks all the other clients have the same external IP address, presumably with different ports (the only way to make this work using the same external IP address), the router has to do a bunch of additional work mapping ports on its external IP to machines on its internal network, whereas a real LAN game would just spit the packets for each internal IP address in the appropriate direction with little effort.
But I can give a better real-world example. At my university, all computers on the network had a unique external IP address assigned to them for all traffic leaving the network (the mapping was handled by the externally-facing routers; our computers only knew about the 10.x.x.x internal address). So, with Blizzard's current plans, if I and my roommate wanted to start a LAN game of Starcraft II, we'd have to do it through Battle.net - but Battle.net would see a unique IP address for each client, and would have no way to know they're on the same LAN. The game clients themselves would have no way of knowing that they're in the same room, either.
That means once we get the game started, the game is not really local - if I'm hosting, my computer sends packets bound for my roommate's computer - which is connected to the same physical switch - all the way to the edge of the network, to the externally-facing routers. They shouldn't go further than that, but why force packets to go all the way across campus when they shouldn't have to go further than the switch handling our two wall sockets?
You might argue that this additional latency is negligible, and you have a valid point. However, I'm sure I could dig up hundreds of hardcore gamers who would insist that the extra latency is noticeable.
Anyway to bring this back on topic, to the SCII team: is there any possibility of WINE support in the next three chapters of SCII in order to run the games on alternative platforms such as LInux/BSD etc?
Do you mean a bundled version of WINE that would theoretically be included with SCII? Most of us who are familiar with WINE on Linux are willing to do the little footwork necessary to get games running on our own installs of WINE, and I'm sure there will be plenty of people out there patching WINE so that SCII works out-of-the-box as much as possible.
From that standpoint, Blizzard doesn't have much incentive to do it themselves.
If that's the question to Blizzard, we already know the answer: They claim it will reduce piracy.
Really, though, that's wishful thinking. As my sibling post by egr points out, games are going to get pirated based on their popularity rather than their alleged pirate-ability. I'd wager that if single player requires authentication to play, then within days of release (if not sooner), the pirated copies will all be able to play single player without authentication. That's just how these things go.
Publishers' estimates about piracy - in terms of lost sales - are based on guesswork and wishful thinking. Unfortunately I think there's no way to show them they're being morons unless nobody buys it and nobody pirates it.
Mod parent up. These are all interesting questions related to the LAN play issue.
(Or even more mundane - I don't want to be unable to play single player just because battle.net is down, or unreachable, or even because I was [hypothetically] misbehaving online.)
He didn't say anything about having a network infrastructure. A cobbled together ad-hoc network running on a couple of 4- or 8-port switches - the staple of most LAN parties - is not a "network infrastructure".
He also didn't say he was on-campus for those LAN parties.
In my case, I did both of these things during college, and only occasionally was I on the university network. It seems you're trying to ignore plausible explanations for your parent post's comments, just so you can splatter him with sarcasm.
Not all of us have phones that can do this, and not all of us that do want to pay the data rates (one cent per KB? Please.) Besides, if you're on a desert island (or in the middle of the desert) what gives you the idea that you'll have a signal on your phone?
You don't need to crash on a desert island to find yourself in a situation where you'd want networked play without access to an internet connection. Some that others have mentioned:
- Staying in a hotel with friends, with either no internet or really expensive internet. - Long layover in an airport. - Visiting family/friends in a somewhat remote connection, where only dialup is available. - On vacation, for example at a cabin near a lake. Spend the day waterskiing, spend the evening playing Starcraft. The cabin is either rented or only occupied part of the year, so it's a waste of money paying for an internet connection there.
But you're forgetting the best part: Starcraft I won't let you play on Battle.net with someone else that's behind the same router as you. Nobody has given any indication that Starcraft II will be any different.
In other words: No more LAN parties. Weren't LAN parties pivotal in Starcraft's success? Why would they shoot themselves in the foot like that?
I reiterate: As long as LAN play (without an internet connection available) is not included with the game, Blizzard has lost my purchase of Starcraft II. (And no, I'm not going to pirate it either.)
In others words. I want to bitch and moan about a feature that I will probably never use.
