The real barrier to making realistic wargames in my opinion is the combat itself.
If you watch footage of either of the current wars in Iraq or Afghanistan you will be stuck by how soldiers almost never ever actually shoot at a target they can see directly. Most of the time they are piling fire at a bush or building they suspect might possibly be hiding an enemy 500-600 yards away. Actual visual contact with the enemy is almost never made. The most they see of them is usually when a patrol maybe moves into the area a few hours later and finds a couple of dead guys in a ditch or hut.
Obviously urban combat is different but the truth is real people value their lives far far too much to ever visually expose themselves to the enemy properly, especially close up. Real combat is much more grey, confusing, stratchy and "unsatisfying" than running into a building filled with 15 guys and shooting them within 10 meters of each other.
You might say it would be impossible to make a fun game whilst denying the player ever seeing his enemy or the satisfaction gunning him down close up, but personally I think it may be worth exploring games that try and replicate the chaos and confusion of real combat. Having a game filled with with characters that display some actual sense of self preservation might really change things. Maybe the player will derive a sense of fun not only from what he does and the direct consequences of his actions (shooting people, people getting shot) but simply from his sense of place and being involved in something more real and incredible. The first time I see a game without a magic hud displaying your mission is xyz displaying the number of flak88's i've yet to single handedly dynamite, or some other varient of this, I will rejoice.
"Perhaps St Augustine was right and there is only one story: of creation, fall and redemption. In PlayStationâ(TM)s case, weâ(TM)re now waiting on the latter."
The Sony tale is one of how to take huge market share and massive goodwill from your business partners and throw it all away by convincing yourself you are different from all the others and that the rules don't apply to you. (George Bush post-9/11 parallels anyone?)
Sony is an electronics company that makes it products out of pcbs and transistors like any other, but they forgot that and seemed instead to be arrogantly convinced they had some divine right to dominate the console market and could do whatever thet want.
Nintendo has done with the Wii what Sony did with the PS1 - create a system the market wants. Instead sony built the machine it wanted to make (replete with technologies like cell and blu-ray)and tried to use its strength and dominance of the previous generation to force the market to like what it had built. We all know the result.
I work for a game developer that makes multi-platform games and our programmers hate coding for the PS3. It always makes me chuckle seeing fanboys shouting console x can do this and console y can't do that - the irony being most multi platform games are essentially clones of each other, so being unable to do something on one console means the other doesn't get it even if it could.
This is another great example of Sony thinking they are better than anyone else because they dominated the last 2 generations of consoles. In reality the PS3 is very similar to the 360 and developers essentialy see them as two sides of the same coin. Nice to see they also haven't learned the lesson of don't let you're ceo's / public figures behave like egotistical dicks yet.
Automatic health regen ala Halo and now Call of Duty. Basically it devalues looking after yourself - as long as the other guy dies just before you, you'll be back up to 100% in a few seconds. Also means people can hang onto powerful weapons and camp the same spot for a inordinate amount of time.
People need to remember that MMORPG's aren't the only MMO games out there. Sure they are the dominant archetype among mmo's, but successes have been made of others too, many of which are more suitable for consoles.
An MMOFPS like Planetside would suit console's perfectly in my opinion - easy enough to control using a standard console controller, and a good mix of action / twitch and persistent elements. Some console games are halfway there, they provide persistent elements in having ranks / xp for characters and allow weapons and skills etc to be selected accordingly ala COD4 or BF:BC.
The main difference is the lack of persistent elements affecting the environment of scenarios the players are playing. They are still playing standard multiplayer games but with added persistent elements on their characters. Part of me wonders why few people are bothering to try anying mmo-like on consoles, considering the potential money to be made. I can see no real technological reason full blown mmo's can't be done on consoles more often, so it makes me think developers simply think the market isn't there.
It could be that developers think most console gamers would be totally against paying monthly for the privelage to play a game. Big mmo's with high server and support costs maybe won't exist until people are more used to the idea of paying monthly for a game.
