Re:Multi-player / thoughts between 4 vs 5
on
Review: Civilization V
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Can it be played online, in multi-player mode?
Please forgive my noob-ness. I've never played civ. Looks great.
Well in civ 4 they had a fantastic side app called pitboss that made it easy to set up multiplayer games. It was pretty much a server, and you could have it email players when it was their turn. It also made it so you could have everyone jump into and out of the game whenever and not fear that the game would be lost. I've heard that within a month or two this will also be coming to civ V along with hot-seat and play by email. pbem games were essentially emailing the save file around between the players.
I will also have to state that the multiplayer is the primary way I play civ anymore. So at least for now I'm waiting for pitboss in civ v before I buy it. Oh and for those on the fence about a new civ, grab the demo and try out the game for 100 turns. I found it to be not really better or worse than 4, just different. In particular if you enjoy the military aspect of the civ games then you should stick to 5. I prefer 4 mostly because of the wider range of civs and having both a unique building and unit for each civ.
Ebooks will not be able to beat out paper books until prices come down. People are cheap and don't want to spend more for an eBook than the mass market paperback version. Drop eBook prices and watch them take off.
It isn't just this. The current E-book store environment is akin to the console wars. If you go to shop A for reader A then you need that same reader device in order to easily read the books. Saying that you can convert the book formats is nice, but your average consumer ISN'T going to do that. When this is combined with books being exclusive to certain stores you really discourage shoppers. Why should I buy E-book A if I can't easily buy book from author X? There are some E-book stores currently that cater to all the devices, and have nice easy ways to just download the format you want. The prices at these stores also tends to be cheaper and they do sales. Almost like a real store in a lot of ways. When these several factors are fixed in some good way the market will attract a lot more shoppers.
What ever the data rate is supposed to max out at I haven't seen anywhere close to that (I'm looking at you Rogers). I see more compression artifacts then detail, especially on sports broadcasts. The only content that would really use it to its potential would be BluRay media. YMMV
The reason for this is the cable pipe for which the channels are coming through. Essentially the number of hd channels, aka bandwidth, that the pipe can handle is easily maxed. To fit more 'HD' channels into the pipe they compress the data before hand. Over the air hd doesn't have this problem, and it is usually easy to see the difference in over the air hd compared to the same channel via digital / hd cable.
A Terminator is NOT a cyborg. A cyborg is an ORGANISM which has been ENHANCED or even REPLACED by cybernetic machinery. The key is that the original entity was a living biologically based organism..
So... if you wear a wristwatch, and prescription lenses, or contacts... or even sunglasses, and... carry a cell phone, or wear a belt to hold up your trousers, or have a pin in the ankle you damaged as an adolescent, or are an amputee with a prosthetic, or any combination of these or similar enhancements, you are no longer merely human. You, sir, are a cyborg. Halo save us all.
Well I wouldn't go that far. Actually I always thought of it as having a not easily removable piece of technology that replaces or enhances a piece of your body. So I wouldn't say that wearing glasses makes you cyborg, that is more using a tool to enhance your vision. If you had implanted lenses so you could see then that is more along the lines of cyborg. amputee with prosthetic definitely counts. I would consider myself one having my insulin pump connected to me. It always gets a bit interesting on the fringe cases.
Sony has also had this for ages. It has been usable for at least 2 years now. The ease of doing it with their readers is at least a portion of why I got one rather than the competition.
Notable for the HTC G2 is that it has a modified hinge that opens up to a slide-out QWERTY keyboard. The phone also includes Swype text entry software for its touch screen, an 800MHz Snapdragon processor, support for a 32-GB microSD card, and Wi-Fi, GPS and Bluetooth capability. It also has a 3.7-inch display, a 5-megapixel camera with LED flash and autofocus, and can shoot video in 720p HD resolution.
So...the features are all less than what the newest smartphones are already capable of. I believe the newest line (EVO, Galaxy, Droid, iPhone 4) all have at least 1Ghz processors and some have much better than 5 Megapixel cameras.
The keyboard is what it is all about. There are certain individuals (like myself) who only like smart phones when they have a physical keyboard. There really aren't many options in this arena and this certainly is better than the rest when you only compare android phones with keyboards.
I thought Apple's ePub let you do this too. Not to slight Stephenson's work, the concept seems well established. So, there is probably a market for it, but it does not need to replace books or movies or even PowerPoint to succeed.