Speak for yourself. The only way I ever play Starcraft or Diablo II with other people is on a LAN. Taking that away literally takes away most of the reason I'd buy Starcraft II in the first place.
Don't project your lack of "real life" friends onto everyone else. (I know that's rude, but that's how you're coming across.)
You will have to log on to battlenet to show your game is not pirated.
After that the gameplay will be resolved directly between the computers currently playing.
Has Blizzard actually said it will work the way you describe? Starcraft I apparently does, but you still can't play with two computers behind the same NAT, so what gives you the impression that Starcraft II will be any different?
It's things like this that just show we need LAN capability. If I'm at my parents' cabin, where there is no internet connection, and we bring our laptops, it's stupid for Blizzard to say "too bad, you can't play Starcraft II together because we can't babysit you every time you start the game unless you have an internet connection." As long as I am unable to play LAN games without an internet connection, Blizzard has lost a sale to me. (And no, I'm not going to pirate it either.)
I agree that self-control is needed more in today's society, but you're being unnecessarily rude. The GP at least recognizes that he plays too much - most people who spend too much time playing video games won't even admit that.
IMO asking for improved time controls like this is a very good step towards improving one's self-control.
Self-control doesn't come all at once. You need baby steps. Give yourself the chance to make incremental improvements. It works better that way.
Star Trek often over explains technology and builds that into the plot.
As big a Star Trek fan as I am, I am often angered by the vast sciency inconsistencies that are blatantly plot-driven. For example, let's look at Voyager when they had the Slipstream drive installed.
The benefit: "If it works, we get home really soon."
Their problem: "We can't use this for more than $DAYS at a time or the ship will fall apart."
Their solution: "Let's uninstall it."
A much better solution: "Let's use it until it's too dangerous, then repair the ship, then use it again, then repair the ship, and so on, until we get home, have Star Fleet scientists look at the tech, make it work right, and then suddenly we're on top of the travel speed game again."
I have similar quibbles with most of Voyager, despite it being the ST series I grew up watching (along with DS9).
Regarding Firefly, I watched it for the first time a few weeks ago and loved it.
Why is it we know a ship is in distress because it's out of proper orientation? "Oh, look! They can't orient themselves to our plane of reference! They must be damaged!"
Star Trek has the same problem, but it's often much, much worse.
I remember one episode (was it TNG or DS9?) where the Federation set up a blockade with some sort of sensor beams between each ship so they could detect any cloaked ships trying to sneak through. My first thought was "what if the cloaked ship just goes above, below, or around the "blockade"?
Ship battles in Star Trek inevitably occur in two-dimensional planes. About the only exception is in the series finale of TNG, the Enterprise E (or whichever one has three warp nacelles, my memory is a bit rusty) takes out some enemy ship or other by "ambushing" it from below the 2-d plane of battle.
At least Star Wars does most of its battles in three-dimensional space.
Nah, you give them some PoS that looks good, sounds good, but doesn't really work terribly well.
I guess Teal'c, um, fixed the staff he carries, because he doesn't seem to have any trouble hitting anything. I've always thought it odd that he didn't switch to Earth's apparently superior weapons until he got rid of his symbiote, but I guess if you pretend his staff weapon is special it sort of makes sense.
And before someone attacks me, I'm not trying to be anti-SG1. I am a happy owner of the series on DVD.
unless someone has a fairly flimsy grasp of spelling in the first place (to the point where they doubt how to spell common words and where to put apostrophes)
... a lot of younger people these days have exactly this problem. I'd place the blame on text-messaging shorthand, rather than Word's autocorrect, but I can see how autocorrect could exacerbate the problem.
And it doesn't help that my informal observation leads me to believe that the average American's vocabulary is shrinking, despite the easy access to many free dictionaries and thesauruses (thesauri?)...
I mean, if people can't bother to read enough to know what "exacerbate" means, what makes you think they'll have any idea how to spell? And if the computer will magically fix it for them, why would they bother actually learning to spell?
I realize I'm being fairly pessimistic, and I am deliberately exaggerating the situation, but I'm sure you can see my point.
Actually, the program itself is a perfectly fine way of representing pi.
So... random honest question. How do they know the program (or its output) is correct? Is it possible to create a proof that the program will generate correct output?