Someone will crack it at some point though, and make millions(billions) when they do.
As with most subjective media, people rarely manage to assess games with an even hand. They will criticise one game for something, then praise another for doing the same. This is partly right, some things work in only certain types of games, a lot of the reason for this lack of objectivity is for other reasons though.
I would take a lot of stuff written about games like Bionic Commando with a pinch of salt, because everybody is so caught up in feeling all cool and retro and indie they rarely come up with a judgement unclouded by those feelings. There are a lot of reviewers that wouldn't dare criticise such a game for fear of harming their gaming credentials or angering some fanboys.
Yes the article does hint at the idea that big games, especially open world ones, are harder to tweak difficulty wise. But I think the author falls into the trap of having seen a cool small indie game, and going - why can't massive muli-milion dollar productions with 175 team members be just like this?
Firstly you generally have a tighter demographic for small indie games, despite their sometimes casual appearances, most of the people making them know exactly what their target players are going to like and dislike. GTA4 is played by multiple demographics, tweaking it to fit all of them is a much bigger task. Yup in Braid you can simply rewind and that mechanic works great, but it is much easier to come up with something like that when you have a much smaller, tighter, controlled environment.
Adjusting the difficulty on the fly is a lovely idea, but often hard to put into practice. It can sometimes feel like punishing the player for doing well. Max Payne used to adjust the damage enemies did to you according to how well you were doing. Playing through it, I quickly got to the point where the difficulty adjustment had clearly reached the maximum level, meaning getting caught out just once and taking a few hits killed me pretty much instantly. This gave me no chance to get the difficulty back down, because every encounter I either got through unscathed or died horribly.
A good article notheless, but it's not as simple as looking at small indie games and saying, we need things to be more like this! Different types of people want different levels of difficulty, and some types of games can be harder to adjust than others. Once AI has progressed a bit further, maybe we can do more complex things in FPS and RTS games than just adjusting how much damage enemies do to you.
About the thinning margins - I have no sympathy at all. They should never have adjusted their business to the point where profit/loss is decided by cramming tonnes of mostly unwanted crap onto peoples PC's.
Great post. I hate how people play a game intensively for months and months, and then suddenly have a "realisation" that the game "sucks" or "sucked all along" because it can't keep them entertained even though they've played it for 1000 hours.
People complain about the MMO monthly fee but they are in fact very cheap considering how many hours your average players gets for his money compared to normal games. And for that you get many many times the content (although admittedly maybe not as high quality) of a normal game, even CRPG.
No one is foring you to play, simply because you played a few thousand hours and got yourself bored of the game, does not mean it sucks nor is a waste of time for anyone else - Some people with more commitments may take years to play what you played through in 3 months.
It seems everyone loses perspective when talking about games, which are far more subjective than people often give them credit.
I am an environment artist for a big UK game developer.
In my opinion, the creation of hybrid roles like this is basically inevitable. The depth of knowledge and skill needed for each part of the development process is deepening all the time as technology rolls forward and graphics increase in fidelity. A handfull of people can no longer make big AAA titles between them, not just because of the size and scope of modern games and the amount of content / code that needs to be done, but because of the depth of knowledge required in each role.
In the end, you WANT a game to be made by people that are each specialists in their area. Coder's that write awesome code and artists that make lovely artwork. Increasingly people have less understanding of the other parts of development because they are so heavily invested in their own areas and don't have time for anything else. Hybrid jobs are inevitable because someone needs to understand enough of each field to keep things running smoothly, and keep proper requirements for tools, code and art assets heading in the direction of each part of the team.
This is especially the case if you are making a big game, which requires lots of custom tools and tools support. The knowledge require by each person means those producing the code or artwork itself, almost never have enough understanding of the other side of development to mesh together perfectly, there are too many misunderstandings about requirements and limitations to let people sit in their own camps all day, someone has to go between. Our lead technical artist is one of the most important people on the team.