I'm afraid that ePub is not something Apple came up with. Otherwise, yes I am hoping that it becomes the more universal way books are published when they are electronic. That way you really are buying the book rather than the book for a particular device.
Pinball really is a lost bit of nostalgia. I bet you a LOT of money could be made if classic machines such as Dr. Who, Attack from Mars, Revenge From Mars, Terminator, were adapted to the PC. I mean, Maxis' Full Tilt Pinball is the last decent pinball sim I can think of. And that was circa Windows 3.1
There are the two pinball hall of fame games that have some of the great gottlieb and williams games. I'm hoping they do a bally one sometime too. At least midevil madness was one of the ones they have ported.
They're both by the same developers. They also had a third pinball game, Pinball Illusions, which was also great.
It has always surprised me that those guys could do excellent pinball games and pretty much all other pinball games to this day (except Metroid Prime Pinball on NDS) have sucked big time.
You should check out all of the pinball hall of fame games. The physics are spot on and they are all great recreations of old real pinball tables. Here is a wiki link with the two versions: pinball hall of fame
Programming is essential. As a model language I would recommend an old BASIC with line numbers. This is close to how computers actually work, but still accessible enought for them. If you want to have an advanced course, teach Pascal.
Pascal is actually what I learned in 9th grade myself. It was a one semester class and we only did basic programming skills like conditional blocks and loops. It ended up being fairly boring for myself so I learned how to do simple graphics output on the side. Then I would add a section at the end of the code for drawing an image. So don't underestimate the skills of a 9th grader. There will certainly be some students that want to do stuff well past what is in the curriculum. Also make sure that the teacher has a GOOD understanding of whichever language is used. I distinctly remember asking questions that my 9th grade teacher didn't know the answer to.
These days most screens are wider than they are taller. And text still reads better vertically.
So the height is valuable real-estate while there is side space to waste.
My desktop has the application bars hide on the left/right.
The more vertical space the better.
If you want more vertical space then just adjust the display to be portrait rather than landscape. I do this at work so that I have a monitor for reading things on websites and one in landscape for doing development on. I guess most people don't think about just physically turning their displays...
This is one category, of several really, where you don't really see big studios doing games lately. These odd categories where you never had a large enough appeal from a normal gamer are where the indie studios can produce some fantastic games.
So what great stuff have I missed on the Wii? Crowdsourcing FTW. KTHXBYE.:)
(I've aquired the Bit Trip stuff, really like those. The Art or Balance was great too. What else? There's too much crap out there, so what other gems are there for us geeks?)
Did you try out sin and punishment? There is the downloadable original and the sequel that is on disc. Both are fantastic shmups.
It always disappoints me how little hemp is used in industry. It is my understanding that hemp is easy to grow, is a more durable replacement for cotton and can be a more sustainable fibre for paper.
I remember in my BioII class we were given an 'experiment' to flip a penny one hundred times and record the results. We were the only group that did not record 50% heads and 50% tails. Our professor insisted that we had made a mistake, and that with this 'large' number of flips we would have absolutely reached 50%.
Well with coin flipping there can be huge variance on the 50-50 depending on the coin and how it is caught or where it lands. Here is an article I found about it that references some research into it.
Blizzard at least gives you something in return for it... you can chat with friends playing other games. I don't have Starcraft II at all, but I regularly chat with friends playing that game from WoW.
Right, but Blizzard only aggravated the problem. Steam has had this for ages and does it very well. Having different in game only im clients is a pain. It feels like icq / aim wars from ages ago. Finding who you want to talk to is much easier when it is on one im client.
Believe it or not I bought Bioshock 2 through steam, and it still required GFWL. I had to go through all that and more just to be able to save my progress in the game.
You know, I had similar problems when I got fallout 3 on steam. The big problem I found was that you only need the gfwl if you wanted it to track the achievements. I had hoped that there would have been steam equivalent achievements but that is not the case. It otherwise would work fine, save games, and not be a pain. Hopefully further games that have gfwl can operate this way so that you don't have to use it if you don't want to.
Quake 4 achieved some reasonable sales success, but the fact that it vanished almost immediately from the mainstream online scene indicates that the singleplayer campaign was probably what most people bought it for. With the current online gaming scene dominated by Modern Warfare, Gears of War and Halo 3, it's pretty clear that tastes have moved away from the "bouncy deathmatch" model of the Quake series.
Maybe for consoles, but TF2 certainly is way up there as far as current online pc gaming scene. Guess you forgot about that market?