I mean, sure, we can look at the first nine digits and say "yeah, that looks right". But does anyone really know if digits 1.2 trillion through 2.5 trillion in the output are correct?
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly! What happened to the days of multiplayer-only spawn installs? Starcraft and Diablo II both included this feature, and both games had LAN play (one could argue that LAN play was vital to Starcraft's success, though not really for Diablo II).
Blizzard, you used to be cool. Now you're just a money-grubbing corporate behemoth. If you were trying to lose our respect, congratulations, you did it very well.
The difference is, Blizzard didn't include bear mace in their first iteration of the game, and bear mace was not integral to the success of the first game.
LAN play, on the other hand, was key to Starcraft I's success.
er, that last bullet point should read "... different for the WINE version than for the Windows version".
Need caffeine.
No no, I understand your point. I'm just saying that as long as nerds are willing to do the footwork themselves, which is currently the case, Blizzard has no incentive to do it themselves - and plenty of incentives to not do it themselves.
It's not really fair to compare indie game developers who provide WINE-compatible games to Blizzard. Indie games are generally orders of magnitude smaller than titles like Starcraft II, and if the indie developer knows he's going cross-platform he'll probably do the graphics in OpenGL. Blizzard, on the other hand, might be doing SCII graphics with DirectX, which I'll get to in a minute.
Officially providing a WINE-run version of SCII means they'd be taking on burdens like:
- Supporting not just bugs in SCII, but bugs in WINE that affect SCII adversely. ... and there are probably a dozen more reasons they wouldn't want to do it themselves.
- Supporting complex areas in WINE like the DirectX-to-OpenGL wrapper code, which is probably fairly hairy.
- Specifically looking for developers proficient with WINE.
- Supporting their version of WINE on dozens of distributions, on both 32-bit and 64-bit architectures. That means lots and lots and lots of QA boxes, and lots and lots and lots of QA people, not to mention the IT overhead of this stuff.
- Testing game patches extensively on not just the Windows version of the game but on the WINE version.
- Heaven help us if a bugfix in a SCII is different for the WINE version than for the SCII version - divergent codebases with only minor differences are bad news.
I agree that they could do it, but I can't in good conscience call the reason they don't "sloth".
Then why can't two people behind the same router play a game on battle.net where one of them is hosting? (With very little effort you'll find plenty of posts here on slashdot indicating that if you have two players behind a router, connected to battle.net, and they try to start a Starcraft game that way, one of them can't connect.) I could elaborate on the apparent technical reasons (public vs private IP addresses, for example) but I don't think it's necessary.
My point is, it's a little more complicated than you're making it out to be, and Blizzard has given exactly zero indication that Starcraft II will be any different.
More to the point, if I have 8 guys at my place trying to start a pseudo-LAN game via Battle.net, can Blizzard make it work without making me reconfigure my router? (Assume that a single person playing via Battle.net works fine with that router configuration.) The answer is probably "no", or at least "yes, if X, Y, and Z are true" which is bound to fail for a large portion of gamers. Furthermore, if each client thinks all the other clients have the same external IP address, presumably with different ports (the only way to make this work using the same external IP address), the router has to do a bunch of additional work mapping ports on its external IP to machines on its internal network, whereas a real LAN game would just spit the packets for each internal IP address in the appropriate direction with little effort.
But I can give a better real-world example. At my university, all computers on the network had a unique external IP address assigned to them for all traffic leaving the network (the mapping was handled by the externally-facing routers; our computers only knew about the 10.x.x.x internal address). So, with Blizzard's current plans, if I and my roommate wanted to start a LAN game of Starcraft II, we'd have to do it through Battle.net - but Battle.net would see a unique IP address for each client, and would have no way to know they're on the same LAN. The game clients themselves would have no way of knowing that they're in the same room, either.
That means once we get the game started, the game is not really local - if I'm hosting, my computer sends packets bound for my roommate's computer - which is connected to the same physical switch - all the way to the edge of the network, to the externally-facing routers. They shouldn't go further than that, but why force packets to go all the way across campus when they shouldn't have to go further than the switch handling our two wall sockets?
You might argue that this additional latency is negligible, and you have a valid point. However, I'm sure I could dig up hundreds of hardcore gamers who would insist that the extra latency is noticeable.