Game art and game design degrees are in a similar state. Most are run by people that have never worked in the games industry which have no clue what companies want from graduates or even what it takes to make a game. I was lucky enough to attend one of the two or three decent game art courses in the UK. I got a job with a big publisher/developer after a few months messing about and working on my portfolio a bit.
Most of the game degrees out there are run by people that simple do not understand what it takes to make a game or work in the games industry. As a consequence most of the graduates come out with very little skills and are totally undesirable to employers.
Also doesn't help that most of the game degrees are at unis that are certainly not at the top of league tables so the graduates attending them are not the pick of the bunch.
None of the linux users I know are interested in gaming. Not because Linux is poor for gaming, but because they simply don't want to play games all that much.
There is a small but vocal annoying minority that insist linux users don't play games because they can't however. Welcome to the real world, if you represent 1% of the market and are primarily interested in using FREE software, companies are not going to spend money trying to access your tiny and considerably more whiny / hard to please market. If you want to play games, buy a games console or use a platform that games are made for. Don't shut yourself in a tiny unprofitable corner of the market and cry woe is me nobody is making games for us. No one makes games for you because it would be very hard to make money doing it.
Apart from power obviously, I see no real benefit from having any systems on the plane shared between the public / passenger network and the planes flight / control systems, considering the risks at least.
Ok so it would make it easy for passengers to view data about the flight (like you currently can now i.e. airspeed altitude location etc) but surely there must be some way of transmitting this pretty simple data to the passenger network without physically connecting them.
At worse the cost of the aircraft may have to go up a bit since some systems may have to be doubled up (one for the plane, one for the passengers etc) but this is just such a huge nightmare of a security risk I cannot see why anyone would think this is a good idea. Even in a purely pragmatic sense, i'm sure the planes systems would be very safe and hard to affect or hack into if they did use a properly designed network like this, but how many people (customers) are going to be put off flying in these things in a post 9/11 world?
You should be able to turn this off. I can on my familie's DX3800. Look around in the printer options and find a way to turn Epson printer status monitor or whatever it's called off. It will then print with one of the cartridges empty, and will also stop giving you stupid messages about using non geniune Epson ink. It does mean you can't see the levels of the ink cartridges though so turn it on every so often to check.
I didn't get the problem... I have only read whats been posted on the EVE-O forums.
Note that you should get outside a little more, get laid, and be a little more polite.
The previous EVE client was barely 3d acceletrated and relied far more on the CPU than modern game engines. I get a much better framerate with the swanky new graphics than I did with the old engine and old graphics. So do most people it seems unless they have a poor video card.
EVE's userbase is probably the most mature / oldest of any mmo out there, certainly the most mature out of the 506 i've played. There isn;t a person in my corp under 30, except me:P
Surely the countless hours you are going to spend playing the game should be spent on a desktop computer, not huddled round a laptop with a tiny mouse and keyboard?
Nuclear power is the only way forward in our carbon conscious world. It is the only solution that efficient/financially viable enough to replace carbon based power. No renewable source has yet proved itself anything close to being a geninue replacement for fossil fuel based power.
Nuclear power no matter how fantastic has inherent risks of nuclear disasters and spillage, this however is something we simply have to live with if we want a low carbon energy supply. We have to accept the fact there will be disasters and incidents and deal with them if we want relatively clean energy.
As usual with 99% of the science/tech articles slashdot links to theres no bloody pictures. When I read something like this, I want to see a damn picture of what they're talking about!
How hard is it to get a small picture of the item they're talking about and put it in the article somewhere. Lazy, lazy, journalists.
Who the hell uses the UI in photoshop anyway? I barely touch it and use keyboard shotcuts for almost everything.
This seems like pointless revisionism to me. They are trying to show off the fact theres obviously a new UI coming for PS, and how we should all buy it when it comes out. The current UI is fine, its quick, easy to use, simple, whatever, its only a bunch of friggen buttons on the side of the screen!