Well, being diabetic probably helped. You can certainly have less nerves in the feet after many years of sub-optimal blood sugar levels. This can lead to not easily feeling what is going on with one's toes.
Maybe they wanted to spend more time with their ebook stores like Fictionwise. Hopefully their ebook stores, like this one, will stick around since they are some of the more open ones around right now.
I would have figured prices at or greater than paperback + cost of a reader would keep their sales figures laughably low.
Not all books for which electronic versions are available -- particularly new releases -- even have a paperback version, so often the relevant cost comparison is to the cost of hardbacks
True, but there are a lot of non-hardback books out there. And having tried to shop around for ebooks it is very difficult to do so. Part of the problem with the price fixing by amazon, or any ebook seller, is that ebook stores are very exclusive. Many stores are the only place you can buy certain ebooks. This makes the price for such a book much higher. If the stores were more open and had a bigger variety of authors and didn't ever have exclusives then prices would most likely be a lot more competitive. It would also help if it was easier for a user to shop for an ebook in the places outside of the one designated for their particular device.
Well, that and the simple law of economics: something is worth what people will pay. People will pay more to see the 3d version, and so they charge more. Simple as that. If you don't want to pay the premium, then go to the 3d showing. Most theaters have 2d versions.
Wait, so if I don't want to pay the premium for the 3d version I should go to the 3d version...This seems like recursion without an end condition...
This is at least partly why I bought a smart car. It has great fuel economy (40 mpg avg.), and is fairly cheap (12,500 for what I got). I only use it for getting to / from work and don't have kids so the 2 seat issue isn't one for me. The electric / hybrids won't ever be interesting until they have much better fuel economy (100 mpg +) or can travel as far as current cars on a charge (300+ miles). Even in either of these cases I won't really consider either if it is priced > $25,000. I just don't think a car is worth that much, though I guess that is partly because I just view it as my mode of transport. Maybe I'm in the minority in this way of thinking....
I think that if Microsoft got a good touch interface version of win 7 things could go very well. There are a lot of individuals that just hate the entire apple software ecosystem and prefer having more control of the computer. If it is good at what windows is already good at, has a decent touch interface, and isn't crazy expensive it should do really well.
Slashdot Mirror
Can it be played online, in multi-player mode? Please forgive my noob-ness. I've never played civ. Looks great.
Well in civ 4 they had a fantastic side app called pitboss that made it easy to set up multiplayer games. It was pretty much a server, and you could have it email players when it was their turn. It also made it so you could have everyone jump into and out of the game whenever and not fear that the game would be lost. I've heard that within a month or two this will also be coming to civ V along with hot-seat and play by email. pbem games were essentially emailing the save file around between the players.
I will also have to state that the multiplayer is the primary way I play civ anymore. So at least for now I'm waiting for pitboss in civ v before I buy it. Oh and for those on the fence about a new civ, grab the demo and try out the game for 100 turns. I found it to be not really better or worse than 4, just different. In particular if you enjoy the military aspect of the civ games then you should stick to 5. I prefer 4 mostly because of the wider range of civs and having both a unique building and unit for each civ.
Ebooks will not be able to beat out paper books until prices come down. People are cheap and don't want to spend more for an eBook than the mass market paperback version. Drop eBook prices and watch them take off.
It isn't just this. The current E-book store environment is akin to the console wars. If you go to shop A for reader A then you need that same reader device in order to easily read the books. Saying that you can convert the book formats is nice, but your average consumer ISN'T going to do that. When this is combined with books being exclusive to certain stores you really discourage shoppers. Why should I buy E-book A if I can't easily buy book from author X? There are some E-book stores currently that cater to all the devices, and have nice easy ways to just download the format you want. The prices at these stores also tends to be cheaper and they do sales. Almost like a real store in a lot of ways. When these several factors are fixed in some good way the market will attract a lot more shoppers.
What ever the data rate is supposed to max out at I haven't seen anywhere close to that (I'm looking at you Rogers). I see more compression artifacts then detail, especially on sports broadcasts. The only content that would really use it to its potential would be BluRay media. YMMV
The reason for this is the cable pipe for which the channels are coming through. Essentially the number of hd channels, aka bandwidth, that the pipe can handle is easily maxed. To fit more 'HD' channels into the pipe they compress the data before hand. Over the air hd doesn't have this problem, and it is usually easy to see the difference in over the air hd compared to the same channel via digital / hd cable.