Anyway to bring this back on topic, to the SCII team: is there any possibility of WINE support in the next three chapters of SCII in order to run the games on alternative platforms such as LInux/BSD etc?
Do you mean a bundled version of WINE that would theoretically be included with SCII? Most of us who are familiar with WINE on Linux are willing to do the little footwork necessary to get games running on our own installs of WINE, and I'm sure there will be plenty of people out there patching WINE so that SCII works out-of-the-box as much as possible.
From that standpoint, Blizzard doesn't have much incentive to do it themselves.
If that's the question to Blizzard, we already know the answer: They claim it will reduce piracy.
Really, though, that's wishful thinking. As my sibling post by egr points out, games are going to get pirated based on their popularity rather than their alleged pirate-ability. I'd wager that if single player requires authentication to play, then within days of release (if not sooner), the pirated copies will all be able to play single player without authentication. That's just how these things go.
Publishers' estimates about piracy - in terms of lost sales - are based on guesswork and wishful thinking. Unfortunately I think there's no way to show them they're being morons unless nobody buys it and nobody pirates it.
Mod parent up. These are all interesting questions related to the LAN play issue.
(Or even more mundane - I don't want to be unable to play single player just because battle.net is down, or unreachable, or even because I was [hypothetically] misbehaving online.)
He didn't say anything about having a network infrastructure. A cobbled together ad-hoc network running on a couple of 4- or 8-port switches - the staple of most LAN parties - is not a "network infrastructure".
He also didn't say he was on-campus for those LAN parties.
In my case, I did both of these things during college, and only occasionally was I on the university network. It seems you're trying to ignore plausible explanations for your parent post's comments, just so you can splatter him with sarcasm.
I have the same intention, and most of my friends do too.
Not all of us have phones that can do this, and not all of us that do want to pay the data rates (one cent per KB? Please.) Besides, if you're on a desert island (or in the middle of the desert) what gives you the idea that you'll have a signal on your phone?
You don't need to crash on a desert island to find yourself in a situation where you'd want networked play without access to an internet connection. Some that others have mentioned:
- Staying in a hotel with friends, with either no internet or really expensive internet.
- Long layover in an airport.
- Visiting family/friends in a somewhat remote connection, where only dialup is available.
- On vacation, for example at a cabin near a lake. Spend the day waterskiing, spend the evening playing Starcraft. The cabin is either rented or only occupied part of the year, so it's a waste of money paying for an internet connection there.
But you're forgetting the best part: Starcraft I won't let you play on Battle.net with someone else that's behind the same router as you. Nobody has given any indication that Starcraft II will be any different.
In other words: No more LAN parties. Weren't LAN parties pivotal in Starcraft's success? Why would they shoot themselves in the foot like that?
I reiterate: As long as LAN play (without an internet connection available) is not included with the game, Blizzard has lost my purchase of Starcraft II. (And no, I'm not going to pirate it either.)
In others words. I want to bitch and moan about a feature that I will probably never use.
Speak for yourself. The only way I ever play Starcraft or Diablo II with other people is on a LAN. Taking that away literally takes away most of the reason I'd buy Starcraft II in the first place.
Don't project your lack of "real life" friends onto everyone else. (I know that's rude, but that's how you're coming across.)
You will have to log on to battlenet to show your game is not pirated.
After that the gameplay will be resolved directly between the computers currently playing.
Has Blizzard actually said it will work the way you describe? Starcraft I apparently does, but you still can't play with two computers behind the same NAT, so what gives you the impression that Starcraft II will be any different?
It's things like this that just show we need LAN capability. If I'm at my parents' cabin, where there is no internet connection, and we bring our laptops, it's stupid for Blizzard to say "too bad, you can't play Starcraft II together because we can't babysit you every time you start the game unless you have an internet connection." As long as I am unable to play LAN games without an internet connection, Blizzard has lost a sale to me. (And no, I'm not going to pirate it either.)
I agree that self-control is needed more in today's society, but you're being unnecessarily rude. The GP at least recognizes that he plays too much - most people who spend too much time playing video games won't even admit that.
IMO asking for improved time controls like this is a very good step towards improving one's self-control.