Photoshop is probably the most comprehensive and complete tool / bit of software i've ever used. I have a very hard time thinking of new things that could be added to it which don't go into plugin territory. My guess is adobe are running out of things to add and this new fangled UI is gona be one of the things selling the next version.
If it ain't broke don't fix it I say.
Whatever you say, they have made an effort to make it easier to play the game on linux machines. Be fucking thankful that somebody is making an effort to reach into your tiny market, instead of whining that it's not perfect. Even if its not a native client, the game should run fine. People with decent computers can run 4 clients at a time in windows.
If it was easy to make linux clients, and the money companies could possibly make by creating them was high enough, everyone would do it. The problem is theres not enough linux users, with the hardware, inclination, whatever, to make it financially worthwhile. Once theres enough of you, willing to pay for games and not whine like hell about not being treated the same as windows users, companies will begin to enter the market. Linux is a tiny market compared to windows, seemingly populated by even harder to please nerds, and you wonder why companies don't bother making linux games? Most of the comments here are more likely to put a company off bothering with a linux client. Overall I doubt this is the begining of a trend. The sort of game eve is means that a higher proportion of potential users will be linux users anyway, so they have a bigger potential market to reach than other games / mmo's.
Regardless, come try eve. 99% of you will hate the game, eve is the harshest, most cutthoat, brutal mmo you can play, and for that other 1% it will be perfect. The real difference between eve and other mmo's, is the ability to affect the world and other players. Imagine losing every peice of your equipment every time you died in wow, or a wow with completely player run towns, real wars over territory involving several thousand players, a complex almost entirely player run economy, a real and working player mercenary market, and almost every bit of your kit being manufacturerd by other players. CCP can almost be seen as providing a framework for the game, the game itself is created by the players.
Gaming magazines in the past often simply provided information. Information about what certain games are like, previews of games in development, general advancements and goings-on in the game industry/world. The internet however is a far greater medium for communicating information, I can look a screenshot or download a game the same day it released, instead of waiting a month for someone to write an article, print it in a magazine and for it to arrive at my door.
Gaming magazines need to adapt so they provide more than simply reams of information about games. Games are moving ever towards the point (very slowly, and to a point thats a long way away) where they will be considered art, gaming is far bigger business than in the past and people other than gamers are standing up and taking it a bit more seriously (probably mostly because of the money involved). I read a book about the development of video games a while ago, one great quote was from someone saying that computing power in the 1980's was driven by the demands of the defence industry, today advancements in computing power is driven by video games.
Gaming has changed a lot in the last 20 yeas, printed game journalism however is still stuck trying to provide something the internet is far better at. Instead why not give me interesting, intellectual, though provoking articles on games, the industry, and game culture. Theres plenty of blog/sites out there doing a fair amount of this, but not all concentrated in one place. Gaming magazines will slowly die as gaming websites become bigger and better, unless they adapt and provide a different kind of service/journalism.
It was plain to see when Mark Rein gave this interview it wasn't going to be put in: http://www.joystiq.com/2007/08/03/joystiq-interviews-unreal-tournament-3s-mark-rein/
Me and a couple of friends had a chat with him literally right after he did this interview at devcon judging by that pic, he got about 10 feet before we pounced on him lol. Very friendly guy, we just walked up to him and he chatted with us for a bit despite just having done that interview and probably already answering all the dumb questions we asked him 3 minutes previous. I think his exact words were "whats the fucking point?" when someone mentioned cross platform play. The guy's right, there is basically no benefit for either group of users (xbox, pc or ps3) in being able to play the others. Why do I care if the guy I just shot / who just shot me was playing on an xbox or ps3? The pc version runs a little quicker game speed wise, ie players run / rockets fly a bit faster, and you're either going to have to slow down or speed up the game on one platform to sync with the others. Doesn't sound like a great idea to me. Lots of effort to get it working, for basically no real benefit for the end user.
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The real barrier to making realistic wargames in my opinion is the combat itself.