No, no, no.
A Terminator is NOT a cyborg. A cyborg is an ORGANISM which has been ENHANCED or even REPLACED by cybernetic machinery. The key is that the original entity was a living biologically based organism..
So... if you wear a wristwatch, and prescription lenses, or contacts... or even sunglasses, and... carry a cell phone, or wear a belt to hold up your trousers, or have a pin in the ankle you damaged as an adolescent, or are an amputee with a prosthetic, or any combination of these or similar enhancements, you are no longer merely human. You, sir, are a cyborg. Halo save us all.
Well I wouldn't go that far. Actually I always thought of it as having a not easily removable piece of technology that replaces or enhances a piece of your body. So I wouldn't say that wearing glasses makes you cyborg, that is more using a tool to enhance your vision. If you had implanted lenses so you could see then that is more along the lines of cyborg. amputee with prosthetic definitely counts. I would consider myself one having my insulin pump connected to me. It always gets a bit interesting on the fringe cases.
Sony has also had this for ages. It has been usable for at least 2 years now. The ease of doing it with their readers is at least a portion of why I got one rather than the competition.
Notable for the HTC G2 is that it has a modified hinge that opens up to a slide-out QWERTY keyboard . The phone also includes Swype text entry software for its touch screen, an 800MHz Snapdragon processor, support for a 32-GB microSD card, and Wi-Fi, GPS and Bluetooth capability. It also has a 3.7-inch display, a 5-megapixel camera with LED flash and autofocus, and can shoot video in 720p HD resolution.
So...the features are all less than what the newest smartphones are already capable of. I believe the newest line (EVO, Galaxy, Droid, iPhone 4) all have at least 1Ghz processors and some have much better than 5 Megapixel cameras.
The keyboard is what it is all about. There are certain individuals (like myself) who only like smart phones when they have a physical keyboard. There really aren't many options in this arena and this certainly is better than the rest when you only compare android phones with keyboards.
I thought Apple's ePub let you do this too. Not to slight Stephenson's work, the concept seems well established. So, there is probably a market for it, but it does not need to replace books or movies or even PowerPoint to succeed.
I'm afraid that ePub is not something Apple came up with. Otherwise, yes I am hoping that it becomes the more universal way books are published when they are electronic. That way you really are buying the book rather than the book for a particular device.
Pinball really is a lost bit of nostalgia. I bet you a LOT of money could be made if classic machines such as Dr. Who, Attack from Mars, Revenge From Mars, Terminator, were adapted to the PC. I mean, Maxis' Full Tilt Pinball is the last decent pinball sim I can think of. And that was circa Windows 3.1
There are the two pinball hall of fame games that have some of the great gottlieb and williams games. I'm hoping they do a bally one sometime too. At least midevil madness was one of the ones they have ported.
They're both by the same developers. They also had a third pinball game, Pinball Illusions, which was also great.
It has always surprised me that those guys could do excellent pinball games and pretty much all other pinball games to this day (except Metroid Prime Pinball on NDS) have sucked big time.
You should check out all of the pinball hall of fame games. The physics are spot on and they are all great recreations of old real pinball tables. Here is a wiki link with the two versions: pinball hall of fame
Programming is essential. As a model language I would recommend an old BASIC with line numbers. This is close to how computers actually work, but still accessible enought for them. If you want to have an advanced course, teach Pascal.
Pascal is actually what I learned in 9th grade myself. It was a one semester class and we only did basic programming skills like conditional blocks and loops. It ended up being fairly boring for myself so I learned how to do simple graphics output on the side. Then I would add a section at the end of the code for drawing an image. So don't underestimate the skills of a 9th grader. There will certainly be some students that want to do stuff well past what is in the curriculum. Also make sure that the teacher has a GOOD understanding of whichever language is used. I distinctly remember asking questions that my 9th grade teacher didn't know the answer to.
These days most screens are wider than they are taller. And text still reads better vertically. So the height is valuable real-estate while there is side space to waste. My desktop has the application bars hide on the left/right.
The more vertical space the better.
If you want more vertical space then just adjust the display to be portrait rather than landscape. I do this at work so that I have a monitor for reading things on websites and one in landscape for doing development on. I guess most people don't think about just physically turning their displays...
This is one category, of several really, where you don't really see big studios doing games lately. These odd categories where you never had a large enough appeal from a normal gamer are where the indie studios can produce some fantastic games.