Self-control doesn't come all at once. You need baby steps. Give yourself the chance to make incremental improvements. It works better that way.
That's a good point. I'd mod you up if I could ;)
but I can't help but lower my opinion of someone when they mix up words like that. It smacks of laziness somehow.
I'm the same way... I'm unsure of whether it's a good thing.
Nope, you're thinking of knives.
Star Trek often over explains technology and builds that into the plot.
As big a Star Trek fan as I am, I am often angered by the vast sciency inconsistencies that are blatantly plot-driven. For example, let's look at Voyager when they had the Slipstream drive installed.
The benefit: "If it works, we get home really soon."
Their problem: "We can't use this for more than $DAYS at a time or the ship will fall apart."
Their solution: "Let's uninstall it."
A much better solution: "Let's use it until it's too dangerous, then repair the ship, then use it again, then repair the ship, and so on, until we get home, have Star Fleet scientists look at the tech, make it work right, and then suddenly we're on top of the travel speed game again."
I have similar quibbles with most of Voyager, despite it being the ST series I grew up watching (along with DS9).
Regarding Firefly, I watched it for the first time a few weeks ago and loved it.
Just what the hell does a moisture farm make anyway?
You've never read Dune, have you?
Yet he looks like an unfinished contraption thrown together in someone's tool shed.
... he is an unfinished contraption thrown together in someone's tool shed (or rather, Anakin's room).
What? You want to know why he wasn't finished later?
I, uh, have to work now.
Why is it we know a ship is in distress because it's out of proper orientation? "Oh, look! They can't orient themselves to our plane of reference! They must be damaged!"
Star Trek has the same problem, but it's often much, much worse.
I remember one episode (was it TNG or DS9?) where the Federation set up a blockade with some sort of sensor beams between each ship so they could detect any cloaked ships trying to sneak through. My first thought was "what if the cloaked ship just goes above, below, or around the "blockade"?
Ship battles in Star Trek inevitably occur in two-dimensional planes. About the only exception is in the series finale of TNG, the Enterprise E (or whichever one has three warp nacelles, my memory is a bit rusty) takes out some enemy ship or other by "ambushing" it from below the 2-d plane of battle.
At least Star Wars does most of its battles in three-dimensional space.
Yep - it could certainly be very atmospheric, but it would be quite a different atmosphere than what was achieved in Star Wars.
As a way of comparing the two atmospheres, look at Firefly (which had no sound in space) and compare it to Star Wars. Very different, I think.
Nah, you give them some PoS that looks good, sounds good, but doesn't really work terribly well.
I guess Teal'c, um, fixed the staff he carries, because he doesn't seem to have any trouble hitting anything. I've always thought it odd that he didn't switch to Earth's apparently superior weapons until he got rid of his symbiote, but I guess if you pretend his staff weapon is special it sort of makes sense.
And before someone attacks me, I'm not trying to be anti-SG1. I am a happy owner of the series on DVD.
unless someone has a fairly flimsy grasp of spelling in the first place (to the point where they doubt how to spell common words and where to put apostrophes)
... a lot of younger people these days have exactly this problem. I'd place the blame on text-messaging shorthand, rather than Word's autocorrect, but I can see how autocorrect could exacerbate the problem.
And it doesn't help that my informal observation leads me to believe that the average American's vocabulary is shrinking, despite the easy access to many free dictionaries and thesauruses (thesauri?)...
I mean, if people can't bother to read enough to know what "exacerbate" means, what makes you think they'll have any idea how to spell? And if the computer will magically fix it for them, why would they bother actually learning to spell?
I realize I'm being fairly pessimistic, and I am deliberately exaggerating the situation, but I'm sure you can see my point.
Actually, the program itself is a perfectly fine way of representing pi.
So... random honest question. How do they know the program (or its output) is correct? Is it possible to create a proof that the program will generate correct output?
I mean, sure, we can look at the first nine digits and say "yeah, that looks right". But does anyone really know if digits 1.2 trillion through 2.5 trillion in the output are correct?
I've read a lot of old books, so my syntax tends to be old-fashioned and/or idiosyncratic
I've had people look at me funny after I've used "must needs" in a sentence... so I know what you mean.