If you watch footage of either of the current wars in Iraq or Afghanistan you will be stuck by how soldiers almost never ever actually shoot at a target they can see directly. Most of the time they are piling fire at a bush or building they suspect might possibly be hiding an enemy 500-600 yards away. Actual visual contact with the enemy is almost never made. The most they see of them is usually when a patrol maybe moves into the area a few hours later and finds a couple of dead guys in a ditch or hut.
Obviously urban combat is different but the truth is real people value their lives far far too much to ever visually expose themselves to the enemy properly, especially close up. Real combat is much more grey, confusing, stratchy and "unsatisfying" than running into a building filled with 15 guys and shooting them within 10 meters of each other.
You might say it would be impossible to make a fun game whilst denying the player ever seeing his enemy or the satisfaction gunning him down close up, but personally I think it may be worth exploring games that try and replicate the chaos and confusion of real combat. Having a game filled with with characters that display some actual sense of self preservation might really change things. Maybe the player will derive a sense of fun not only from what he does and the direct consequences of his actions (shooting people, people getting shot) but simply from his sense of place and being involved in something more real and incredible. The first time I see a game without a magic hud displaying your mission is xyz displaying the number of flak88's i've yet to single handedly dynamite, or some other varient of this, I will rejoice.
"Perhaps St Augustine was right and there is only one story: of creation, fall and redemption. In PlayStationâ(TM)s case, weâ(TM)re now waiting on the latter."
The Sony tale is one of how to take huge market share and massive goodwill from your business partners and throw it all away by convincing yourself you are different from all the others and that the rules don't apply to you. (George Bush post-9/11 parallels anyone?)
Sony is an electronics company that makes it products out of pcbs and transistors like any other, but they forgot that and seemed instead to be arrogantly convinced they had some divine right to dominate the console market and could do whatever thet want.
Nintendo has done with the Wii what Sony did with the PS1 - create a system the market wants. Instead sony built the machine it wanted to make (replete with technologies like cell and blu-ray)and tried to use its strength and dominance of the previous generation to force the market to like what it had built. We all know the result.
I work for a game developer that makes multi-platform games and our programmers hate coding for the PS3. It always makes me chuckle seeing fanboys shouting console x can do this and console y can't do that - the irony being most multi platform games are essentially clones of each other, so being unable to do something on one console means the other doesn't get it even if it could.
This is another great example of Sony thinking they are better than anyone else because they dominated the last 2 generations of consoles. In reality the PS3 is very similar to the 360 and developers essentialy see them as two sides of the same coin. Nice to see they also haven't learned the lesson of don't let you're ceo's / public figures behave like egotistical dicks yet.
Automatic health regen ala Halo and now Call of Duty. Basically it devalues looking after yourself - as long as the other guy dies just before you, you'll be back up to 100% in a few seconds. Also means people can hang onto powerful weapons and camp the same spot for a inordinate amount of time.
People need to remember that MMORPG's aren't the only MMO games out there. Sure they are the dominant archetype among mmo's, but successes have been made of others too, many of which are more suitable for consoles.
An MMOFPS like Planetside would suit console's perfectly in my opinion - easy enough to control using a standard console controller, and a good mix of action / twitch and persistent elements. Some console games are halfway there, they provide persistent elements in having ranks / xp for characters and allow weapons and skills etc to be selected accordingly ala COD4 or BF:BC.
The main difference is the lack of persistent elements affecting the environment of scenarios the players are playing. They are still playing standard multiplayer games but with added persistent elements on their characters. Part of me wonders why few people are bothering to try anying mmo-like on consoles, considering the potential money to be made. I can see no real technological reason full blown mmo's can't be done on consoles more often, so it makes me think developers simply think the market isn't there.
It could be that developers think most console gamers would be totally against paying monthly for the privelage to play a game. Big mmo's with high server and support costs maybe won't exist until people are more used to the idea of paying monthly for a game.