So what great stuff have I missed on the Wii? Crowdsourcing FTW. KTHXBYE. :)
(I've aquired the Bit Trip stuff, really like those. The Art or Balance was great too. What else? There's too much crap out there, so what other gems are there for us geeks?)
Did you try out sin and punishment? There is the downloadable original and the sequel that is on disc. Both are fantastic shmups.
It always disappoints me how little hemp is used in industry. It is my understanding that hemp is easy to grow, is a more durable replacement for cotton and can be a more sustainable fibre for paper.
The same can be said of bamboo actually.
I remember in my BioII class we were given an 'experiment' to flip a penny one hundred times and record the results. We were the only group that did not record 50% heads and 50% tails. Our professor insisted that we had made a mistake, and that with this 'large' number of flips we would have absolutely reached 50%.
Well with coin flipping there can be huge variance on the 50-50 depending on the coin and how it is caught or where it lands. Here is an article I found about it that references some research into it.
Blizzard at least gives you something in return for it... you can chat with friends playing other games. I don't have Starcraft II at all, but I regularly chat with friends playing that game from WoW.
Right, but Blizzard only aggravated the problem. Steam has had this for ages and does it very well. Having different in game only im clients is a pain. It feels like icq / aim wars from ages ago. Finding who you want to talk to is much easier when it is on one im client.
Believe it or not I bought Bioshock 2 through steam, and it still required GFWL. I had to go through all that and more just to be able to save my progress in the game.
You know, I had similar problems when I got fallout 3 on steam. The big problem I found was that you only need the gfwl if you wanted it to track the achievements. I had hoped that there would have been steam equivalent achievements but that is not the case. It otherwise would work fine, save games, and not be a pain. Hopefully further games that have gfwl can operate this way so that you don't have to use it if you don't want to.
Quake 4 achieved some reasonable sales success, but the fact that it vanished almost immediately from the mainstream online scene indicates that the singleplayer campaign was probably what most people bought it for. With the current online gaming scene dominated by Modern Warfare, Gears of War and Halo 3, it's pretty clear that tastes have moved away from the "bouncy deathmatch" model of the Quake series.
Maybe for consoles, but TF2 certainly is way up there as far as current online pc gaming scene. Guess you forgot about that market?
Well, being diabetic probably helped. You can certainly have less nerves in the feet after many years of sub-optimal blood sugar levels. This can lead to not easily feeling what is going on with one's toes.
It certainly would have been handy to have had a link to something that looked like results. Graphs, data points, or something would have worked...
Maybe they wanted to spend more time with their ebook stores like Fictionwise. Hopefully their ebook stores, like this one, will stick around since they are some of the more open ones around right now.
Not all books for which electronic versions are available -- particularly new releases -- even have a paperback version, so often the relevant cost comparison is to the cost of hardbacks
True, but there are a lot of non-hardback books out there. And having tried to shop around for ebooks it is very difficult to do so. Part of the problem with the price fixing by amazon, or any ebook seller, is that ebook stores are very exclusive. Many stores are the only place you can buy certain ebooks. This makes the price for such a book much higher. If the stores were more open and had a bigger variety of authors and didn't ever have exclusives then prices would most likely be a lot more competitive. It would also help if it was easier for a user to shop for an ebook in the places outside of the one designated for their particular device.
Well, that and the simple law of economics: something is worth what people will pay. People will pay more to see the 3d version, and so they charge more. Simple as that. If you don't want to pay the premium, then go to the 3d showing. Most theaters have 2d versions.
Wait, so if I don't want to pay the premium for the 3d version I should go to the 3d version...This seems like recursion without an end condition...
This is at least partly why I bought a smart car. It has great fuel economy (40 mpg avg.), and is fairly cheap (12,500 for what I got). I only use it for getting to / from work and don't have kids so the 2 seat issue isn't one for me. The electric / hybrids won't ever be interesting until they have much better fuel economy (100 mpg +) or can travel as far as current cars on a charge (300+ miles). Even in either of these cases I won't really consider either if it is priced > $25,000. I just don't think a car is worth that much, though I guess that is partly because I just view it as my mode of transport. Maybe I'm in the minority in this way of thinking....
I think that if Microsoft got a good touch interface version of win 7 things could go very well. There are a lot of individuals that just hate the entire apple software ecosystem and prefer having more control of the computer. If it is good at what windows is already good at, has a decent touch interface, and isn't crazy expensive it should do really well.