Someone will crack it at some point though, and make millions(billions) when they do.
As with most subjective media, people rarely manage to assess games with an even hand. They will criticise one game for something, then praise another for doing the same. This is partly right, some things work in only certain types of games, a lot of the reason for this lack of objectivity is for other reasons though.
I would take a lot of stuff written about games like Bionic Commando with a pinch of salt, because everybody is so caught up in feeling all cool and retro and indie they rarely come up with a judgement unclouded by those feelings. There are a lot of reviewers that wouldn't dare criticise such a game for fear of harming their gaming credentials or angering some fanboys.
Yes the article does hint at the idea that big games, especially open world ones, are harder to tweak difficulty wise. But I think the author falls into the trap of having seen a cool small indie game, and going - why can't massive muli-milion dollar productions with 175 team members be just like this?
Firstly you generally have a tighter demographic for small indie games, despite their sometimes casual appearances, most of the people making them know exactly what their target players are going to like and dislike. GTA4 is played by multiple demographics, tweaking it to fit all of them is a much bigger task. Yup in Braid you can simply rewind and that mechanic works great, but it is much easier to come up with something like that when you have a much smaller, tighter, controlled environment.
Adjusting the difficulty on the fly is a lovely idea, but often hard to put into practice. It can sometimes feel like punishing the player for doing well. Max Payne used to adjust the damage enemies did to you according to how well you were doing. Playing through it, I quickly got to the point where the difficulty adjustment had clearly reached the maximum level, meaning getting caught out just once and taking a few hits killed me pretty much instantly. This gave me no chance to get the difficulty back down, because every encounter I either got through unscathed or died horribly.
A good article notheless, but it's not as simple as looking at small indie games and saying, we need things to be more like this! Different types of people want different levels of difficulty, and some types of games can be harder to adjust than others. Once AI has progressed a bit further, maybe we can do more complex things in FPS and RTS games than just adjusting how much damage enemies do to you.
About the thinning margins - I have no sympathy at all. They should never have adjusted their business to the point where profit/loss is decided by cramming tonnes of mostly unwanted crap onto peoples PC's.
Great post. I hate how people play a game intensively for months and months, and then suddenly have a "realisation" that the game "sucks" or "sucked all along" because it can't keep them entertained even though they've played it for 1000 hours.
People complain about the MMO monthly fee but they are in fact very cheap considering how many hours your average players gets for his money compared to normal games. And for that you get many many times the content (although admittedly maybe not as high quality) of a normal game, even CRPG.
No one is foring you to play, simply because you played a few thousand hours and got yourself bored of the game, does not mean it sucks nor is a waste of time for anyone else - Some people with more commitments may take years to play what you played through in 3 months.
It seems everyone loses perspective when talking about games, which are far more subjective than people often give them credit.
I am an environment artist for a big UK game developer.
In my opinion, the creation of hybrid roles like this is basically inevitable. The depth of knowledge and skill needed for each part of the development process is deepening all the time as technology rolls forward and graphics increase in fidelity. A handfull of people can no longer make big AAA titles between them, not just because of the size and scope of modern games and the amount of content / code that needs to be done, but because of the depth of knowledge required in each role.
In the end, you WANT a game to be made by people that are each specialists in their area. Coder's that write awesome code and artists that make lovely artwork. Increasingly people have less understanding of the other parts of development because they are so heavily invested in their own areas and don't have time for anything else. Hybrid jobs are inevitable because someone needs to understand enough of each field to keep things running smoothly, and keep proper requirements for tools, code and art assets heading in the direction of each part of the team.
This is especially the case if you are making a big game, which requires lots of custom tools and tools support. The knowledge require by each person means those producing the code or artwork itself, almost never have enough understanding of the other side of development to mesh together perfectly, there are too many misunderstandings about requirements and limitations to let people sit in their own camps all day, someone has to go between. Our lead technical artist is one of the most important people on the team.
The announcement is about Duke Nukem 3D on XBLA, not Duke Nukem Forever.
Game art and game design degrees are in a similar state. Most are run by people that have never worked in the games industry which have no clue what companies want from graduates or even what it takes to make a game. I was lucky enough to attend one of the two or three decent game art courses in the UK. I got a job with a big publisher/developer after a few months messing about and working on my portfolio a bit.
Most of the game degrees out there are run by people that simple do not understand what it takes to make a game or work in the games industry. As a consequence most of the graduates come out with very little skills and are totally undesirable to employers.
Also doesn't help that most of the game degrees are at unis that are certainly not at the top of league tables so the graduates attending them are not the pick of the bunch.
None of the linux users I know are interested in gaming. Not because Linux is poor for gaming, but because they simply don't want to play games all that much. There is a small but vocal annoying minority that insist linux users don't play games because they can't however. Welcome to the real world, if you represent 1% of the market and are primarily interested in using FREE software, companies are not going to spend money trying to access your tiny and considerably more whiny / hard to please market. If you want to play games, buy a games console or use a platform that games are made for. Don't shut yourself in a tiny unprofitable corner of the market and cry woe is me nobody is making games for us. No one makes games for you because it would be very hard to make money doing it.
Apart from power obviously, I see no real benefit from having any systems on the plane shared between the public / passenger network and the planes flight / control systems, considering the risks at least. Ok so it would make it easy for passengers to view data about the flight (like you currently can now i.e. airspeed altitude location etc) but surely there must be some way of transmitting this pretty simple data to the passenger network without physically connecting them. At worse the cost of the aircraft may have to go up a bit since some systems may have to be doubled up (one for the plane, one for the passengers etc) but this is just such a huge nightmare of a security risk I cannot see why anyone would think this is a good idea. Even in a purely pragmatic sense, i'm sure the planes systems would be very safe and hard to affect or hack into if they did use a properly designed network like this, but how many people (customers) are going to be put off flying in these things in a post 9/11 world?
You should be able to turn this off. I can on my familie's DX3800. Look around in the printer options and find a way to turn Epson printer status monitor or whatever it's called off. It will then print with one of the cartridges empty, and will also stop giving you stupid messages about using non geniune Epson ink. It does mean you can't see the levels of the ink cartridges though so turn it on every so often to check.
I didn't get the problem... I have only read whats been posted on the EVE-O forums. Note that you should get outside a little more, get laid, and be a little more polite.
The previous EVE client was barely 3d acceletrated and relied far more on the CPU than modern game engines. I get a much better framerate with the swanky new graphics than I did with the old engine and old graphics. So do most people it seems unless they have a poor video card.
Very few people install their game to C:\, I doubt the testers especially.
EVE's userbase is probably the most mature / oldest of any mmo out there, certainly the most mature out of the 506 i've played. There isn;t a person in my corp under 30, except me :P
Surely the countless hours you are going to spend playing the game should be spent on a desktop computer, not huddled round a laptop with a tiny mouse and keyboard?
Nuclear power is the only way forward in our carbon conscious world. It is the only solution that efficient/financially viable enough to replace carbon based power. No renewable source has yet proved itself anything close to being a geninue replacement for fossil fuel based power.
Nuclear power no matter how fantastic has inherent risks of nuclear disasters and spillage, this however is something we simply have to live with if we want a low carbon energy supply. We have to accept the fact there will be disasters and incidents and deal with them if we want relatively clean energy.
As usual with 99% of the science/tech articles slashdot links to theres no bloody pictures. When I read something like this, I want to see a damn picture of what they're talking about!
How hard is it to get a small picture of the item they're talking about and put it in the article somewhere. Lazy, lazy, journalists.
Who the hell uses the UI in photoshop anyway? I barely touch it and use keyboard shotcuts for almost everything. This seems like pointless revisionism to me. They are trying to show off the fact theres obviously a new UI coming for PS, and how we should all buy it when it comes out. The current UI is fine, its quick, easy to use, simple, whatever, its only a bunch of friggen buttons on the side of the screen! Photoshop is probably the most comprehensive and complete tool / bit of software i've ever used. I have a very hard time thinking of new things that could be added to it which don't go into plugin territory. My guess is adobe are running out of things to add and this new fangled UI is gona be one of the things selling the next version. If it ain't broke don't fix it I say.
Whatever you say, they have made an effort to make it easier to play the game on linux machines. Be fucking thankful that somebody is making an effort to reach into your tiny market, instead of whining that it's not perfect. Even if its not a native client, the game should run fine. People with decent computers can run 4 clients at a time in windows. If it was easy to make linux clients, and the money companies could possibly make by creating them was high enough, everyone would do it. The problem is theres not enough linux users, with the hardware, inclination, whatever, to make it financially worthwhile. Once theres enough of you, willing to pay for games and not whine like hell about not being treated the same as windows users, companies will begin to enter the market. Linux is a tiny market compared to windows, seemingly populated by even harder to please nerds, and you wonder why companies don't bother making linux games? Most of the comments here are more likely to put a company off bothering with a linux client. Overall I doubt this is the begining of a trend. The sort of game eve is means that a higher proportion of potential users will be linux users anyway, so they have a bigger potential market to reach than other games / mmo's. Regardless, come try eve. 99% of you will hate the game, eve is the harshest, most cutthoat, brutal mmo you can play, and for that other 1% it will be perfect. The real difference between eve and other mmo's, is the ability to affect the world and other players. Imagine losing every peice of your equipment every time you died in wow, or a wow with completely player run towns, real wars over territory involving several thousand players, a complex almost entirely player run economy, a real and working player mercenary market, and almost every bit of your kit being manufacturerd by other players. CCP can almost be seen as providing a framework for the game, the game itself is created by the players.
Gaming magazines in the past often simply provided information. Information about what certain games are like, previews of games in development, general advancements and goings-on in the game industry/world. The internet however is a far greater medium for communicating information, I can look a screenshot or download a game the same day it released, instead of waiting a month for someone to write an article, print it in a magazine and for it to arrive at my door.
Gaming magazines need to adapt so they provide more than simply reams of information about games. Games are moving ever towards the point (very slowly, and to a point thats a long way away) where they will be considered art, gaming is far bigger business than in the past and people other than gamers are standing up and taking it a bit more seriously (probably mostly because of the money involved). I read a book about the development of video games a while ago, one great quote was from someone saying that computing power in the 1980's was driven by the demands of the defence industry, today advancements in computing power is driven by video games.
Gaming has changed a lot in the last 20 yeas, printed game journalism however is still stuck trying to provide something the internet is far better at. Instead why not give me interesting, intellectual, though provoking articles on games, the industry, and game culture. Theres plenty of blog/sites out there doing a fair amount of this, but not all concentrated in one place. Gaming magazines will slowly die as gaming websites become bigger and better, unless they adapt and provide a different kind of service/journalism.
It was plain to see when Mark Rein gave this interview it wasn't going to be put in: http://www.joystiq.com/2007/08/03/joystiq-interviews-unreal-tournament-3s-mark-rein/ Me and a couple of friends had a chat with him literally right after he did this interview at devcon judging by that pic, he got about 10 feet before we pounced on him lol. Very friendly guy, we just walked up to him and he chatted with us for a bit despite just having done that interview and probably already answering all the dumb questions we asked him 3 minutes previous. I think his exact words were "whats the fucking point?" when someone mentioned cross platform play. The guy's right, there is basically no benefit for either group of users (xbox, pc or ps3) in being able to play the others. Why do I care if the guy I just shot / who just shot me was playing on an xbox or ps3? The pc version runs a little quicker game speed wise, ie players run / rockets fly a bit faster, and you're either going to have to slow down or speed up the game on one platform to sync with the others. Doesn't sound like a great idea to me. Lots of effort to get it working, for basically no real benefit for the end user.